As World leaders are spending the next two days in a lavish sanctuary nestled in the Bavarian Alps for the G7 summit.

Although outnumbered by the police forces present, around 5000 people are out protesting against the G7 summit in the German town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

The massive protest is just one of many mobilizations, including alternative summits and direct actions that are challenging the gathering of global elites, which is to take place June 7 and 8. Government representatives of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States will formally take part.

Playing drums, tambourines and shaking rattles, protesters shouted “Brick by brick, wall by wall stop G7 and make the system fall!”. They carried banners reading “Fight G7 for Revolution” and “G7 go to hell! I like Putin”.

“I’m protesting because the big financial corporations have too much influence over politics,” said Thomas Schmidbauer, 50, from Sindlsdorf in Bavaria, who was dressed in traditional Bavarian lederhosen shorts.

“Poverty isn’t being tackled. It is unfair. We could organise our economies much better for the people,” he added.

Tom Klappert, a 31-year-old medical student, said: “It’s not acceptable that they’re throwing so much money at a conference while so many refugees and other people are dying of hunger every day.”

Some 17,000 German police have been deployed around the summit site in the Bavarian Alps and another 2,000 Austrian police were on standby across the nearby border.

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Tens of thousands marched through nearby Munich on Thursday to protest the summit’s politics of “neo-liberal economic policies, war and militarization, exploitation, poverty and hunger, environmental degradation, and the closing-off towards refugees.”

Police set up a blockade to stop the progression of the march and when the protest confronted it, police deployed tear gas and pepper spray on the crowd. At least one protester was carried away by paramedics.

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Video of earlier police assaults on the demo.

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