18,000 police officers are to secure the G7 summit in Elmau, Upper Bavaria, at the end of June. A container jail was erected in the Garmisch ski stadium, and a 16-kilometer fence across the mountain forest cordoned off the Schloss Elmau conference venue. The police even look for demonstrators who are ready to riot in the high mountains. FOCUS Online asked local locals what they think of it.
Shaggy, short, gray hair, light blue eyes and hands as big as shovels: Christian heaves his heavy body up a ridge of earth with a wide gait. The shepherd, in his early 60s, looks with his “Spezi” Sepp at the Luttensee above Mittenwald to see how their two dozen goats are doing.
“What do I think of the G7? A scandal!” rumbles the shepherd. And immediately adds: “Completely crazy, what money is being spent on. And we pay the politicians while the army isn’t even able to defend the country. And then the Dingsda a no goes to Kyiv. Scholz, yes exactly. If stupidity gave milk, we need a couple more cows”, pants Christian and laughs thunderously into the radiant white-blue sky over the Werdenfelser Land.
Now save articles for later in “Pocket”.
If you want to take a look at the conference venue, you can do so until Sunday. On June 19, the few access roads are cordoned off by heavily armed police squads with a wire fence that is 16 kilometers long and up to three meters high and is already illuminated during the day. Without a service ID, accreditation or special pass, nothing will work until the end of June.
German police officers have been checking the border crossing from Austria to Bavaria for several days. You observe hiking trails in the Wetterstein Mountains, at the northern foot of which lies Elmau Castle. Even at the Meilerhütte at an altitude of 2372 meters on the ridge of the Wetterstein Mountains, mountain police guides are now constantly on the lookout for suspected riot brothers and sisters. And in the Olympic ski stadium in Garmisch, a container jail is piling up ready for admission, offering space for up to 150 suspected criminals. In addition to militant summit opponents, Bavaria’s police are also expecting demonstrations by so-called “Reich citizens” and members of the lateral thinkers scene and other anti-constitutional organizations.
The sentence fits the moment when I want to photograph the controversial fence on the southern outskirts of Klais, just before the start of the four-kilometer-long toll road to Schloss Elmau. As I put the camera on, suddenly out of nowhere someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind. Not a policeman in uniform, but a slender officer in a white shirt and gray trousers, who immediately shows me his name tag, which is dangling around his neck, and belongs to the G7 organizational team. “May I ask who you are and what you’re doing here?” asks the white-faced officer. “Oh, press. Did you know that there is a G7 press office in Garmisch? If you have questions. All the best!”
This year, Hornsteiner adds, everything is going even better. “Mittenwald will not go up in flames,” says the 34-year-old, referring to the serious riots at the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017. The only thing that takes some getting used to are the intensive traffic controls at the Scharnitz border crossing and also on the route Mittenwald-Garmisch. “‘Where do you come from, what did you do there, where do you want to go and why’… all this questioning from the police takes some getting used to. And costs time.”
First Corona, then the effects of Putin’s war against Ukraine, then the train accident in Garmisch before the Pentecost weekend. And numerous hotels were rented by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior between June 19 and 29 to accommodate the 18,000 police officers. “The police officers hardly go shopping, they have to work. The next two weeks will be very quiet. And the politicians will ensure that the railway line is not reopened before the end of the summit, I’m sure of that,” fears the blacksmith.
In the long term, Adam believes the summit could actually boost retail sales. Because the Werdenfelser Land will become even better known as a result of the event, which this year is all about Putin’s war against Ukraine. But as far as his failures are concerned, he sees black. “The effort, that’s tax-wise disproportionately high for me.”
“There’s a lot of talk about the summit,” says the slim man, who walks slowly and talks slowly and whose watery blue eyes shine brightly between the wide brim of a straw hat and a dark blue T-shirt new political dimension, about which the international community of states was probably not really clear for a long time.” And if the heads of the seven most important countries on earth meet here at this moment, then Germany probably doesn’t want to make a bad impression, what security,” says Schnapp.
He believes that the locals have not been affected much by the effects of the G7 summit – despite the extremely high volume of traffic between Klais and Elmau and the numerous helicopter flights that have been part of everyday life up here for a few weeks. Weather permitting, the plan is to fly in the state guests by air. You land on a helipad that has been completely asphalted on a large hiking car park above Schloss Elmau especially for the summit between Enzian and Edelweiß. “For the gastronomy, however, the summit is a big problem,” adds Schnapp. “Because of the lack of tourists, it is very difficult for the restaurant owners to plan with the staff. If they’re missing, it’s like cutting off your hand.”
The 77-year-old has not forgotten that one of the heads of state of the former “G8” was disinvited because he had invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea the year before: Russian President Vladimir Putin. And he regrets that “the most important person at the G7 summit” will unfortunately be absent this time; at least personally: Volodymyr Zelenskyj.
