The feeling of general security that the state must guarantee has ceased to exist in Hamburg over the last 48 hours." Just behind the tightly-secured G20 summit venue, charred road barricades, trashed shops and stones, debris and shattered glass bore testimony to an anarchic night, when police commandoes with semi-automatic weapons detained militants who hurled rocks from rooftops. Criticism also came from Merkel's conservative camp, with Bavarian CSU politician Hans-Peter Uhl charging that "the G20 summit should never have been held in a city of millions like Hamburg. Some also saw the G20 summit, years in the planning, as a dress-rehearsal as Hamburg bid for the 2024 Olympics - an effort the people of Hamburg later torpedoed in a referendum. Spiegel Online judged that Merkel, who faces elections on September 24, "must realise that it is mostly pictures of burning cars and black-clad radicals that will be remembered from the G20 summit".

Source: The Local July 08, 2017 13:07 UTC