Protest with a dragon and punk rock: 250 people marched through the “prosperity-neglected” district of Grunewald on Sunday to demonstrate for redistribution from top to bottom.
Photo: Florian Boillot
There was a small energy crisis on Saturday afternoon in front of the Eastgate shopping center in Marzahn. The power generator failed briefly before Berlin’s Senator for Social Affairs, Katja Kipping (left), went to the microphone. “Social protests are part of democracy and they are a necessary corrective,” Kipping said when the power went back on at the rally organized by the Left District Association of Marzahn-Hellersdorf in response to inflation and the energy crisis.
According to Kipping, protest is worthwhile. This was shown not only by the federal government’s third relief package, which is now also aimed at pensioners and students due to criticism of the previous relief measures. The fact that a gas price cap has been announced and the gas surcharge is off the table shows that politics can definitely be influenced.
Above all, the federal government is in demand in view of the social needs. Wages, pension levels and social benefits: Berlin can do little here. “We do what is possible within the framework of state politics,” said Kipping. The social senator not only referred to the moratorium on terminations at the state-owned housing companies, but also to the benefits in local public transport with the 29-euro ticket.
Another measure is the “warmth network”, with which the crisis winter in Berlin is to be defied. Public and private meeting places such as district centers should offer both a warm place and social contact as contact points. It is important not to leave social institutions alone with the price increases, especially for gas. “I’ll let other parts of the Senate campaign, I’ll use every hour so that this city gets through the winter of energy poverty well,” said Kipping, with a view to the likely repetition of the elections for the House of Representatives and the district assemblies from last year.
As a solidarity project, the “Network of Warmth” is also directed against right-wing propaganda. There were also those on Saturday in Berlin. Several hundred people, mainly from the conspiracy ideology, right-wing and right-wing extremists, gathered in the early afternoon at the TV tower in Mitte for a so-called peace demonstration under the motto “Craftsmen for peace”. Their main demand: an end to sanctions against Russia.
The rally was organized by the District Craftsmen’s Association of Anhalt Dessau-Roßlau and its boss Karl Krökel. The last SED district secretary in Dessau ran in the local elections in 2014 as a candidate for the AfD. In an interview with the right-wing extremist conspiracy-ideological magazine “Compact”, Krökel recently said: “We stand by Wagenknecht.”
A correspondingly illustrious community of AfD, the Corona-denier party Die Basis and the local Left Party mobilized for a first, much better-attended demonstration of the “Craftsmen for Peace” at the end of August in Dessau. In addition to AfD, Die Basis and the magazine “Compact”, the central organ of the German Communist Party (DKP) also advertised for the rally on Saturday.
After completing the speeches at the television tower, some participants in the right-wing demonstration then joined a rally at the Neptune Fountain organized by the Peace Coordination Berlin, which has long been criticized for its openness to vaccination opponents and “lateral thinkers”. The rally, which also counted only a few hundred participants, was part of a nationwide day of action by the peace movement, whose call was also criticized because Russia was not clearly named as the aggressor in the Ukraine war.
Consequently, an excited peace movement gathered at the edge of the fountain, who fully confirmed the same criticism with their loud cry »We understand Putin and we are proud of it«.
On Sunday evening in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of Grunewald, things went very differently than at the Neptune Fountain, where everything finally came together, which then went quite well together. Here, too, the number of around 250 participants was rather manageable, but the mood was far more relaxed. The activists of the satirical initiative Quartiersmanagement Grunewald had called for a punk rock lantern procession for redistribution in the “prosperous, neglected villa district” of Grunewald. They had already announced in advance that they would control the garden pools in order to save energy and, where they found heated pools, they would collect them through pool parties.
The threat remained during the neighborhood walk, which was accompanied by a large police force. Nothing was collectivized at first.
