We don’t need no Muslims here CALLING themselves Pegida, or “patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident”, since October they have marched through Dresden every Monday. Their numbers are growing: on December 15th 15,000 protested. Their slogans of xenophobic paranoia (“No sharia in Europe!”) seem bizarre in Saxony, where only 2% of the population is foreign and fewer than 1% are Muslim.The marchers make no attempt to explain their demands. Convinced of a conspiracy of political correctness, they do not speak to the press. Few bear any signs of neo-Nazism. They have eschewed violence. What they share is broad anxiety about asylum-seekers (200,000 in 2014) and immigrants.The instigator is Lutz Bachmann, owner of an ad agency who once fled to South Africa to avoid being locked up for dealing drugs. He has imitators in other cities: Bonn has a Bogida march, Würzburg a Wügida. But eastern Germany, especially Dresden, is the movement’s base. Counter-demonstrations have sprung up, but their numbers in Dresden (about 5,600 this week) are dwarfed by Pegida’s. Chancellor Angela Merkel accused Pegida of…
The Economist: Europe
