A confrontation between the police and protesters on Thursday that left about 130 demonstrators injured was the most heated flare-up in a months-old dispute between the government and local residents who oppose plans to build a modern transportation hub, called Stuttgart 21, that will eventually be linked to Europe’s high-speed rail system.
Newspapers across the country on Friday were filled with pictures of German police officers in riot gear and bloodied and wounded demonstrators, young and old. The incident, already a major political embarrassment to Chancellor Angela Merkel, has persuaded the opposition Green Party to call for national protests.
A party leader, Cem Ozdemir, said in a television interview Friday that “these methods aren’t the way we do things in Germany, and we don’t want them.”
Mrs. Merkel has called for calm, while her party, the Christian Democratic Union, has shown it is determined to move ahead with the project regardless of how many people take to the streets of a city best known as the home of Mercedes-Benz and Porsche.
“I would hope that demonstrations like these would pass off peacefully,” Mrs. Merkel told the public broadcaster SWR on Friday. “This must always be tried, and anything that leads to violence must be avoided.”
The city, state and federal governments, along with Deutsche Bahn, the German rail agency, are determined to move ahead with a plan that has been in the works for about 15 years, will cost billions of dollars and take about a decade to complete.
It requires knocking down two wings of the city’s 100-year-old train station, one of the few buildings to survive heavy bombing during World War II, and cutting down about 300 trees, some centuries old.
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