Blockupy Demo in Frankfurt

On Saturday a large protest against the failed austerity policy took place in Frankfurt. Even though the weather in Germany was pretty awful, 7.000 people marched through the City in what was a authorized protest. Sadly Hessonian police is not a fan of constitutional rights and stopped the protest after only 30 minutes. They encircled 900 protesters on no basis whatsoever - some were masked according to police which was the main reason for the action (apparently sun glasses seem to count) - and held them for nine hours. Police lied about the number of demonstrators (claiming 200-400 of actually 911) held for no reason. According to journalists there, they lied about violence of protesters. The whole operation was planned beforehand, to force the march away from the ECB. Again the route was authorized so the police had no right to interfere in what can in hindsight only be described as willful escalation on part of the executive branch.

The silly attempt to whitewash their own actions on Sunday failed miserably according to HR and ended in "disgrace" calls by journalists. Others called it an "orgy of violence". Journalists themselves were attacked by police officers during the march and claims that there was no other choice than to use pepper spray and batons were answered with "I think you must have been at a different event than me."

On Sunday Merkel's spokesperson Seibert tweeted that freedom of opinion and assembly are constitutional rights, but obviously only in Turkey. Why should the German government care about rights of German citizens, when it is so much easier to just point at somebody else?

BRegierung mahnt in d. #Türkei zu Besonnenheit. Meinungs- u. Versammlungsfreiheit sind Grundrechte, Staat muss verhältnismäßig reagieren.
— Steffen Seibert (@RegSprecher) 3. Juni 2013

According to Sueddeutsche 200 protesters and 21 police officers were injured possibly including officers injured. The police confiscated a total of 907 items including an unspecified number of sun glasses in what is quite frankly a successful attempt to make fools of themselves.