Protests against Corona measures | Michael Ballweg: The lateral thinker

Climate change? It doesn't exist, with such a rainy July. The Tagesschau? Dumbing-down television! And the AfD? Guaranteed to come to power in 2026.

While hundreds of people waited on livestreams of so-called alternative media outlets Thursday afternoon for Querdenken founder Michael Ballweg to appear in front of the cameras, the comment sections revealed what characterizes this movement. To fill the waiting time, videos about the dangers of wind turbines and modern medicine were shown.

The verdict has been finalized this morning: The Stuttgart Regional Court acquitted Ballweg of the charge of enriching himself with donations. He was only convicted of tax evasion – among other things, he had declared a dog mat as a business expense, even though, according to the court, it was only used privately.

Ballweg has been on trial since the fall of 2024. The public prosecutor's office considered him a shrewd businessman who sought to enrich himself through the Querdenken protests and used more than half a million euros in donations for private purposes. According to the files, only around 843,000 euros of the more than one million euros in expenditures for Querdenken are documented. However, the court reasoned that there was a lack of complete accounting – and this could not be blamed on the defendant.

On this day, 50-year-old Ballweg was wearing a T-shirt with the inscription: "Once a rebel, always a rebel." In the eyes of his supporters, the verdict only further turns him into a martyr who would have felt the full power of the government-controlled judiciary for his fight for freedom—after all, Ballweg had been in pretrial detention for several months since June 2022 due to the ongoing investigation. And indeed, given the meager evidence, imprisonment seems excessive.

But it was precisely this same justice system that now acquitted Ballweg. A contradiction that already characterized the coronavirus protests: Demonstrators complained about massive restrictions on their basic rights – while exercising those very rights.

IT entrepreneur Ballweg became a central figure in these protests. While he himself was still advocating for protective measures at the beginning of 2020, he launched demonstrations in Stuttgart in the spring, calling themselves "Querdenken." This quickly developed into a nationwide movement against the coronavirus measures. The protests attracted a slew of "conspiracy theorists"—for many, the term that most aptly describes the Querdenken movement. However, the term ignores the fact that many right-wing extremists also joined the protests. Ballweg never credibly distanced himself from them; on the contrary, he even met with Reich citizens like Peter Fitzek, the self-proclaimed King of Germany. But that wasn't why Ballweg had been on trial since the fall.