If you watch German public TV news nightly.....this topic of the Querdenken crowd comes up a good bit. So this is my explanation of the group.
About six months into the Covid-19 era in Germany.....as ban-rules started to appear and be enforced....this loose-net group started up (mostly out of Stuttgart in the first 90 days).
At the time, it was heavily stressed by ARD/ZDF (the two public networks) that this was a right-wing anti-government group.
The suggestion that anti-vaccination folks are in the mix? Well...there really wasn't much of a group existing prior to this....over anti-vaccination. This suggestion might be true, but there's not a lot of investigative reporting to lead to any conclusion.
What you can say in a factual way is that around a dozen major protests have occurred since October of last year. Police have tried to enforce ban-rules upon the crowd and dismiss the protests. In the case of Kassel (five weeks ago), around 20,000 folks showed up and it stayed mostly peaceful (but the police went to the effort of not enforcing a lot of the ban-rules on the crowd).
I bring this all up because across Germany on Saturday (May-Day)....there's a belief that a couple hundred thousand will be on some type of protest demonstration and maybe half of them will be Querdenken folks who are hyped up against the ban-rules.
So my interpretation of the Lateral Thinkers? I would offer four observations:
1. A fair number of the protest crowd have identified ban-rules as being something that the old GDR (East German/DDR) government would have done. I won't suggest they are correct or incorrect on this....just that the older crowd remembers how many rules that the GDR government wrote, and living by them made life miserable.
2. If you had a fun-factor index (1 to 10).....at this point in the German Covid-era....most people under the age of thirty would give the situation today (late April) a fun-factor of '4'. Bars closed, restaurants closed except for pick-up, disco and dance-hall operations non-existent since spring 2020, and social life sitting at a miserable point. Vacation planning? In a normal year, most folks would have a vacation or two planned for 2021, but I don't see much of that going on presently.
3. Constant changes to the rules? This is a long discussed situation and it's become almost a joke. The newest situation is the federal ban-rule control.....with states now out of the control business....except for enforcing the ban-rules.
4. Trust in the vaccination business? Various issues have popped up and I'd go to the point of suggesting that two out of ten Germans are highly concerned about getting the vaccination. The 'herd-immunity' discussion? At one point, they suggested that 70-percent was the goal, and lately (March/April 2021)....it's now getting to the 60-percent point. But if you ask anyone if the ban-rules go away with 'herd-immunity' achieved....they mostly disbelieve that the ban-rules will lessen.
Are the Lateral Thinkers mostly right-wing? Well....there's a fair amount of interviews accomplished where left-wing folks are among them and believing the close comparison of the old DDR rule-establishment. I might go and suggest that a quarter of the Querdenken folks are more left-wing than right-wing. At one point in the Kassel video business....a couple of migrant/immigrant folks were in the picture and you had to laugh over any suggestion of them being right-wing types.
Here's the chief thing to consider....it's just an oddball group made of people frustrated by the ban-rules business and a zero-social life. Since they can't 'fire' anyone....these protests are the only way to communicate with the public, Chancellor Merkel, and the Bundestag crowd.
Growing? It's an election year, with a lot of people who are hyped-up negative. If there was a 4th option (beyond Laschet, Scholz, or Baerbock)....I suspect that a quarter of the population would be gauging the 4th Chancellor-candidate with more interest. But from the AfD, Linke Party, or FDP.....there just isn't anyone with that type of 'brand'.
Politically, who gets hurt more by the Querdenken crowd? Well....anyone associated with the CDU-CSU or SPD parties. They are the ones who made the ban-rules.
Finally, any truth to the idea that the Constitutional Protection 'agency' is monitoring the Querdenken crowd? It's absolute fact that they are monitoring them and consider them a threat to the stability of Germany. But lets be honest here.....there are probably over one-hundred different groups which are monitored around the clock by the Constitutional Protection 'agency' and some folks probably make the watch-list two or three times over....by membership in different groups.
So prepare for the Saturday evening newscast and the hyped-up nature of protests for 1 May.
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