Germany: young people take to the streets, and the state is already looking for culprits

According to Le Monde, the demonstrations held on Saturday in dozens of German cities passed off largely calmly, before tensions broke out in the evening. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt accused "left-wing groups prone to violence and troublemakers from migrant backgrounds". Still according to the daily, the left condemns the violence and calls for the demands not to be obscured. The dispatch does not say how many people marched, nor who is responsible for the clashes, nor what the toll is. We will not invent it.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. Our angle: these mobilisations, carried by a generation that refuses compulsory military service, belong to a movement from below. Le Monde's dispatch does not detail how they are organised, and we do not claim to describe it.

Yet look at the reflex. On a day that, by the account's own admission, was mostly peaceful, the minister seizes on the evening. The method is a classic one: frame the demonstration by its fringe, pin a label on it, "violent left", "migrant milieu", and the demand evaporates behind a police of categories. Naming whole groups is also convenient: it spares a government the need to answer young people asking why they are being asked to put on the uniform. Violence, if it is confirmed, deserves to be condemned without hedging, and the left has done so; but condemning does not oblige anyone to hand the substance of the debate over to the interior ministry.

This is where the Luxemburgist tradition sheds light on the scene. Great mass movements, a note from our editorial team summarising her thought reminds us, often erupt from a spark that seems modest, and they educate those who take part faster than any party school. A youth that takes to the streets in dozens of cities learns, by marching, what a balance of forces is. This is precisely what a state fears: not the disorder of one evening, but the collective learning of a day.

The question any movement of this kind raises, and to which we do not have the answer, is that of duration: will anger turn into lasting organisation, with its assemblies, its delegates, its memory? Without that, the procession disperses and the minister has won. With it, Germany will have to discuss conscription, militarisation, and the money poured into weapons rather than schools and housing.

Governments like young people who are patient, who vote, wait and keep quiet. They like less those who, on a Saturday, fill the streets and ask the question nobody put to them. You can always look for the culprit at night; the demand, however, marched in broad daylight.