Protests Planned for Bush-merkel Talks

Thousands of demonstrators are expected to protest on Thursday against the US president, George Bush, who arrives in eastern Germany tomorrow night 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. But the trip has already provoked opposition from residents. Officials in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have invited 1,000 carefully selected guests to meet Mr Bush on 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," 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!', said today. "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 Linkspartei, or left party, has said it will boycott Thursday'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, told the Guardian today.

Mr Bush will arrive in the port city of Rostock tomorrow evening. He will travel to Stralsund on Thursday for a meeting with Mrs Merkel in the old market, and a tour of the town's oldest church, St Nicolas.

In the evening, both leaders will drop into a wild boar barbecue in the tiny village of Trinwillershagen. The village, population 1,360, was famous in East German times as a model of socialist production - and was even visited by East Germany's late communist leader Erich Honecker. "I'm looking forward to it. It's not every day you can say guten Tag to the world's most powerful man," Klaus-Dieter Than, the village mayor, told the Guardian.

Locals had promised to serve the president wild boar. This week, however, they admitted they had not actually been able to shoot one.

Mrs Merkel invited Mr Bush to visit her constituency during her last trip to Washington in May. The president's decision to accept - and 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.

Since becoming Germany's first woman chancellor in November, she has swiftly emerged as Washington's preferred interlocutor in Europe - and, unlike Tony Blair, the only one with a future. She is also seen as a crucial mediator with Iran over the country's nuclear weapons programme. In the run-up to the trip, politicians from all sides have urged Mrs Merkel to put pressure on the US president to close Guantánamo Bay. Although Mrs Merkel -who grew up in communist East Germany - is a passionate fan of the trans-atlantic relationship, she has said she believes the US military prison should be shut.