Attacks on “Gen Z Rules” Protests: Violence is not the problem

Everyone knows the old saying: Attack is the best defense. And if you as a party have nothing to offer, then it's better to attack. True to this motto, the Union and partly also the SPD are meeting the demonstrations by “Gen Z regulates”, who want to demonstrate in 24 cities nationwide on Saturday.

Even before the paint on the posters has dried or a demonstrator has shouted the first slogan, the fears of excessive violence and the demands to take tough action against it are escalating. The discourse is racially poisoned from the start. The racism that the right-wing in France and Germany has only fueled even more since the riots resonates again and again.

There are repeated warnings about the criminal energy that comes from migrants. The idea that young people take to the streets in large numbers and, unlike Fridays for Future, do not only represent a white, educated middle class, is seen as a threat. So once again people with a migrant background can only lose. They either remain silent or are labeled as potential sources of violence.

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It seems as if the Union can't help but work further and further to the left and lash out in red fear. Just as she has been doing incessantly since the state elections, and as if she could get out of her own affair and deal with the slide to the right within her own ranks. So the Junge Union suggests deploying the Bundeswehr directly - which would be unconstitutional. The CDU in Stuttgart would like to ban the demonstration entirely.

What kind of understanding of democracy is this if the voices of young people would rather remain completely unheard because there were violent riots in France? The “Gen Z Regulates” alliance distanced itself from violence from the start - and since then has been concerned with nothing other than distancing itself from all forms of extremism. But all of that doesn't seem to be enough. People simply do not believe the organizers or give their confession insufficient value because they could be infiltrated.

The Federal Student Conference also distances itself: “Violence and calls for violence distract from the actual problems in the education system.” One would like to reply that the incessant discourse about whether violence could occur also distracts from the actual problems.

The “Gen Z rules” demonstrations are already being pushed into a corner from which only defense is possible. This is intended to prevent as many people as possible from joining the protests. All those people who are dissatisfied with the dilapidated schools in Germany, who are afraid of conscription, who can barely afford their rent and who, with their last name, receive one rejection after the next. Basically all people who feel the unequal distribution of property particularly strongly.

Young people have the feeling that their future is being blocked. And what is the party doing that didn't even get 10 percent of those under 30 in the three most recent state elections? The Union has nothing to offer the young generation. Not even acknowledgment that you see her problems, take them seriously and want to listen to her.