Europe

Bavarian locals vent frustration as G7 summit rolls into town

‘What can we do here … This shows their complete contempt for us’

A demonstration against the G7 Summit in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, southern Germany. Photograph: Christof Stache/Getty Images

Derek Scally in Garmisch, Bavaria
Mon Jun 27 2022 - 18:40

The Bavarian Alps were alive on Monday: not with the sound of music but the whirr of helicopters.

As the G7 summit hit its stride in the luxury Alpine hotel Schloss Elmau, downhill the resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen felt like a ghost town.

Just an hour’s drive south of Munich, this is normally a bustling tourist hotspot: hikers in the summer, winter sports lovers when the snow arrives.

The G7′s return here for the second time after 2015 has been controversial. Exhaustive preparations for three days of meetings — at a cost to the German taxpayer of €170 million — have left local business owners exhausted and defeated.

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Few regular visitors are allowed inside a 16km exclusion zone around Elmau and, while most local hotel beds are occupied, the 18,000 police officers are only sleeping in the town, not eating in restaurants or buying anything in local shops.

Unlike most locals, Oliver Deby has stayed — in protest. He has closed his sports equipment shop for the week and says the G7 has brought him “to the edge of ruin”.

Meet elsewhere

When summit organisers requisitioned the local ice rink in February — until August — he had to cancel his entire summer season of children’s ice-hockey camps.

“These events are simply out of proportion, they should meet elsewhere,” said Deby to The Irish Times. “The worst part is that no one will tell me who we should contact over this.”

To vent his frustration at six months of lost income, he plastered a message to delegates in large orange letters in his shop window: “Sh**e G7, thanks for nothing.”

Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann told locals at a meeting he understood their frustration but said chancellor Olaf Scholz had decided to return to Elmau without consulting the Bavarian authorities.

In 2015, everyone had 18 months’ notice, the Bavarian politician said, but this time the decision came just after Scholz took office six months ago.

“We were told nothing and then everything had to be magicked out of nowhere very quickly,” said Hermann.

Besides local frustration, it has been a slow start for anti-G7 protest. On Sunday, a demonstration expected to attract 20,000 in Munich attracted just a quarter of that, according to city police.

In Garmisch on Sunday, some 900 people attended a demonstration near the summit headquarters. On Monday morning, just 80 people braved the strong sun and 30-degree heat to participate in a “star protest”, approaching Elmau from different locations.

About 50 were escorted by police into the hotel grounds to demonstrate on a small pocket of grass around half a kilometre — out of hearing and out of sight — of the venue.

“What can we do here?” asked one demonstrator on local broadcaster BR. “This shows their complete contempt for us.”

Anti-coal

A nearby protest went almost unnoticed. A Greenpeace projection on to a nearby mountain, reading “G7: End Fossil Fuels Now!”, was largely invisible in the strong sun.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine sucked up attention, and many countries pivot back to coal to fill short-term energy needs, Fridays for Future (FfF) campaigners from Germany and Ukraine joined forces to demand that G7 leaders agree to phase out coal by 2030 and introduce a total embargo on Russian fossil fuels.

“We have a climate war in Europe,” said Ilyess El Korbti, a Ukrainian FfF activist. “Leaders need to stop selling people dictator-owned energy and stop making people finance wars like that in my country, Ukraine.”

As local protest petered out, businessman Deby feared that the G7 circus may return again in seven years.

“I fear so because it’s so easy for them to have their meeting up there,” he said. “Who cares what happens to people like me?”

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