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[Warning: mainstream media report!] More than 110 people were arrested in May Day clashes in Berlin between demonstrators and police, authorities said, while neo-Nazis and counter-protesters faced off across the country.

Protesters threw bottles and stones at police in the Friedrichshain district in the east of the capital in the early morning hours after an anti-globalisation parade ended with a street festival that drew about 1,000 people.
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Fifteen police officers were slightly injured and four cars in various districts were set ablaze.

Some 5,000 police officers were deployed to avert the riots and mass vandalism by far-left demonstrators that have marred the labour day holiday in Berlin for two decades.

Police chief Dieter Glietsch said Tuesday afternoon that 119 arrests so far this year had already topped the 70 counted last year during the 24-hour-long May Day celebrations.

But he noted that a strategy of restraint and de-escalation, combined with the swift arrest of troublemakers, had markedly cut down on May Day-related crime.

Separately, more than 500,000 people rallied across the country for the introduction of a minimum wage in Germany, at events organised by trade unions, while thousands more demonstrated against right-wing extremism.

About 5,000 demonstrators gathered in the southern city of Nuremberg against a march by 500 supporters of Germany’s biggest far-right party, the strongly anti-immigration National Democratic Party (NPD).

“Democrats must stand together against old and new Nazis,” Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein said in a speech in the city where the Nazis staged giant torchlight marches in the 1930s.

Beckstein, a staunch conservative, was heckled by groups of far-left demonstrators some of whom threw stones and bottles. In Erfurt, central Germany, more than 5,000 protesters blocked the march route of about 1,300 far-right demonstrators.