“The police’s approach was scandalous,” said Mascha Meier, a spokeswoman for the Widersetzen alliance, the organizer of a mass protest against the far-right party in the eastern German town of Riesa.
The Interior Ministry for the state of Saxony, where Riesa is located, and the police did not initially comment on Meier’s allegations on Sunday.
On Saturday, around 15,000 people demonstrated against the AfD’s party conference in Riesa, according to the organizers, delaying the beginning of the conference by two hours. Police estimated the number of participants at 10,000.
Registered demonstrations were not allowed to proceed to the central rally site in front of the AfD conference hall, Meier said.
Widersetzen added that the largest march was prevented from moving for hours and said police used pepper spray and threatened to fire a water cannon to divide the crowd.
A member of Saxony’s state parliament for The Left party, Nam Duy Nguyen, said he was beaten unconscious by a police officer. A companion of Nguyen was also hit in the face, he said.
Nguyen has reported the incident to the police.
Saxony’s Interior Ministry and the police confirmed that a preliminary investigation into the incident has been launched.
Separate proceedings are to be launched in a case involving a police dog that was reportedly used against a demonstrator. A video posted on X shows a police officer directing his dog towards an activist in order to push the man across the divider in the middle of a road.
The police spoke positively of their operation: “We have achieved our goals: The party conference is taking place. We have thus fulfilled our obligation to protect party events regardless of their political orientation,” the police president of the nearby city of Dresden, Lutz Rodig said on Saturday.
He said the police had allowed the protest to reach a location where it could be seen and heard, therefore upholding the right to freedom of assembly.
Rodig added that the police were sorry that a member of the state parliament and his companion were injured, and said the matter would be investigated as a matter of highest priority.
On Saturday, Saxony’s Interior Minister, Armin Schuster, said, “individual protest situations today in Riesa required consistent police action, during which the police had to use direct force on several occasions.”
He emphasized that the incident involving Nguyen was “by no means a minor matter.”
