Through the teargas, I saw something missing from German politics for too long: hope | Scott Roxborough

At 5am on Saturday morning, I found myself jogging across a field with a few hundred strangers, on my way to block a highway. We were just outside the east German city of Erfurt, one of several groups setting up roadblocks to try to stop delegates from reaching the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party conference. We set up facing a row of police in riot gear – helmets on, batons ready – filming us with cameras on monopods.

A few years ago, I would have been covering an action like this as a reporter, from behind the police lines. In journalism school, I was taught to be objective. But I can’t pretend to be impartial when it comes to the AfD – and so instead I chose to join the demonstrators, most decades younger than me, chanting together: “Siamo tutti antifascisti (We are all antifascists)!” As a foreigner who has called Germany home for nearly 30 years, as the father of two daughters growing up in this country, I have skin in the game.

And the AfD terrifies me. The party backs what it calls “remigration”: a policy its critics warn could extend beyond deporting undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, to a broader vision of who belongs in Germany. The fear is not only felt by migrants, asylum seekers and non-citizens like myself. Some leading figures in and around the AfD have discussed removing German people with migrant backgrounds who they argue are not truly German. The Bavarian AfD parliamentary group has called for a German deportation police force modelled on the US’s notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Polls now make the AfD Germany’s most popular party, with support approaching 30%. This autumn, there are crucial elections in two eastern German states, and the AfD could win both. In one, Saxony-Anhalt, polling suggests it is close to securing an absolute majority, to become the first far-right party to take state office in this country since the end of the Nazi dictatorship.

So, along with several thousand others from across Germany, I came to Erfurt to resist: to say no. I didn’t come expecting to stop the AfD conference. I came because, for the first time in years, a movement was offering ordinary Germans something the political establishment no longer seems able to provide: a way to resist.

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 here like to 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 printed with a unicorn, rainbow and the ironic legend “Alpha Male”. A medical student brought her urology textbook to study in the downtime. The one moment of 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. Thankfully, none seriously.

Instead of aggression and fear, what I felt in the middle of that group of protesters was something missing from German politics for far too long: hope. Until now the rise of the AfD has felt inevitable and irresistible, and Germany’s mainstream parties have largely responded to it by chasing the same voters. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has moved to the right on immigration and social issues, and used dog-whistle language to refer to racial and gender minorities. All while cutting social funding and boosting military spending with a clear neoliberal economic agenda. Meanwhile, the AfD has only grown stronger.

What struck me most in Erfurt was the strength of Widersetzen’s ground game. For months before the AfD conference, Widersetzen activists went door to door, speaking with local residents and building alliances with community groups. It was exactly the sort of shoe-leather politics that Germany’s mainstream political parties have neglected in the east, ceding the ground to the far right.

These efforts paid off. After my blockade broke up, I walked through Erfurt with hundreds of other protesters. All along our route were people waving from windows, cheering 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 against fascism in what is considered the heartland of the AfD. But for a moment, we felt like the majority.

That’s why Erfurt felt different. Widersetzen didn’t stop the AfD conference. Delegates slipped into the convention centre before dawn to avoid the blockades. But the movement I joined achieved something Germany’s mainstream political parties have failed to do: convince thousands of ordinary people that democracy is something you have to put your body on the line for.

It won’t be enough on its own to stop the AfD. But after years in which the far right’s rise has seemed inevitable in Germany, this felt like the beginning of the fightback.