A significant protest march against the German government’s pro mass migration policies passed off “largely trouble free” on Saturday afternoon, as police kept thousands of pro Germany on one side, and leftist counter demonstrators on the other apart.

Marching under a unified message that Merkel Must Go — Merkel Muss Weg — a police estimate of 1,800 anti mass migration protesters marched in central Berlin yesterday.

Hailing from a coalition of groups including Pro Germany and We For Berlin, police said the event was “peaceful” an d “largely trouble free”, despite numerous attempts by left-wing counter protesters to break police lines and storm the Pro Germany area, reports Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

Starting at three o’clock, the group listened to speeches outside Berlin central railway station before marching on a route that took them past the Chancellery — Angela Merkel’s office.

Protesters held signs including messages such as “Freedom!”, “Merkel Must Go”, “Rapefugees’ Not Welcome”, and “No Islam on German Soil”.

While in terms of European counter-jihad and anti mass migration rallies the 1,800 that marched yesterday was reasonably small, it can be seen as a significant number for predominantly left-wing Berlin. Breitbart London reported on a Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA) rally in the city in 2015 which attracted 500, itself likely the biggest such gathering there in years.

Although this Saturday’s protest was much larger, it also attracted a large number of counter-demonstrators from the radical left. Cheered on by the Berlin city government and marching a route organised by the national protestant church and christened “a walk for openness and tolerance” thousands ‘raved against Nazism’ to music played loud on the streets by amateur DJs and nightclub promoters.

The Associated Press reports bottles and even a beer stein was thrown at police by counter-demonstrators, forcing police to deploy tear gas against the leftists and to detain some protesters.

Hakan Tas, a Turkish-born German politician and member of the national radical Left party, “by his own account” claimed to have been attacked at a subway station by right-wing activists yesterday but sustained no injuries. There were no other known occurrences of right-wing violence on the day, reports the Rheinische Post.

Although the leftist self-proclaimed anti-fascists claimed to represent the silent majority of Germans, new opinion polls suggest the public are moving away from Chancellor Merkel’s rigid stance on mass migration.

Breitbart London reported this week on the majority of Germans who have said they don’t believe Islam should be a “part of Germany”. In the survey conducted by a national polling company for a German newspaper, 61 per cent of those surveyed said that they were against recognising Islam as something that was essentially German.

Just 22 per cent agreed that it was, or should be. In October, research found four-fifths of Germans thought the country should regain border controls, a policy against which Chancellor Merkel is strongly set.