https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/europes-anti-lockdown-moment/
The reopening sentiment is spreading, and it’s not all right-wingers who are doing the protesting.
America’s worship of civil liberties was on display as anti-lockdown protests swept from Lansing, Mich., to San Diego, and from Madison, Wis., to Boston’s Beacon Hill. From London to Seine-Saint Denis, from Munich to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a similar defiance of state intrusion is now arising in parts of Europe. As in the United States, the question is still open: Will these protests channel the growing lockdown fatigue into a cogent, constructive case for reopening, or will they descend into paranoia?
A recent hotspot of anti-lockdown fuss has been Germany, where both media and the government have raised the alarm about the far right’s sway in driving people to break the quarantine and social-distancing rules. This past weekend saw radical groups co-opt protests in Dortmund and Munich, where a reporter was attacked and police had to disperse 25 vandals, respectively. A reporting crew from the center-left late-night satirical heute-show was similarly assaulted in Berlin the previous weekend, claiming the popular Moroccan-German comedian Abdelkarim as a victim. Germany’s crippling memory of extremism (so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has a way of penalizing political deviance on the right to this day, and these acts of violence surely didn’t help give the protests a good name in the public eye, either.
Resistance to lockdowns has gotten a bad name in France, too, after a young local from Villeneuve-la-Garenne was thrown off his motorbike and sent to the hospital with a broken leg by a police-car door flung open. The incident sparked a wave of riots across the northern Paris suburbs reminiscent of the three-week-long émeutes in 2005 that saw 8,000 cars set ablaze by restless youths protesting police abuse. The quarantine has brought long-simmering tensions in these largely low-income, immigrant, and poorly housed suburbs to a boiling point, with locals decrying heavy-handed policing, spending cuts in public services, and the unequal impact of school closures that leave low-income kids lacking Internet access with little means to keep up with schoolwork.