Conservative Germany goes off rails

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel is not used to seeing her conservative constituents on the streets, occupying buildings and scuffling with policemen. But that is her reality now as a controversial rail-modernisation project in Stuttgart threatens to derail government in Berlin.

On Friday night some 69,000 protesters against the so-called "Stuttgart 21" rail project formed a human chain through the city. They were not the students, disaffected left-wingers, anarchists and green-movement groupies of most street demos - to Mrs. Merkel's dismay.

They are lawyers, doctors, pharmacists and small businessmen; the solid core, in fact, of her CDU party, and they are angry.

"There is a whiff of Paris in 1968 in the air of stolid Stuttgart," wrote the French daily Le Monde last week. More than a whiff, in fact; yesterday the main German police union warned politicians it needs more manpower and money to handle the escalating demonstrations.

Trouble began last month when demolition work began on the main station, a listed building constructed in 1928. A large part of it will have to go to make way for the mega-project that is Stuttgart 21.

Demonstrators turned out in their thousands. They began by blocking the construction site. Then they clambered on to the station roof, neighbouring trees and parks. Soon the stones and bottles began flying and what began as a peaceful protest morphed, in the words of the city police chief, into "intolerable civil disobedience."

It is planned to make Stuttgart a key subterranean station on one of the longest high-speed lines in Europe linking it with Paris, Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest. It involves 16 tunnels and cuttings in the city's many surrounding hills, 18 new bridges, laying 40 miles of new rail lines, three new station - and a price that could double from current estimates to nearly 9 billion.

In a country where kindergartens are closing down as part of the austerity budget and primary pupils are asked to bring their own toilet paper to school, such expenditure has roused the middle class.

The conservative mayor is worried. A recent poll in the local daily paper showed 63 per cent of Stuttgarters oppose the project. This comes six months away from a regional poll that Mrs Merkel's party can ill afford to lose, battered and weakened as she is from the Greek bailout, party infighting, resigning state governors and low approval ratings.

But there is no relief in sight. Although rail operator Deutsche Bahn and the city mayor have offered talks with the protesters, they in turn want nothing less than the abandonment of the project."Gruss Gott," the traditional greeting of southern Germans, has been replaced on the city's streets with "Oben Bleibhen" - literally meaning stay above, which is where they want the station to remain.

"I am prepared to throw stones if that is what it takes," said kindergarten teacher Klara Seewald, 46. "This has been in the works for two decades, was shelved once because of costs and now has been seen to have limited benefit for Germany or Europe.

"It takes a lot to get me on the streets but I am not giving in now."

Following the mass demonstration on Friday the German Police Union served notice on the government that it needed reinforcements to cope with the escalating protest movement.

Spokesman Rainer Wendt said; "The same units can't simultaneously stand watch over nuclear waste transports, left-wing and right-wing demonstrations, football matches, or conduct surveillance on violent criminals who have been set free - and then deal with the anti-atomic energy demonstrations all over Germany." He estimated costs for the policing operation in Stuttgart thus far at 2.5 million.