Police protect the rights of demonstrators objecting to the G20 summit, Mayor de Blasio said Saturday in a speech to a Hamburg, Germany protest rally of tens of thousands of people.
“Our right to protest is directly related to the fact that our police protect us,” the mayor said. A tweet from de Blasio’s press secretary said the line drew loud applause.
He began his speech by remarking at the size of the audience he spoke to: “We have a phrase in America we like to use: This is what democracy looks like.”
The mayor also assured the crowd that despite President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement, US cities “are signed on to the Paris Accords. We will do it ourselves.”
He hailed the German parliament’s recent decision to legalize gay marriage. “It wasn’t the choice of some politicians. But the people made it happen,” de Blasio said.
De Blasio also spoke to his German audience about the turmoil of US politics.
“My nation isn’t broken, but my nation is going through an identity crisis,” he said. “It’s on its way somewhere and I know it’s somewhere good because I see what happens in the neighborhoods in my city … I see the process of change underway.”
De Blasio appeared on the outdoor stage in central Hamburg with his son Dante, a Yale University student who is spending the summer working on an internship in Berlin.
The mayor was the keynote speaker at the rally held by the protest group Hamburg Zeigt Haltung [Hamburg Shows Attitude].
Earlier, in a speech at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, de Blasio spoke of New York as a city that works for all different people, using the metaphor of crowded subway trains to illustrate his point.
“You have the Muslim and Jewish person next to each other. Then you have the immigrant and the person whose family has been in America for many generations. You have the rich and the poor, people of all faiths and all backgrounds, cramped in close together.
“I like it as a metaphor, because it’s not perfect,” de Blasio said — noting that it’s no one’s idea to go through life as “the sardine in the sardine can.”
“What you notice is there is a working harmony everyone understands, the sort of live and let live,” he said in a video snippet of his remarks on the theater’s Twitter feed.
De Blaiso’s visit also included stops at the city’s ornate Rathaus — or city hall — and meetings with Hamburg mayor Olof Scholz and other officials.
De Blasio’s jaunt to Germany has left him in hot water at home, where critics have slammed him for fleeing the city after the execution of an NYPD cop in the Bronx.
Familia was assassinated early Wednesday while sitting in an NYPD mobile command center vehicle. The 48-year-old mother of three is the third female city cop to die on duty, and the first since the World Trade Center attacks. Hamburg Zeight Haltung is reportedly paying for de Blasio’s trip.