Angry farmers roll through the city centers with their tractors. Green party events are blown up. Millions are taking to the streets against the right. Times are turbulent, and it seems that author and podcaster Friedemann Karig has written just the right book for it. “Whatever you want. How protest really works,” it says, and Karig deals with civil disobedience, non-violent protest and the major progressive movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.
For weeks, several hundred thousand people have been on the streets to protest against the right. Why are these protests still so popular?
Because it’s about the whole thing. The protest on the streets against the AfD and right-wing extremism was long overdue. In recent years there have been repeated anti-fascist counter-demonstrations, but no national and long-term protest movement. However, many people in this country are rightly very concerned about where the AfD stands in the polls, about its plans and its radicalization in recent years. Sometimes a spark is enough, like the “Correctiv” research. The fact that it was needed is a good example of the immense but untapped potential for protest that we are not using.
Surprisingly, there are currently no clearly defined requirements. It’s against the right, perhaps even against the AfD. But there is no consensus among participants about a ban on the AfD, and even the word “right-wing” is the subject of public debate. So does the current protest thrive on its vagueness?
Yes, the protest is vague in its demands, but that is also legitimate in this specific case because so much has been missed politically that you are almost starting from scratch. It is also not the job of a protest to tell politicians what needs to be done in detail.
Protest can have very specific demands – think, for example, of the last generation, which wants to block individual laws. But protest can also be more vague, as is the case with Fridays for Future, who say that the 1.5 degree target should be met. How exactly the government achieves this is of secondary importance to them. In this case, the protest is actually directed against an entire ideology. For a government that wants to take active action against right-wing extremism, there are still obvious calls for action. One obligation would be to massively increase funding for de-radicalization programs and to take action against neo-Nazis as employees of the AfD.
How effective can such a protest actually be?
As far as I know, politicians have hardly responded to the protests with any concrete steps. This is an incredible oversight and really doesn’t say anything good about our government’s ability to act. Protest can ruthlessly reveal who is actually on which side. This government is largely staying out of it right now and this situation must end.
With the SPD and the Greens, there are two parties in the government coalition that would probably classify themselves as left of center. Why do they have so much trouble reacting?
I don’t understand that at all. The AfD will destroy democracy if it can – that must be completely clear to all of us. The issue is so important that no democratic government can afford not to take action and respond to the protest. It would have been very easy to at least react more strongly with money and rhetoric. And in the medium term, you can also find new ways of doing things legislatively, if you really want to. The attitude is still too often: “We didn’t make the rules.” That’s not true: We made the rules, and if right-wing extremists benefit from them, we have to change them immediately. Otherwise it’s too late.
To be honest, I’m curious to see whether this sitting out, which Olaf Scholz inherited from Angela Merkel, can be ended through further protests. To do this, however, the demands would actually have to be more specific.
How does the protest affect its own participants?
Protests require a certain level of organization, a certain amount of self-assurance and a group consciousness of self-efficacy. All individuals must feel that they can really make a difference. Many people have long felt powerless in the face of the phenomenon of right-wing extremism. The protests are a first step out of learned helplessness.
In your book you describe how you became politicized through protests against Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Hoyerswerda and Mölln. Does protest against the “right” mean something different today than it did 20 or 30 years ago?
We now have a party that represents right-wing extremism, which sits in the Bundestag and state parliaments and is threatening to become the strongest party in some federal states. That’s a huge difference. This institutionalization did not exist in the 1990s. And at the NSU and in Hanau we also saw much greater violence from extremists.
In addition, we now have a completely different anti-racism discourse than we did back then.
Society as a whole has developed a different understanding of structural and linguistic violence, which I think is good. We talk completely differently about words and racism in everyday use and have become a little more attentive to the internalized mechanisms, to the connectivity of misanthropic and racist ideas and to the ever-acute threat to democracy from the far right.
How can these dangers be countered?
In recent years we have seen in many European countries and especially in the USA how quickly neo-fascists and anti-democrats can come to power and what follows from that. When you look at Poland, for example, it is really serious how democratic institutions have been destroyed. Given this immense political tension, I believe we are faced with two fundamental decisions: What kind of anti-democratic and destructive behavior do we allow extremists to engage in? And how do we want to get the climate crisis under control? There is no “business as usual”, there is no status quo that can be easily extended into the future. It really gets down to business.
What role can protest play in this?
In general, we still do not make enough use of our democratic rights today. We may vote sometimes, but we are less and less organized into parties and only protest in exceptional cases. My thesis is that we will be looking at a time in which protest will become much more ubiquitous. A small, convinced minority understands that it is high time to fight more actively about the things that are important to us. This is a big difference from the 1990s, when it was believed that the end of history had been reached and that the West had triumphed.
In your book you talk about the economics of attention. We all suppress unpleasant truths every day. How do I know which battle to fight?
The question of which political problems and conflicts we pay attention to is probably the most hotly debated of our time. There are a lot of actors who fight for attention using unfair means, for example, think of new-right news portals like Julian Reichelt’s, where it’s actually all about strategically poisoning the discourse. The first task of democratic protest is therefore to remain peaceful and fact-oriented.
The last generation was already optimized for this attention economy. They stuck to the streets because they could generate a lot of attention with relatively little effort. But if you want to be successful in the long term, you have to think very carefully about how this attention is structured. In terms of communication, protest must be clearly divided into protagonists and antagonists and must make the moral conflict crystal clear. It’s more about the ecology of attention, i.e. the other interrelationships of a discourse, its roles and frictions.
Who are the protagonists and who are the antagonists?
The major conflicts of our time are not as complex as we always want to believe. Let’s take a problem like the climate crisis: we would simply have to stop emitting CO2, then the catastrophe would be averted. But there are many people who are becoming incredibly rich by destroying the world: oil companies, chemical companies, heavy industry, who don’t seem to care at all about what they emit into the atmosphere and who want to stop us from this change. And there are policies that make this possible. These can and must be influenced.
And the problem of rising right-wing extremism?
There are still a lot of right-wing extremist criminals in Germany who have been legally convicted but are not punished. Let’s focus our attention there. Let us encourage and empower the judiciary to follow through with these sentences. When you focus attention on a problem in a big way and in the right way, sometimes magical things happen. See “Correctiv” research: A lot of attention on a very small occasion – and suddenly half of Germany is on the streets.
Your book should actually have “Revolution” in the title. Why did you first decide for it and then against it?
That’s true, but I didn’t mean a revolution in the literal sense. I don’t want to overthrow this system. I want it to work better. This doesn’t require a revolution, but rather an evolution, a new version of society and our participation.
In your opinion, is Germany a country that is unfriendly to protests?
Yes. On the one hand, this is of course justified, because it is still in our bones that National Socialism was not imposed from above, but was, as Thomas Mann writes, a “sparking revolution.” A lot of people back then really thought that their lives would be better without democracy. It ended in absolute disaster.
That’s why we are suspicious of any form of political energy. In France, for example, we see that there can be a completely different form of protest culture even within a democratic framework. Unfortunately we are missing that. We are a very comfortable, fearful country and also world champions of repression. I think we’ll see a lot more protests in the next ten years – I’m just worried about which side they’ll come from.
You mention the infiltration of farmers’ protests by right-wing groups. What do these parties offer people that left-wing parties cannot offer you?
The farmers’ protests are a good and bad example of this because legitimate concerns mix with right-wing extremist infiltration, anti-democratic traits and outright violence. Even government representatives like Robert Habeck and Ricarda Lang were attacked from this movement, which I still don’t see scandalized enough.
Of course, right-wing populism always offers the famous simple answer and the simple remedy. We are blocking the politicians so that they cannot continue to take money from us and therefore cut off subsidies. Of course, it is always easier to mobilize for this than to participate productively in democratic discourse.
Likewise, the easy answer is to pretend the system is broken just because the system doesn’t do what I want it to. In the USA, someone became president with it. We must not fall for this under-complexity. We are currently seeing how center-left movements are bringing many more people onto the streets than the farmers’ protests. When a right-wing populist takes to the streets, there is a lot of attention and fear. When 100,000 democrats take to the streets, it is hardly news.
So is there a double standard in German public perception when it comes to protests from the left and the right?
Yes absolutely. People are simply much more likely to be afraid of the right than to defend themselves against it. During the farmers’ protests, for example, people cower and immediately row back. At the same time, people always dismiss left-wing protests as being a little more gratuitous and don’t react to them. This is of course an inequality that can frustrate democrats.
In your book you refer a lot to Fridays for Future and the Last Generation. Both organizations are generating a lot of attention, and yet there is hardly any public talk about the climate in these months. Why is that?
Fridays for Future is what brought this topic to the public’s attention in the first place. Before that it lay fallow for 20 years. That was already a huge success. When they started, we had no climate protection law, no climate protection ruling from the Constitutional Court and no Greens in the government. But that was still not enough.
The Last Generation, as a further escalation, has made it too easy for their opponents to antagonize them, rather than cast the blockers in government and the carbon industry as villains. Now they are trying to bring their protest more to the real antagonists through so-called “disobedient assemblies”. I’m looking forward to it.
And yet young people no longer feel as caught up in the climate protests as they did before the pandemic, don’t they?
I think people were too quick to use this generation concept back then. This generation was considered very green for a while and then voted disproportionately for the FDP in the federal election. But protest always works in waves of frustration. The people from Gen Z who took to the streets with Fridays for Future and became politicized about it had to learn that when in doubt, politics will ignore them. But the climate crisis is so comprehensive and essential that anything short of sustained massive protest would surprise me.
What role do we media play when reporting on protests?
I found it shocking how long the German media didn’t find an answer to the Last Generation. That’s one reason why I decided to write this book. Instead of dealing scientifically with protest movements, people wrote insulted comments or reproduced insulted comments that other people had already written on the Internet.
In the end, journalism has fallen for the provocations. For example, “works of art are being destroyed” in museums, which is simply not true in fact. Then comes the complaint that the attention is only on the daubed artwork and not on the real problems. I find that a very funny statement from the media because they are the ones who decide where the attention goes. This argument is so under-complex that it is a huge disgrace for quality journalism.
Friedemann Karig (*1982) runs the podcast “Piratensender Powerplay” together with Samira El Ouassil. After his literary debut “Jungle”, his second book “How We Love. The End of Monogamy” was published in 2017. In 2021 he wrote the book “Narrative Monkeys” together with Samira El Ouassil, which became a bestseller and received a nomination for the German Non-Fiction Prize.
