At 5am on Saturday, I jogged across a field with hundreds of strangers to block a highway near Erfurt, Germany.
We were one of several groups setting up roadblocks to stop delegates from reaching the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party conference.
We faced a row of police in riot gear, helmets on and batons ready, filming us with cameras on monopods.
A few years ago, I would have covered such an action as a reporter from behind police lines.
In journalism school, I learned to be objective. But I cannot pretend impartiality when it comes to the AfD.
I chose to join the demonstrators, most decades younger than me, chanting: “Siamo tutti antifascisti (We are all antifascists)!”
As a foreigner who has called Germany home for nearly 30 years, and as a father of two daughters growing up here, I have skin in the game.
The AfD terrifies me.
The party backs what it calls “remigration” — a policy critics warn could extend beyond deporting undocumented migrants and asylum seekers to a broader vision of who belongs in Germany.
Some leading AfD figures have discussed removing German citizens with migrant backgrounds they argue are not truly German.
The Bavarian AfD parliamentary group has called for a German deportation police force modelled on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
So, along with several thousand others from across Germany, I came to Erfurt to resist. I did not expect to stop the conference.
I came because, for the first time in years, a movement was offering ordinary Germans a way to resist that the political establishment no longer provides.
A Movement Built on Civil Disobedience
The blockades were organised by Widersetzen, a loose coalition of trade unionists, climate activists, anti-racist groups, queer organisations and local networks committed to civil disobedience.
The name can mean both “sit down” and “resist”.
Conservative media often portray Widersetzen as dangerous, potentially violent, far-left radicals. My blockade felt more like a street party or a school outing.
The twentysomething next to me wore a bright pink T-shirt with a unicorn, rainbow and the ironic legend “Alpha Male”.
A medical student brought her urology textbook to study in downtime.
The only violence I saw came from the police: a handful of protesters ran through a gap in the cordon and were met with swinging clubs and pepper spray.
A few demonstrators were hurt, but none seriously.
Instead of aggression and fear, I felt something missing from German politics for too long: hope. Until now, the rise of the AfD has felt inevitable.
Germany’s mainstream parties have largely responded by chasing the same voters.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has moved right on immigration and social issues, using dog-whistle language, while cutting social funding and boosting military spending with a neoliberal agenda.
The AfD has only grown stronger.
What struck me most in Erfurt was Widersetzen’s ground game.
For months before the conference, activists went door to door, speaking with local residents and building alliances with community groups.
This is exactly the shoe-leather politics that mainstream parties have neglected in the east, ceding ground to the far right.
These efforts paid off. After my blockade broke up, I walked through Erfurt with hundreds of other protesters.
People waved from windows and cheered us on. An older woman leaning on her garden fence, tears in her eyes, gave us the thumbs up.
We were a pack of lefties protesting fascism in the heartland of the AfD. For a moment, we felt like the majority.
Widersetzen did not stop the conference. Delegates slipped into the convention centre before dawn to avoid blockades.
But the movement achieved something mainstream parties have failed to do: convince thousands of ordinary people that democracy requires putting your body on the line.
It won’t be enough alone to stop the AfD. But after years of seeming inevitability, this felt like the beginning of the fightback.
