Why are people in Dresden marching against ‘Islamisation’?

Among the flags waving last Monday evening in Dresden the most unlikely sight in the drizzle was a tattered Irish Tricolour. It was held aloft by Stefan, a fortysomething man from a village near the Saxon capital, on behalf of a German friend living in Ireland.

Stefan was one of the record 18,000 people who turned out to march with the organisation that calls itself Pegida, short for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident.

From nowhere the movement has grown via Facebook in the past dozen weeks, and it now draws marchers weekly on to the streets of Dresden, with increasing numbers of visitors from Berlin, to the north, and Bavaria, to the south.

Stefan doesn’t know of any Muslims in his small town near Dresden, but he has heard stories. Of schools where canteens have stopped serving pork under pressure from Muslims. Or of Christmas markets now dubbed “winter markets”, apparently not to offend Muslim sensibilities.

"Over in western Germany immigration has gone too far already," he said. "So I am protesting here rather than waiting until it's too late."

As German authorities struggle to house rising numbers of asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere, Pegida has used the issue – and the supposed threat of “Islamisation” – as both calling card and battering ram. In a few short weeks it has become an anti-establishment mouthpiece for Germany’s disenchanted.

Hate in their hearts?

After weeks of ignoring the movement, politicians have gone on the attack. In her New Year's address Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Germans to be wary of people with "hate" in their hearts. But, as the opposition to Pegida builds, so does its support.

Walking through dark Dresden back streets on last Monday’s march, the first thing you notice is that about 80 per cent are white German men aged from their mid 20s to, in the main, their 50s and 60s.

Fear of the other is the most common sentiment in posters: “Our country, our values”; “Saxony must remain German”. Another banner juxtaposes the words “Islam = Peace” with a dove bearing dynamite.

The atmosphere is volatile, tipping from cheery one moment to defiant and threatening the next. The most common chant is "Wir sind das Volk" (We are the people) – last heard in 1989, from demonstrators who toppled the Berlin Wall.

When journalists or press photographers are spotted, the crowd bellows a four-syllable chant: "Lü-gen-pres-se" (lying press). The feeling is menacing, with journalists jeered for caricaturing Pegida supporters as "pinstripe Nazis".

The organisation held its first demonstration last October: barely 300 people showed up for a gathering dominated by neo-Nazis. They are still visible and tolerated today but are outnumbered by newer arrivals.

Pegida doesn’t do press. Its leader, Lutz Bachmann, on the record for condemning foreign drug dealers in Dresden, has 23 convictions for break-ins and possession of drugs. He now runs an advertising agency and internet consultancy.

In its only manifesto to date, Pegida makes no mention of “Islamisation”. Instead it insists it is pro-asylum but wants greater asylum resources, quicker rulings and tighter rules, along Swiss lines.

On Tuesday evening, after weeks of public confrontation, Dresdners from both sides of the Pegida divide meet for the first time to discuss the group’s demands.

Frank Richter, a civil-rights leader from 1989, suggests that Pegida has become a catch-all movement for easterners with shattered biographies, frustrated by a quarter-century of struggle with a new system of chances and risks they don’t understand. But he also sees parallels with similar groups springing up around Europe. “Welcome to the new nationalistic normality,” he says.

No senior Pegida members come to the Tuesday meeting in Dresden. Instead enthusiastic Pegida marchers, all men over 40, tell similar stories of feeling talked down to by the media and belittled by politicians over their concerns about asylum seekers. Joachim Möhler is a Pegida marcher from Perba, a small Saxon village of 170 people, that has been allocated 50 asylum seekers. He says he’s gone to Pegida because he sees no other way to express his concerns.

“We’ve been turned into enemies for disturbing the political system,” he says. “Are we back in East Germany, where the only opinion you could express publicly was the official one?”

Across the table from him Elke Norg, a Dresden woman, says her sympathy for the concerns of Pegida marchers is tempered by their lack of interest in the people behind the movement. “These leaders are people who take out their frustration on the weakest in society.”

Among the complex arguments, claims and counterclaims is one particularly loaded question: what has made Pegida blossom in eastern Germany and, particularly, in Dresden?

Migration experts point to eastern Germany’s limited experience of outsiders. Local historians, meanwhile, suggest Pegida taps an inward-looking Saxon identity, reactivated with German unification in 1990, which has failed to develop an outward-looking, European component.

"Given that, I don't think it's coincidence at all that Pegida has established itself successfully here," says Hans-Peter Lühr, publisher of the respected Dresdner Blätter historical journal.

Firebombing fallout

Ruairí O’Brien, an Irish-born architect, has lived in Dresden for two decades. He remains struck by the city’s lingering trauma of loss – that of the old Dresden in the firebombing of February 1945, in the final months of the second World War. He worries that Pegida will try to co-opt that feeling next month by linking the 70th anniversary of the firebombing to the potential threat of Islamist-related violence. What might seem a stretch is not necessarily so in Dresden, particularly not after Wednesday’s attacks in Paris. “Pegida could play the Islamisation and migration card along the lines of: we’ve lost our city once before, we don’t want to lose it twice,” he says.

As Pegida leaders explore their political options in Saxony, possibly with the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, Stefan rolls up his Irish Tricolour at the Monday-night Pegida march, happy to be part of something. “This Irish flag is to show that Pegida isn’t just about Germany,” he says. “Pegida is part of something bigger across Europe.”