Merkel-Must-Go Rallies
Beginning in February 2018, right-wingers and neo-Nazis gathered Monday evenings in Hamburg’s city center for rallies under the slogan ‘Merkel must go’ (Merkel muss weg – MMW). After years of racist debates about refugees, they followed the example of the PEGIDA demonstrations in Dresden, which had been taking to the streets to protest migrants and ‘the government’ every week since 2014.
In Hamburg, AfD and NPD functionaries, members of the Identitarian Movement (IB), and neo-Nazis from the banned Blood & Honour network regularly took part in the protests. AfD officials from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania spoke at the rallies alongside Michael Stürzenberger, a journalist and activist who has been convicted of incitement to hatred, and former Spiegel journalist Matthias Matussek, who openly sympathizes with the extreme right-wing Identitarian Movement. The event was organized by the neo-Nazi Thomas G., a former bodyguard of Hamburg Minister of Home Affairs Ronald Schill.
The largest of the racist rallies had an attendance of 500 people – as opposed to the more than 1000 people who demonstrated every week against them. After March 2018, the right-wing rallies only took place sporadically and no longer on a weekly basis. With the slogan ‘Deutscher Michel, wach endlich auf’ (German Michel, wake up at last), the organizers tried to revive the protests in 2019, with no success. Many of the participants came together again at the anti-corona protests.
In 2020, it became known that the MMW organizers Thomas G., Thorsten K. and Ralph E. were involved in the chats of the right-wing terrorist cell ‘Gruppe S.’.
