PEGIDA: Understanding the Emergence and Essence of Nativist Protest in Dresden

ABSTRACT

Surprisingly to many observers in Germany from fall 2014 onwards, several public protests were organised that turned against fundamentalist currents of Islam. A demonstration of a group that called itself Hooligans against Salafists (HoGeSa) received great public attention; another group using the abbreviation Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA) proved able to initiate a very dynamic mobilisation within a few weeks: from a few hundred to more than 20,000 participants in weekly marches in Dresden. Surveys show that a significant portion of the German population holds Islamophobic stereotypes. Yet, until the appearance of HoGeSa and PEGIDA there had been no expression of these attitudes in public protest of any relevant kind. While growing in numbers week by week in Dresden, attempts were made to organise similar rallies in many other German cities. By and large these attempts, however, were not successful which raises the question of the causes and conditions that allow nativist mass mobilisation in Dresden but not in other cities. This paper portrays the emergence and development of PEGIDA and like groups and discusses the particular political culture in Dresden and Saxony that is the most important factor to explaining the PEGIDA phenomenon.

KEYWORDS:

• Political movements
• racism
• Islamophobia
• nativism
• far right
• Germany
• migration
• protest
• rally
• political culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Fabian Virchow is professor of social theory and theories of political action at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf where he is also the Director of the Research Centre on Right-Wing Extremism FORENA (www.forena.de). He earned his Ph.D. at the Free University in Berlin with a thesis on far right approaches in foreign politics and military affairs. He spent several years at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Philipps University in Marburg and has published frequently on the history, ideology and political action of far right and anti-immigrant groups.

Notes

1. All translations of PEGIDA statements by the author of this paper.