Snow rests on sun loungers around the swimming pool outside the Schloss Elmau hotel ahead of the Group of Seven (G7) nations meeting in the Bavarian Alps
A fairy-tale German Alpine town of 26,700 dwellers swelled with thousands of protesters seeking to rankle world leaders hosted by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The activists were descending on Garmisch-Partenkirchen on Saturday through the June 7-8 summit to rally against the world’s powers for their policies on global inequality, conflicts and climate change. Getting close to the Group of Seven summit in Schloss Elmau, a luxury hotel tucked away in a secluded valley under Germany’s highest peaks, will be a challenge for them.
Armored police were everywhere in the town that held the 1936 Winter Olympics under Adolf Hitler.
As many as 5,000 demonstrators, according to organizers’ estimates, rallied at the train station at around noon in sun and heat that topped 27 Celsius as they prepared for the main event. On the way there, a group of environmental activists dressed in super hero outfits and donned masks of the G-7 leaders.
“We need heroes for clean energy,” they chanted. Rally organizers appear confident they can get to the destination in sufficient numbers and point to the success of the Alternative Summit meeting in Munich, where as many as 40,000 people rallied Thursday. Police in the Bavarian capital praised demonstrators for protesting peacefully.
“Protests against the G-7 summit have begun with great success,” the Stop G-7 Elmau umbrella group attempting to derail the meeting said on its website.
Still, authorities are bracing themselves for the worst. Reinhardt said in an e-mailed response to questions that security forces identified “a significant mobilization of summit opponents prepared for violence.”
Ever since the 2001 death of a demonstrator at a bloody G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, host nations have picked remote locations that allow outsiders limited access in a bid to prevent armed clashes between police and protesters.
World leaders including President Barack Obama, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande will skirt the measures by flying to Elmau from Munich airport.
The government heads will have views of the Wetterstein mountain range from the spa retreat, which was finished in 1916. The venue boasts an outdoor pool heated to 34 degrees Celsius and a Michelin-star restaurant.
For the adventurous, if only time would allow it, there is the Zugspitze to climb: Germany’s highest mountain at 2,962 meters.
Authorities will seek to avoid mayhem that threatened to overshadow the last such summit in Germany in 2007, when the G-8, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, met at Heiligendamm on the Baltic Sea coast. Protesters breached barriers by land and sea, including thousands who ran through forests and fields to reach the venue’s eastern perimeter. Patrick Donahue
MDT/Bloomberg
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