They gather in the dark, wave German flags and vent their anger over foreigners they fear are overrunning their homeland — next week Germany’s PEGIDA movement turns one year old.
Radicalized by Germany’s record influx of refugees and migrants, the long-dormant protest movement has come back with a vengeance onto the streets of Dresden in the former communist east.
Last week one protester carried a mock-gallows with the names of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her deputy, who the protesters call “Berlin dictators” and “traitors” because of their open-door policy to refugees.
PEGIDA — short for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” — started life as a Facebook group around cofounder Lutz Bachmann, 42.
From a few hundred people who showed up for their first evening “Monday stroll” on Oct. 20 last year, it grew to a peak of 25,000 in January, shortly after the Paris attacks against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“We are the people,” they have chanted, coopting the slogan of demonstrators before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suggesting a revolt against an out-of-touch political elite and the “lying press.”
A mix of neo-Nazis and a far greater number of self-proclaimed “concerned citizens,” the movement triggered broad distaste in Germany and sparked larger anti-fascist counterprotests nationwide.
It seemed to have crashed and burned at the start of the year after Bachmann posted slurs online and “selfies” of him sporting a Hitler mustache surfaced, sparking outrage and a leadership split.
PEGIDA, and its smaller clone groups in Germany and abroad, disappeared from the streets and the newspaper headlines — until a spike in migrant arrivals last month brought them back.
“The turning point was when Angela Merkel opened the borders to let in people from Hungary,” said Nele Wissmann of the French Institute for International Relations. “This was the trigger point.”
TV footage of volunteers cheering refugees arriving on packed trains, and handing them donated drinks, food and clothes, went around the world. To PEGIDA’s followers it set off alarm bells and the movement regrouped.
Experts warn the movement is turning more radical, after members allegedly attacked journalists, and as police report a spike in attacks against asylum-homes.
“Since the autumn it’s become really radicalized to become a right-wing movement ... focused on refugees,” Wissmann said. “It is very, very serious.”
Others have argued that the re-emergence of the movement must not be overplayed, given that PEGIDA has so far drawn an estimated 9,000 protesters — compared with at least 150,000 at a Berlin rally last weekend against a planned EU-US trade agreement.
Timo Lochocki of think tank the German Marshall Fund of the US said that despite a dip in the polls for Merkel, the ratings in fact show that the broad majority of Germans are not lured by groups such as PEGIDA, but maintain a basic trust in her government to manage the migrant wave.
The small populist Alternative for Germany party — whose leaders have voiced sympathy for PEGIDA — has so far failed to capitalize in a major way on any anti-migrant backlash, gaining just two points to reach 7 percent support, he said.
“Germany is facing its greatest challenge since reunification ... and at this very moment, the German far-right is gaining 2 percent, and the governing parties have slipped from 41 to 38 percent,” Lochocki told reporters. “It’s indicating that the lion’s share of German voters still entirely trusts the German established parties.”
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