For most Berliners, 1. Mai is about going to a park to dance, drink, and soak up some sun after an interminable winter — Görlitzer Park was packed with tens of thousands of revelers. For the city’s leftists, though, May Day is the most intense, longest, and best day of the year. It’s Commie Christmas.
The Maifeier or May Celebration has a long history in Berlin. Protests have taken place every year since 1890. But this year, the 135th anniversary, feels different. Germany is set to get a new Kanzler next Tuesday. The Blackrock gremlin Friedrich Merz promises to combine austerity with militarism and far-right culture war: hundreds of billions for the military and cuts for social programs. Merz hasn’t even been elected, and he’s already among the least popular politicians in the country, with 56 percent declaring him “nicht gut” and just 38 percent “gut”
The rise of the far-right AfD, endless rent increases, and racist fear mongering brought Berliners onto the streets on May Day.
Union Morning
In the morning, up to 10,000 people joined a demonstration by the German Union Confederation (DGB). Every German city has an official union rally featuring beer, bratwurst, and bad music. Social democratic politicians like to make appearances. Since post-war (West) Berlin has almost always had social democratic mayors, so public-sector workers have to demonstrate alongside their boss.
And so many choose to sleep in, only a tiny sliver of Berlin’s union members take to the streets. For the bureaucrats, this has long been an “alibi” event, doing as little as possible to claim they at least did something. I could never think of any other reason to pick an impossible time (usually 10am on a holiday!) and relatively unknown meeting points. They don’t put up posters nor send out e-mails to their members. Even people looking for the demonstration didn’t have an easy time finding it on the DGB website.
Back in 2022, then mayor Franziska Giffey was booed out for ten minutes as she tried to speak from a May Day stage. People were unhappy that she was refusing to implement the referendum that called for the expropriation of big housing companies. After Egg Day [editor’s note: a protestor threw an egg at Giffey], big politicians have avoided the space.
Yet even as union bosses refuse to mobilize, and union members sleep in – the proletarian Left keeps turning up. This year, the Class Struggle Bloc made up perhaps half of the demonstration. That was — more than all the union blocs together, according to junge Welt. Last year, “antideutsch” union stewards made ham-fisted attempts to expel the leftists. But that became such an embarrassment that there were no more attempts by DGB leaders to kick out half the participants.
Revolutionary Evening
As the sun was setting over Kreuzberg, tens of thousands of people gathered at Südstern for a revolutionary demonstration. By all rights, it should have been at Hermannplatz, but police have banned gatherings at this more political location. Over the next few hours, the crowd grew to 30,000 people. There was a hard core of several thousand anarchist and communist militants in tight formations, surrounded by several times as many supporters.
This goes back to the Kiezaufstand, the neighborhood uprising in Kreuzberg on May 1, 1987, when residents plundered dozens of shops and burned down a supermarket. That inspired an independent demonstration the following year, which has now taken place for 37 years, and wanders south toward Neukölln at a glacial pace.
Berlin police brought 6,000 officers to the scene, including water cannons and metal fences. But as the revolutionaries marched through the streets, cops generally held back and the mood remained peaceful. The unavoidable conclusion from decades of Revolutionary May Day — just about 100 percent of violence can be traced back to police. To put it scientifically: No cops, no problems.
Yet while the march was largely peaceful, police couldn’t let us reach the end without creating some images to justify the tens of millions of euros they spent on repression. Shortly before we returned to Südstern, they attacked the Palestine bloc and detained several dozen people. I won’t demean myself by repeating their ridiculous justifications for violence, which have been obediently repeated by bourgeois politicians and journalists.
The great thing about Berlin’s May Day is how it connects different struggles. Yesterday, Palestine was everywhere — like one would expect at left-wing demonstrations in every other country. I was pleasantly surprised when an autonomist feminist bloc, all decked out in purple, declared that people who didn’t support Palestine weren’t welcome. Yesterday’s demonstration was probably the biggest demonstration in support of Gaza Berlin has seen in the last 18 months.
