BERLIN—One Saturday last month, thousands of anti-lockdown protesters stormed my quiet neighborhood, crashing into the weekly farmers’ market with signs discouraging vaccinations against COVID-19. But their concerns appeared to go beyond supposedly overreaching public health measures. One demonstrator pushed a newspaper into my hands with a front page declaring the protests were “rising up against the totalitarian and possibly genocidal tendencies of governments.” Their grievances were with the state itself.
Germany has won global praise for its handling of the pandemic. But its coronavirus-denying conspiracy movement, which has documented links to the far-right, has become increasingly radical in the past year. Last August, protesters attempted to storm the German parliament in Berlin, months before the Jan. 6 riots in Washington. In Kassel, in the German state of Hesse, anti-lockdown protests that turned violent captured media attention in March. Many members of the movement have a deep-seated mistrust of institutions. Online and at protests, they share conspiracy theories, such as the Great Reset, which contends that COVID-19 is a ploy to introduce an authoritarian world government.
This aggressive conspiracy movement could seek to disrupt Germany’s federal elections on Sept. 26. Some far-right figures are already seeding narratives reminiscent of former U.S. President Donald Trump, saying the results could be tampered with. The behavior of some protesters has left...
Read Full Story: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/13/germany-election-disinformation-social-media/
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.