Cologne, Germany (AP) – Nearly a million people went to the pride parade in Cologne, West Germany, to join or watch the celebrations on Sunday.
According to the German news agency dpa, around 180 LGBTQ groups and music platforms took part in the downtown parade – more than ever before.
About 1.2 million people attended the march, and police estimated the crowd to be around one million, organizers said.
Participants in the Cologne Pride Parade pose in front of the cathedral in Cologne, Germany, Sunday, July 3, 2022. This year’s Christopher’s Day (CSD) Gay Pride for LGBTQ rights, with thousands of demonstrators, marks the first since the coronavirus pandemic accompanies it. By hundreds of thousands of spectators on the streets of Cologne. (AP Photo/Martin Meisner)
Hendrik Wüst, minister head of Germany’s federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said that Cologne sends “a strong signal about diversity, tolerance, resistance to hatred and exclusion” at this parade, and that is where the cologne is located. Visit the city’s parade for its nearly 30-year history, according to dpa.
Wuest is a politician for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), led by four-term former Chancellor Angela Merkel, and a conservative social organization in theory as the name suggests, but in practice, like Wuest, he supports left-liberal socialism. movements. Like LGBTQ Pride, without merely symbolic resistance to a handful of issues.
The largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia by population, Cologne has one of the largest LGBTQ communities in the country, which makes it possible that Wuest’s Pride enthusiasm was partly due to electoral concerns.
Participants of the Cologne Pride Parade will meet in Cologne, Germany on Sunday, July 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
“Unfortunately, there are extremists all over the world and in Germany who do not want to give us our freedom,” said Sven Lehmann, the German government’s commissioner for recognizing sexual and gender diversity.
“A strong signal from Cologne: We will not let them take this freedom away,” he said.
The current German government is a left-liberal “traffic light” coalition of social democrats whose party color is red, extreme left green and free democrats or yellow, focused primarily on protecting business interests and apparently satisfied with what left partners are referring to social policy.
July 3, 2022, North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne: Horst and Uwe celebrate this year’s CSD parade at the start of the Deutzer Brücke. Christopher Street Day in Cologne is one of the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) community events in Europe. (Photo: Roberto Pfeil/Photo Alliance, via Getty Images)
Source: Breitbart
