CREDIT: REUTERS/HANNIBAL HANSCHKE
Anti-immigration movement PEGIDA gathered in Dresden on Monday (December 22) for the latest in a series of public actions criticising the German government for ignoring its fears of being overrun by Muslims.
According to police estimates, 17,500 demonstrators from the grass-rootsmovement staged a rally in front of the city’s Semperoper opera house, waving flags and holding banners reading: “Against religious fanaticism”.
Grass-roots movement PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, has drawn support from the far-right as well as some ordinary Germans alarmed by a sharp rise in refugees, many fleeing conflict in the Middle East.
The group’s leader, Lutz Bachmann, told the crowd from a makeshift stage thatGermany was not a “land of immigration”.
“Integration does not mean to live beside each other, but to live together on the basis of our Christian-Jewish merits of our constitution and our German culture with its Christian-Jewish roots, determined by Christianity, humanism and clarity,” Bachmann said.
Bachmann started PEGIDA in October to protest plans to add 14 centres for roughly 2,000 refugees in Dresden.
The rallies have spread rapidly across Germany since starting with a local social media appeal in Dresden two months ago.
They are now beginning to unsettle the German political establishment, which has spent decades restoring Germany’s image as an open, tolerant country after the devastation of the Nazis.
Even though foreigners are scarce in Dresden and the Saxony region compared to other parts of Germany, Bachmann’s protest reverberated and his Monday rallies have grown from a few hundred to over 17,500 on Monday.
The number of asylum-seekers in Germany has surged to some 200,000 this year, more than any other western country, due in part to an influx of Syrians.
In recent weeks, media reports have exposed Bachmann’s own criminal record for among other things burglary, drunk driving and drug dealing, which have led to him lashing out against what he said were lies about the movement.
Anti-PEGIDA demonstrators projected “Refugees Welcome” onto a wall in the square in Dresden and a Reuters witness said that a protester who was ejected from the crowd belonged to the “Antifa” anti-fascist movement.
Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas, a leading figure in the centre-left Social Democrats, has called the PEGIDA movement a disgrace for the country.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned all forms of xenophobia and stressed that Germany needs immigrants to help it cope with a looming demographic crisis resulting from one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.
But she is also keen to avoid alienating voters that might ordinarily support herconservatives. Some are already leaving for a new party, the Alternative forGermany (AfD), which was founded last year in opposition to the euro currency but now talks tough on immigration and law-and-order issues.
The AfD scored surprisingly well in three eastern state votes, including Saxony, earlier this year, entering regional parliaments for the first time.