Pegida and Far-Right German Movement

What started out just over three months ago as little more than a Facebook page with a few hundred members has grown into a group with thousands of supporters, who are invited by the organisers to meet for “evening strolls” through German cities. On Monday, a record 18,000 people took to the streets of Dresden. . .

Many of the slogans held aloft by participants are hard to disagree with, such as “If you go to sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship”. Others, such as “Beware Ali Baba and his 400 drug dealers”, seem to be trying hard to make the point that drug-dealing and immigrants are synonymous. . .

What Pegida stands for is hard to ascertain, especially if you ask Pegida, largely because demonstrators have been urged not to talk to what they call the “Lügenpresse”, or liar press (a term of condemnation also used by the Nazis, by the way), and its organisers rarely give interviews. Some speak, but only through gritted teeth. They mention a desire for tighter immigration controls, for keeping war refugees in their homelands, for forcing foreigners in Germany to speak German at home. . .