Post date: Mar 26, 2011 4:22:44 PM
One hundred thousand anti-nuclear protesters gather in the German capital, according to Berlin police, as organisers say another 30,000 supporters take to the streets of Cologne to demonstrate against atomic power plants and to remember the victims of the Fukushima disaster.
BERLIN, GERMANY (MARCH 26, 2011) REUTERS - Tens of thousands of anti-nuclear protesters gathered across Germany on Saturday (March 26) to demonstrate against the use of atomic energy following the Fukushima disaster and ahead of two important state elections.
According to Berlin police, one hundred thousand people participated in a march which went past Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) party headquarters.In the western city of Cologne, 30,000 anti-nuclear protesters walked along the river Rhine, carrying banners and green balloons.
One demonstrator said of nuclear plants "those things have to go!"
"There are enough alternatives and I'd rather save some electricity than to have those nuclear plants in our country, in Europe or elsewhere in the world," Gunnar Kruse said.
Angela Merkel's conservatives risk losing power on Sunday in Baden-Wuerttemberg state, their bastion since 1953, where nuclear fears could tip voters towards the Greens and put her future on the line.
The southwestern state of 11 million people is an industrial heavyweight where the conservatives say they uphold prosperity, but the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens' mobilisation of local environmental concerns got a huge boost from Japan's crisis.