Locked, Blocked and Two Smoking Bankers

Blockupy Frankfurt’s well-timed intervention follows an arc of protest that spans the globe this spring, resisting the stranglehold that big finance and big business have on democracy. More than 25,000 people demonstrated against austerity for four days in mid-May, undeterred by the deployment of over 5000 police and over 400 hundred arrests.

Frankfurt is the headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB). It was part of the troika, including the EU and the IMF, which implemented the so-called bailout of the Greek economy, with catastrophic consequences to Greek society and fiscal austerity. It was executed by the likes of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi of the ECB and Olli Renn of the EU Commission.

Blockupy comes as the electorate in both Greece and France have decisively rejected the politics of austerity at the ballot box, the same issue that led the Dutch government to collapse. Rather than take stock of the democratic decision made by voters in these countries, Angela Merkel first responded to Francois Hollande’s victory by stating that the Fiscal Stability Pact, an attempt by Europe’s elites to hardwire neoliberal austerity, was not negotiable.

When I arrived at Frankfurt’s central station on a drizzly evening, the crackdown was manifest across the city. On every corner I saw squads of bored and tooled up riot police stopping anybody and everybody that “looked” like a protestor. The joke amongst activists was that the authorities’ exaggerated response did much of the work to build-up and publicise the week of protests. The authorities actually imposed their very own Blockupy with a police cordon preventing anyone suspected of being a protester from entering, effectively shutting down the financial district. Since October 15th, the authorities physically evicted the Occupy camp outside the ECB, and they also turned away coaches of protesters at the German borders.

The University was shut down for four days – to prevent activists mixing with the local student population. Danielle, an officer from the student council that accommodated protestors from all over Europe in the student union, described how the riot police planned a Genoa style raid on the on the student union building, and placed banning orders on all those present from entering the city. According to her, it was only the presence of the media and MPs from the Left Party that deterred them from carrying this out.

The city government applied for and rapidly imposed a citywide ban on demonstrations at short notice, in spite of the fact that the protest organisers had appealed against this to the Federal constitutional court in a time-consuming process. This citywide ban violates the post-war constitution of the Federal Republic concerning the right to peaceful assembly. This cynical tactic was used by a “black green” coalition administration to implement an interim ban, and upheld by the lower courts pending the appeal. This is evidence, if any was needed, that we cannot rely on the courts to defend our democratic rights anywhere on this continent.

The authorities also banned a public meeting that David Graeber was to give in a theatre. It was instead rescheduled at the last minute to the student union building at the Frankfurt University campus – the only building not controlled by the authorities. Whatever they were trying to achieve, the clampdown is a political defeat for the government. Even the conservative press was criticising the response as over the top.

Blockupy is an umbrella organisation of groups comprising a politically diverse array of organisations. It includes anti-fascist and anti-racist groups such as the Antifa and the No Borders network, and Interventionist Left – a well-known and non-party organization responsible for organising large-scale and effective direct actions with thousands of people, such as the yearly anti-nuclear transport blockades in Lower Saxony. With the exception of the anti-nuclear movement, this unity is rare in Germany – but it is the kind of unity that can bring over 25,000 people onto the street of Frankfurt. There was also a large scale mobilisation from Spain and Italy, putting this protest on the international map.

Speaking to activists who had been at the receiving end of all this, the mood was not one of dejection nor despair. They can see fear in the eyes of the authorities that this movement could spread to wider sections of society. But for that to happen the movement still has a lot more growing to do.

The lack of trade union banners may reflect a weak trade union presence. This is probably because the German trade union bureaucracy is not feeling the heat from below they way they do in the UK. According to Alexis Passadakis from ATTAC, the DGB (the German equivalent of the TUC) received over €400 million in contributions from its affiliate union this year, making it one of the richest unions in the world.

In Frankfurt, we witnessed the pattern repeated all over the northern hemisphere; in order to impose neoliberal austerity, the authorities further limit our democratic right to protest. This strategy, and those employed by unelected ‘technical’ governments imposing austerity, reveal a fundamental incompatibility between neoliberalism and the democracy we have been lead to believe in in the West.

At the end of the weekend, my impression is that the tactics of the authorities in Frankfurt and elsewhere are not sustainable in the long-term. Every time the authorities assault our democratic rights, they de-legitimise themselves a little bit more, giving our movement more legitimacy. We don’t need to respond with the same kind of violence they use against us, but we do need to expose it, and in so doing build a movement that will bring an end to the system they defend.

By John Sinha