COVID-19-related protests in Germany 2020-2023

Protests between 2020-2023 against COVID-19 measures in Germany were marked by a combination of concerns about civil liberties, opposition to lockdowns, and skepticism regarding the severity of the pandemic, as well as frustration with government restrictions. These protests attracted a diverse range of individuals, including conspiracy theorists, advocates of alternative medicine, vaccine hesitants, and those skeptical of the efficacy of public health measures, and covering the whole political ideological spectrum (Liekefett, Bürner and Becker 2023). The actual combination of actors differed strongly between regions and cities. Whereas in some regions the protests were clearly dominated by actors and organizations from the extreme right, in other regions groups and organizations from the alternative left started the protests. So far, these differences have been acknowledged in the existing research, but systematic data on the protests at a larger number of locations was missing. In our proposed paper we will try to fill this gap by systematically analyzing the reporting about the Corona protests in more than 100 local newspapers. For this we rely on tools for automatic protest event analysis developed within the project "Protests and Social Cohesion: Local Conflict Dynamics in Comparison". Our goal is to map differences and similarities of actors and claims of Corona protests in Germany, both geographically and over time. We thus aim to contribute to a more detailed picture of these protests that puzzled observers because of their unusual actor-coalitions across the political spectrum.