Germans Protest Social Reform

More than 200,000 demonstrators marched through Berlin on Saturday to protest the German government’s welfare, pension and healthcare spending cuts.

The protesters, blowing whistles and waving union flags, gathered in front of the Brandenburg Gate for the biggest rally yet against Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s year-old reform drive. Organizers said turnout nationwide topped 500,000, with big rallies also held in Cologne and Stuttgart; police put the overall number at 400,000.

Schroeder’s center-left government has come under attack from unions and anti-globalization activists for its “Agenda 2010” economic reform program scaling back Germany’s generous social welfare system in a bid to improve its business competitiveness. The plan includes higher healthcare fees, lower retirement and jobless benefits, looser job protection laws and income tax cuts.

“Schroeder Must Go!” was written on scores of posters carried through Berlin’s government quarter.

One small group hurled plastic bags filled with paint at the headquarters of the German employers association in Berlin.

“We want to send a signal to the rulers in politics and industry that we’re fed up with policies that hurt the masses and help the rich get richer,” Michael Sommer, head of the DGB trade union federation, told the Berlin rally.

Some left-wingers in Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party took part. But the party’s general secretary, Klaus Uwe Benneter, criticized unions for attacking the wrong target.

“If the conservatives take power, they’ll destroy the social welfare state and not just rebuild it as we are trying to do,” he told the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper.

The chancellor said before Saturday’s protests that he wouldn’t change course, even though his party’s poll ratings have been low for months.

“When you organize a reform process, you have a problem -- the burdens become apparent immediately,” Schroeder said in a radio interview Friday. “The positive effects will come later.”