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The start of the Stuttgart “lateral thinking” demonstration on Easter Saturday was proof of why this week a nationwide implementation of uniform corona measures may still be necessary.

A casual request from the meeting management to keep your distance and wear masks was followed by hugs, here and there knowing laughter, and neither a hand nor a foot moved.

Then “the Niels von lateral thinking Leipzig” started his speech: “If you can see the square from up here, it's all full, it's great!” Exactly.

That was the problem: 15,000 people without a mask and without any distance.

The meeting management interrupted the speech again and just as casually stated that the rally area was simply "too small" to keep a distance.

The pro forma appeal: "Please remember to cover your mouth and nose" was repeated - without consequences.

Of course it had no consequences!

The participants had just chanted “No dictatorship!”.

The police saw no reason to intervene.

The demonstrators are mostly peaceful.  

But that was not the question, although there have been individual attacks - against journalists, for example.

The question to which neither the police nor the Stuttgart city administration had an adequate answer was: Why are 15,000 people here allowed to ignore the precautionary measures and break them deliberately without consequences if these measures are otherwise fined for the slightest violation?

Because the right of assembly is also an important basic right, as the responsible mayor of Stuttgart objects?

And because a breakup of the rally would have increased the risk of infection, as was heard from the police?

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The right of assembly is undoubtedly a fundamental right.

But not like on Saturday in Stuttgart.

15,000 people crowded together and without a mask, because whoever wears a mask makes himself suspicious in such circles - this is by no means fully covered by the Basic Law in a pandemic situation.

Not the peacefulness of most of the demonstrators, but their close standing without a mask is the danger to public order, which would have justified a dissolution.

The maskless close standing is not a resistance to a dictatorship, but the breach of infection-related regulations that the parliaments have passed;

it is bottomless recklessness and a conscious endangerment to third parties.

Such freedom is by no means automatically covered by the right of assembly.

City mayors have no discretion there.

Federal policy will then have to explain this to such mayors through a tightened federal infection law if they lack their own insight.

Unfortunately, it should be explicitly added.

It would be very helpful if the tightening was not necessary.

Because such restrictions are not fun for anyone.

The protesters feel they are at the forefront of a struggle for freedom and they are not even all alone.

But the corona restrictions are not ordered to prevent “political-ideological diversion”, but to prevent the spread of a virus, the danger of which has by no means been averted.

Criticizing the restrictions by holding a rally at which all precautionary measures are deliberately ignored is neither repeated resistance to the Nazi regime nor the continuation of the Monday demonstrations against the SED.

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There is enough reason for all kinds of criticism of many details of the corona measures.

The discussion about it is not prohibited.

And you can also demonstrate against it.

Just with a distance and a mask.

“No dictatorship”?

It's a childish slogan.

You can use it to light a cigarette if there is a risk of forest fire.

But demonstrating against the infection control measures with such a spirit, without keeping a distance and without masks, is not resistance, but political ghost-driving, which one has to accept just as little as a street race in 30-kilometer zones.

That is how far the horizon of German mayors should actually go.