Two police officers were on Saturday hospitalized after clashes with hooded protesters outside the congress of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), as the party met weeks after its record EU election result.
About 1,000 police were deployed in the western city of Essen, where demonstration organizers said that 50,000 protestors marched towards the congress.
The police have not yet provided figures.
Photo: Reuters
“We want to govern, first in the east [of Germany], then in the west, then at federal level,” AfD copresident Tino Chrupalla told about 600 delegates of the two-day meeting that started half an hour late due to street blockades.
Police said two officers, a man and a woman, had to be hospitalized following attacks by protesters.
“Unknown assailants kicked two police officers in the head” and continued to “hit them while they were on the ground,” the North Rhine-Westphalia Police said.
Doctors later established their injuries were not as serious as initially feared, police said.
Seven officers were also slightly injured in the clashes near the Grugahalle hall. The perpetrators fled the scene.
Police said they had used pepper spray and batons in earlier clashes.
“Several disruptive violent actions occurred in the Ruttenscheid quarter. Demonstrators, some of them hooded, attacked security forces. Several arrests were made,” the police wrote on X.
A top regional official had said that “potentially violent far-left troublemakers” could be among the protesters.
Twenty-eight officers were injured on Saturday, the police said, adding that several people had been arrested.
Chrupalla praised the AfD’s progress at a local level and its strong EU election result last month, when it won 16 percent of the vote to take second place.
The AfD congress comes ahead of three key elections in September in states that once formed part of communist East Germany, and where the AfD has been topping opinion polls.
“We are here and we will stay,” party copresident Alice Weidel said, opening the congress and drawing sustained applause.
Weidel and Chrupalla were re-elected to lead the party for another two years.
“We have the right like all political parties — to hold a congress,” she added.
Buoyed by a surge in immigration and a weak performance by Europe’s top economy, the party hit as high as 22 percent in opinion polls in January.
However their support faltered amid a welter of scandals that mainly implicated their top EU election candidate, Maximilian Krah.
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