Germany's new far-right populists rail against Islam

BERLIN - Agence France-Presse

Picture taken on Dec. 8 shows Lutz Bachmann (C, in the background), leader of the Pegida movement, speaking during a rally in Dresden, eastern Germany. AFP Photo

They march in their thousands every Monday evening, wave German national flags and angrily protest against "criminal asylum seekers" and the "Islamisation" of their home country.

In recent months, Germany has witnessed the emergence of a far-right populist movement that has drawn support from hardcore neo-Nazis and also a small but growing anti-euro party, the AfD.

Germany was rattled this week when the latest in a series of marches in the eastern city of Dresden by the "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident", or PEGIDA, drew over 10,000 people.

The group's name is in itself "a veritable call to arms by far-right populists", evoking echoes of Christian crusaders and Nazi propaganda, said Hajo Funke of Berlin's Free University.

"It's about the mobilisation of resentment, about establishing an enemy. It becomes dangerous if it turns into contemptuous aggression and the awakening of mob instincts," the political scientist told AFP.

PEGIDA, launched in October, has grown and spawned smaller copycat groups nationwide, provoking much soul-searching in a country haunted by its history of Nazi terror and the Holocaust.

The protests have been fuelled by a sharp rise in refugees seeking political asylum in Germany, which is scrambling to house them in converted schools, office blocks and container villages.

Germany has received more than 180,000 asylum applications since January, a 57-percent spike from last year, mostly from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Somalia but also from several Balkan countries.

Experts on Germany's far-right have noted a new mainstream character to PEGIDA, likening it to anti-foreigner movements in France, the Netherlands, Austria and Greece.

Most of the marchers are not jackbooted skinheads but disgruntled citizens, raising fears especially among immigrant groups that a societal taboo against expressing xenophobic sentiments on the streets is vanishing.

The home city of the protests, Dresden, was part of communist East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, and the Saxony region in which it lies still lags western Germany in prosperity and jobs.

It is also here where the AfD has won seats in three state parliaments, spelling a growing challenge as a political newcomer on the right of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats.

Her party congress this week vowed to boost domestic security, crack down on foreign criminal gangs and pledged that "Salafist Islamic subversion will not be tolerated."

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has meanwhile said "there is no danger of an Islamisation of Germany - particularly not in Saxony," where foreign-born residents make up just 2.2 percent of the population.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas said "we can't stay silent when xenophobic sentiments are being aimed at people who have lost everything and come to us seeking help.        

"We must make clear that these demonstrations do not represent a majority."                       

The demonstrators' stated aim is to prevent their country from being overrun by dangerous jihadists and foreigners who refuse to "integrate."

But they also cheer and applaud speakers who voice broader grievances - against the "political elite", EU bureaucrats and the mainstream media they blame for allowing multiculturalism to "water down" their national culture.

"We are the people," they regularly chant, co-opting the phrase of the original "Monday demonstrations" that led up to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

They have so far avoided clashes, with police or the anti-fascist protesters, such as the "Dresden Alliance Without Nazis," who show up in equal numbers.

By contrast, another group, the "Hooligans Against Salafists," have fought street battles with police that left more than 50 officers injured in October in the western city of Hanover.

Police union chairman Rainer Wendt said that while riot police can handle football thugs, the bigger challenge stems from the new mass rallies of people "who voice this diffuse hostility, fear and resentment against anything foreign to them."

"Many of them have failed in their lives and their jobs and they project onto others their own failure... and are looking for scapegoats," he told news channel NTV.        

"We need to pay careful attention to them so they're not drawn in by the right-wing Pied Pipers."