German
riot police clash with protesters hoping to block far-right AfD conference
Thousands
of police deployed to Erfurt in central Germany as party holds conference on
key Nazi date
Donna
Ferguson
Sat 4 Jul
2026 14.17 BST
Riot
police have clashed with opponents of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) party on the streets of Erfurt in Germany, where thousands met to block
roads and prevent AfD delegates from attending the party’s biennial national
conference to elect its leadership.
Police
reported 20,000 protesters were demonstrating in the eastern city, where Alice
Weidel and Tino Chrupalla are expected to be re-elected as the party’s
co-leaders in the run-up to crucial regional elections in which AfD could win
power at state-level for the first time.
The protesters,
led by the “Resistance” alliance, staged sit-in blockades in the city centre in
an attempt to prevent the AfD’s approximately 600 delegates from reaching the
conference grounds, with some abseiling from a motorway bridge and others
gluing themselves to tram tracks to cause disruption.
Thousands
of police were deployed to the city, and some were filmed using batons on
protesters who ran towards them, while others were captured on camera
struggling to hold back crowds of demonstrators.
However, a
police spokesperson told Die Zeit that the demonstration had been “mostly
peaceful”, adding that just under 100 offences had been recorded so far, many
of them property damage by graffiti.
Despite
the efforts of the protesters to cause disruption, a spokesperson for the AfD
told reporters 540 delegates had managed to reach the conference centre before
5am and its congress had begun on time.
AfD’s
decision to hold its conference on the centennial of a Nazi party conference in
nearby Weimar, where Adolf Hitler unveiled the Hitler Youth movement and
introduced the Hitler salute, has caused outrage in Germany.
Historians
and politicians say the timing of the conference is a deliberate provocation,
which AfD has denied, describing its critics as “clearly only interested in the
compulsive weaponisation of history”.
Opponents
of AfD accuse the party of promoting racist and anti-Muslim policies, and are
angered by AfD politicians downplaying Nazi crimes.
Protesters
in Erfurt included the federal environment minister, Carsten Schneider, and
Thuringia’s interior minister, Georg Maier, who gathered at a second
demonstration march organised by the Standing Together alliance, where the
“Grandmas Against the Right” waved homemade signs.
“It’s
important to send a signal against the shift to the right,” one of the
demonstrators, Lene Krug, 19, from Gera, east of Erfurt, told reporters for
Agence France-Presse. “The AfD is an anti-democratic party that spreads hate.”
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