German Anger As Bush Flies in to Bond With Merkel

Thousands of demonstrators are expected to protest tomorrow against the US president, George Bush, who arrives in eastern Germany tonight for a three-day bonding session with Germany's leader, Angela Merkel.

The president is dropping into Mrs Merkel's picturesque Baltic coast constituency before flying on Friday to the G8 summit in St Petersburg. Officials in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have invited 1,000 carefully selected guests to meet Mr Bush tomorrow in the seaside town of Stralsund. The stage-managed reception for the US president is being wryly compared to the treatment once afforded East Germany's communist party.

The reception party will include 300 German soldiers dressed in civilian clothes. Ordinary Germans have been told to stay indoors. All shops in the town's historic market have been shut, and cars, rubbish bins and flowerpots have been removed. "It's a bit like communist East Germany again," said Monty Schädel, spokesman for Germany's Peace Association, one of 45 groups protesting against Mr Bush's visit under the slogan 'Not welcome, Mr President!'. "In communist times the authorities bussed in lots of loyal party officials to clap and shout 'hurrah'. The same thing is happening again.

"I've got nothing against President Bush as such. But we are passionately against his politics. He stands for the politics of declaring war on people, expelling them from their homes and of destruction. We are also concerned about Guantánamo Bay, and the creeping erosion of human rights under the 'war on terrorism', not just in the US but also in the UK."

Mr Bush's last visit to Germany in 2005 attracted similar controversy. Germany's Left party has said it will boycott tomorrow's visit and join around 5,000 demonstrators expected to gather in the town's Karl-Marx Allee. The Social Democrats have described the US president as unerwünscht - not wanted.

Only Mrs Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) have expressed enthusiasm. "It's a big honour for Stralsund. I'm glad Mrs Merkel invited him and I'm glad he's coming," Jörg Vierkant, the local CDU leader, said yesterday.

The president's decision to meet, as he put it, "folks who grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain" is a symbol of the importance the Bush administration places on its relations with Mrs Merkel.