Germany: Anti-Islamization Movement Faces Uncertain Future
The future of the German grassroots anti-Islamization movement known as PEGIDA has been thrown into doubt after a leadership split resulted in key members leaving the group.
Germany: Anti-Islamization Movement Faces Uncertain Future
Soeren Kern | Gatestone Institute | February 15, 2015
The future of the German grassroots anti-Islamization movement known as PEGIDA has been thrown into doubt after a leadership split resulted in key members leaving the group.
Only 2,000 people attended a weekly rally held in the eastern German city of Dresden on February 9, a sharp decrease from the 17,000 who assembled at the previous rally held on January 25.
PEGIDA — named after the German abbreviation for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West” — has been organizing “evening strolls” (Abendspaziergang) through downtown Dresden on Monday evenings since October to protest against runaway immigration and the Islamization of Germany.
PEGIDA was launched by Lutz Bachmann, a 41-year-old Dresden publicity agent with no background in politics, after government officials in the eastern German state of Saxony announced that they would be opening more than a dozen new shelters to house some 2,000 asylum-seekers.
Germany received more than 180,000 asylum-seekers in 2014, a 60% jump from 2013. Most of them are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq and Somalia, as well as from the Balkans. Many are being housed across Germany in converted schools, shipping container villages and office blocks.
Around 500 people gathered at the first PEGIDA event held on October 20 to protest Germany’s lenient asylum policies. From that point on, the number of protesters increased exponentially from week to week, with more than 25,000 people attending a rally on January 12, just days after Islamic terrorists murdered 16 people in Paris.
