German anti-Islamic rallies may grow on terror fears

Germany’s new anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement plans to rally again on Monday, when analysts expect its ranks to swell by thousands following the Paris shootings this week. Leaders of the so-called “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” have asked marchers to wear black armbands and observe a minute’s silence for “the victims of terrorism in Paris.” Many observers of the rise of the far-right populist movement in the eastern city of Dresden now expect it to seek to make political capital from the massacre at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and its bloody aftermath. But the movement has so far failed to strongly take root outside Dresden, in the former communist East Germany.

[It] will buoy currents of the vague xenophobia that exist in this country. The Islamophobia syndrome, on the crest of which PEGIDA rides, could in fact gain strength.

Everhard Holtmann of Halle-Wittenberg University

PEGIDA has voiced a wide range of grievances and railed against diverse enemies, not just Islam and asylum-seekers, but also the media and a political elite whom they accuse of diluting Germany’s Christian-based culture with multiculturalism. Launched in October with a march of just 500 people, it has since swelled rapidly, stirring anguished debate in a country whose dark history makes expressions of xenophobia especially worrisome. Activists have announced plans for PEGIDA spin-offs in Austria and Scandinavia, while other European far-right groups have voiced support for the German movement.

World PEGIDA