Akademikerball Riots

The most recent shocking event that happened in Vienna were the protest marches against the so called “Akademikerball”. The FPÖ, the Austrian right wing party (or "the Austrian Freedom Party") organising the event, which is an event comparable with the UK independence party, just to give you an idea of what it is.
It took place in the famous Hofburg on January 24th.
This year, one of the protest marches was unusually violent and destructive. There were approximately 4 or 5 marches in the inner districts of Vienna with 6000 demonstrators in total. Naturally, most of them were on the far left. Most of the marches proceeded peacefully, except the one protest on Stephansplatz, which caused that big turmoil. Among the demonstrators of this march there was a group called “Der schwarze Block” consisting of 200 people. The police knew beforehand that they were going to wear masks and therefor imposed a prohibition of wearing masks (including scarfs!), which made the inhabitants of the first district quite angry. We later found out that the police had warned us with good reason! - There were apparently busses which brought the masked hooligans from Germany and the result was this:
                                

 Yes, they smashed shopping windows, destroyed cars and ripped off the garbage cans...   


"You can have our hatred"

 And no, we are not proud of this, but we do think it´s worth a blog post. This hardly ever happens here in Vienna! In fact, Vienna is still a peaceful city and I think we shouldn´t take that for granted. So what do you think of these news? Have you experienced such an incident in your homecountry?