Thousands protest in Berlin against Lockdown, anti-covid measures

the tsar has several thousand people banging saucepans and blowing whistles gathered in central berlin to protest against angela merkel’s plans to enforce corvid restrictions most germans accept the latest lockdown lie to tackle a second wave of the coronavirus one protester wore a face mask with the words merkel muzzle others held banners with slogans such as for enlightenment peace and freedom now most

protesters were neither wearing masks nor socially distanced police officers in riot helmets lined up to stop demonstrators getting too close to the parliament building germany europe’s largest economy was widely praised for keeping infection and death rates below those of many of its neighbors in the first phase of the crisis but now it’s in the midst of a second wave like much of the rest of europe the daily number of

new coronavirus infections in germany remain high but the country’s partial lockdown is having a positive effect you know wheeler head of germany’s disease control agency rki has said that the covet 19 infection numbers remain high but they are not increasing anymore [Music]

meanwhile the head of the world health organization europe has said that fresh lockdowns in europe are avoidable hans klush said that some health systems are being overwhelmed on the continent where more than 29 000 deaths were recorded in the past week alone he also said the primary schools should be kept open adding that children and adolescents are not driving the spread of the new coronavirus known as

sars kobe 2 and school closures are not effective for more details let’s quickly go across uh to our correspondent janelle de melon who’s joining us live from berlin janelle thank you for joining our broadcast now why are the protests you know when the partial lockdown is

having an effect why are there protests taking place well as you say thousands of protesters gathered in front of parliament on wednesday and what they were doing were protesting reforms to germany’s law that would provide the legal basis for these pandemic restrictions so

basically those reforms would lay out what the government is allowed to do in the time of a pandemic so things like closing shops things like banning religious services now these protesters have argued that these measures are unconstitutional that they go against their basic rights and they’ve gotten a lot of attention because of how loud they’ve been protesting on this particular occasion they’ve even managed to break

into parliament and harass lawmakers who were going to vote on the new reforms and these protesters you have to say it’s like they come from all over germany they come from all walks of life some are anti-vaxxers some are suspicious of state control some are comparing these regulations to nazi era germany while holding far right positions themselves so a bit of irony there for you but it is good for germany’s

government to know that these people are while allowed in the minority two out of three germans polled do say that they support these measures a certain percentage a good percentage even say that they don’t think the measures go far enough and uh they do not agree with the

views that many of these protesters hold that the coronavirus is a hoax they see it as a real thing and that is also of course what the numbers have told us right fair enough janelle why are anti-lockdown protesters comparing the infection protection law proposed by angela merkel’s

government to the law that paved the way for adolf hitler’s dictatorship back in 1933 is it even fair to do so indeed it is not at all a comparison that we should be taking seriously nothing is comparable to the to those regulations in nazi era germany the thing that you have to

understand with these protesters is that because many of them view the coronavirus itself as a hoax any sort of intervention on their basic freedoms in terms of uh who they meet where they go what businesses uh what businesses they can visit and what they can do with their time so basically any intervention of the state is draconian to them because they don’t believe that the reason for those interventions exist but

again i would not give any stock to this position that it is at all like nazi era germany at this time i think these people might have forgotten what that was like last but not least are there more protests to come and what happens now i’m sorry can you repeat that please are there more protests to come and what happens now well the protesters have been coming quite regularly so and the reason the thing is that you

cannot ban people from assembling you can only tell them that they have to follow the masking rules when they assemble and that means that the protests can only be broken up once those rules have been broken like they had been broken on wednesday but they’ve been happening pretty regularly so i wouldn’t rule out any further protests but in terms of what’s happening in germany uh angela merkel and the

16 leaders of germany’s federal states are going to be meeting next week in order to discuss the future of these restrictions that we have in germany they’re due to expire at the end of the month many are expecting a further tightening of the restrictions uh or um or at least an

extension of these measures but no one is really expecting a complete lifting of the restrictions as they now stand that’s actually right because the german government has already made it clear that the restrictions are here to stay for a while now on that