Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West"The Pegida Movement and German Political Culture: Is Right-Wing Populism Here to Stay?""PEGIDA in Germany". (), abbreviated Pegida (; stylised in its logo in all caps), was a German anti-Islam, far-right extremist political movement. "PEGIDA in Germany". "The Pegida Movement and German Political Culture: Is Right-Wing Populism Here to Stay?"
Pegida believed that Germany was being increasingly Islamicised.
Pegida wanted to curb immigration into Germany and it accused the authorities of failure to enforce related laws. Starting in October 2014 in Dresden with hundreds of participants, the peaks in 2015 and 2016 attracted over 20,000 supporters, often accompanied by counter-demonstrations. In 2015, , the founder of Pegida, resigned from the movement after a doctored photograph appeared where he appeared to be posing as and making racist statements on Facebook. He was later reinstated. Activity started to decline by 2018, and soon after it nearly ceased all operations until its formal dissolution in 2024.
Though nationalism was a central feature, Pegida offshoots have formed in various countries. It was a grassroots part of the counter-jihad movement.
History Origin
Pegida was founded in October 2014 by , who runs a public relations agency in Dresden. 's impetus for starting Pegida was witnessing a rally by alleged supporters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) against the siege of Kobani by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on 10 October 2014 in Dresden, which he posted on YouTube on the same day. The next day he founded a Facebook group called ('Patriotic Europeans against Islamisation of the Occident').
On 7 October, Yazidis and Muslim Chechens had violently clashed in . On 26 October, out of 5,000 protesters, "at least 400 right-wing extremists went on a rampage in downtown Cologne during a demonstration" by "Hooligans Against Salafists". mentioned these events in a release for his first demonstration.
First wave of demonstrations
The first demonstration, or "evening stroll" (according to Pegida), took place on 20 October 2014, and attracted only a handful of people. During the following days, the movement began gaining wider public attention, and, subsequently, the weekly Monday demonstrations drew larger numbers of people. Among the 7,500 participants on 1 December 2014, the police identified 80 to 120 hooligans. The demonstration grew to 10,000 people on 8 December 2014.
During the weekly demonstrations on Monday evenings, Pegida supporters carried banners with slogans such as "For the preservation of our culture", "Against religious fanaticism, against any kind of radicalism, together without violence" and "Against religious wars on German soil".
On 19 December 2014, PEGIDA e.V. was legally registered in Dresden under the registration ID VR 7750, with as chairman, as vice-chairman and as treasurer. Pegida also formally applied for the status of a nonprofit organization.
Aftermath of Charlie Hebdo shooting and rising tensions
While the demonstration on 29 December 2014 was cancelled by the organizers, the movement continued to draw large numbers of participants in early January 2015. After the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015 in Paris, politicians (including ministers and ) warned Pegida against misusing the attack on Charlie Hebdo for its own political agenda. On Saturday 10 January 2015 some 35,000 anti-Pegida protesters gathered to mourn the victims of Paris, observing a minute's silence in front of the .
On 12 January 2015, Pegida organizers organised a rally of some 25,000 participants. Pegida's main organizer, , declared the six central political objectives of Pegida, which include calls for selective immigration and the expulsion of religious extremists, the right and duty to integrate, and tighter internal security.
On 15 January 2015, a young Eritrean immigrant, Khaled Idris Bahray, was found stabbed to death in his Dresden high-rise apartment. International media correspondents portrayed an "atmosphere of hatred and resentment" and published social media comments of Pegida sympathizers, who had expressed disdain for the dead Eritrean. Pegida's organizers rejected any possible connection. One week later, the police investigation led to the arrest and eventual conviction of one of the victim's Eritrean housemates.
Dresden police did not permit the demonstration planned for 19 January 2015, due to a definite threat against one of Pegida's leadership members in form of an Arabic-language tweet labelling Pegida an "enemy of Islam". Pegida cancelled its 13th demonstration and stated in a post on its Facebook page that there was an explicit threat against a leadership member, and "his execution had been ordered by ISIS terrorists".
Resignations On 21 January 2015, Bachmann resigned from his position in Pegida after coming under fire for a number of Facebook posts. Excerpts from a closed Facebook conversation incriminated Bachmann as having referred to immigrants with the insults "animals", "scumbags" and "trash", which are classified as hate speech in Germany. He was also quoted as commenting that extra security was needed at the welfare office "to protect employees from the animals". A self-portrait of Bachmann allegedly posing as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, titled "He's back!" (which the later discovered to be a forgery, reporting that the moustache was added after the photo was taken), went viral on social media and was printed on front pages worldwide. On another occasion, Bachmann had posted a photo of a man wearing the uniform of the US white supremacist organisation Ku Klux Klan accompanied by the slogan: "Three Ks a day keeps the minorities away". The Dresden state prosecutors opened an investigation for suspected (incitement to hatred), and Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the real face of Pegida had been exposed: "Anyone who puts on a Hitler disguise is either an idiot or a Nazi. People should think carefully about running after a pied piper like this".
reported that Pegida's media spokeswoman, , turned to the Alternative for Germany () for advice, and that the and both confirmed there was a phone conversation between the AfD's and . said to that should no longer be supported (""). On that same day announced 's resignation.
On 28 January, resigned as well, citing "the massive hostility, threats and career disadvantages" as the reason. At the same time, four other leading figures of Pegida stepped back. On 2 February 2015, and six other former Pegida members founded ('Direct Democracy for Europe') to distance themselves from the far-right tendencies of Pegida.
Reinstatement In February 2015, Pegida confirmed on its Facebook page that had been re-elected as chairman by the six other members of the organisation's leadership committee, after the published a report that the Hitler moustache on the now infamous photo had been added after the photo was taken.
Dresden mayoral election, 2015 In June 2015, following the resignation of CDU incumbent on health grounds, , who was dismissed from Pegida's leadership circle in June 2016, ran for the mayoral office of Dresden, polling 9.6% in the first round with support from the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). On 7 July 2015, announced that Pegida would participate in all future federal elections in Germany.
Renewed protests
The European migrant crisis revived the movement, which drew as many as 20,000 supporters to a 19 October 2015 rally in Dresden. At the same time, observers perceived a further radicalisation of the crowd.
On 28 September, two journalists were injured when Pegida participants kicked a local newspaper reporter and punched another TV reporter in the face. On 12 October, Pegida demonstrators carried a mock gallows showing nooses reserved for Chancellor and her deputy . derided the demonstrators who made it, calling it a "laughable piece of work with spelling errors" (""), a reference to the fact that the name Sigmar had been written with an "ie" ().
At Pegida's anniversary event on 19 October 2015, keynote speaker named the Muslim refugees as invaders, with Germany becoming a "Muslim garbage dump". said that politicians were acting like " against their own people", as they wanted critics of Germany's refugee policy to leave the country. Addressing the crowd shouting "Resistance!", he claimed that the majority of Germans were held in contempt by the political class and that politicians wished that there were "other alternatives [to fight Pegida supporters] – but the concentration camps are unfortunately out of order at the moment". The crowd applauded and laughed, and let him continue his speech for another 20 minutes before calling upon him to finish.
When 1,500 to 2,000 people celebrated Pegida in 's first anniversary, dozens of hooligans protested, vandalizing foreign-owned shops. Over 100 people were arrested. Mayor Burkhard Jung called it "open street terror".
Party founding The founder of Pegida, , has set up a new political party, the ("Liberal Direct Democratic People's Party", or ). The FDDV was established on 13 June 2016. Tommy Robinson founded a branch of Pegida in the United Kingdom.
Position paper
At the beginning of December 2014, Pegida published an undated and anonymous one-page manifesto of 19 bulleted position statements.
Pegida's specific demands were initially unclear, largely because Pegida has refused a dialogue, considering the press to be a politically correct conspiracy. Demonstrators have been observed chanting (lying press), a term that has a long history in German politics.
Alongside the German national flag, supporters of the movement have often been seen with a variant of the "Wirmer flag", a flag proposed by resistance member in 1944 for use after World War II.
According to a report from December 2014, Pegida considers Islamism a misogynist and violent ideology. In January 2015 The Guardian described Pegida as a far-right movement, The New York Times labelled Pegida as anti-immigrant, and Angela Merkel has repeatedly questioned the motives underlying its anti-immigrant message.
The State Authority for the Protection of the Constitution () of Thuringia considers (the regional Pegida branch of South Thuringia) to be steered by right-wing nationalists.
In February 2015 the 19 positions were revised and broken down to the ten "Theses of Dresden".
On 10 September 2015, Pegida demanded ten changes to the German refugee policy. They called for an immediate stop for asylum seekers and for a German 'asylum-emergency law'.
Participants and supporters
According to Frank Richter, director of Saxony's Federal Agency for Civic Education, Pegida is "a mixed group—known figures from the National Democratic Party of Germany, soccer hooligans, but also a sizable number of ordinary citizens". , director of the Migration Council, has pointed out that the movement is strongest where people have hardly any experience with foreigners, and among "easterners who never really arrived in the Federal Republic and who now feel they have no voice".
In December, , president of Saxony's State Authority for the Protection of the Constitution, said that initial suspicion that Pegida might tie in with the riots staged by earlier in Cologne were not substantiated, so the movement was not put under official surveillance. He said there were no indications that the organizers were embracing right-wingers. This assessment was contested by the weekly who researched the ideological proximity of Pegida organizer to the German Defence League or the European Identitarian movement. In a interview on 19 January, Meyer-Plath reaffirmed that the participant spectrum was very diverse and that there was no evidence of radicalisation.