German
anti-immigrant protests revive — and radicalize
“Lying”
media targeted in weekly protests centered on Dresden.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
10/6/15, 8:18 PM CET Updated 10/6/15, 9:50 PM CET
BERLIN — As
estimates of the number of refugees arriving in Germany this year
skyrocket, a growing backlash is reviving and radicalizing the
eastern German PEGIDA anti-Islam movement.
Coinciding with a
report in the top-selling Bild newspaper Monday that as many as 1.5
million people could seek asylum in Germany this year — almost
double the government’s last official estimate of 800,000 —
PEGIDA’s latest march this week in Dresden, where the movement
sprang up a year ago, attracted between 7,500 and 9,000 people.
Independent
estimates by a group linked to the city’s Technical University
suggest the number of attendees at the regular Monday marches is
rising, although still lower than the 25,000 the rallies were
attracting at their peak in early 2015. PEGIDA’s own estimates are
much higher, putting the turnout this Monday at 20,000.
Since last year,
PEGIDA — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West —
has split into rival factions, but it has also become increasingly
radicalized and more aggressive towards the news media, denounced as
Lügenpresse (lying press), a term used by the Nazis.
“Since the spring
of 2015, we have observed a radicalization that went along with the
rising number of refugees,” said Frank Richter of the State Agency
for Civic Education, an interior ministry body promoting civic
values, in a television interview.
“I can’t rule
out the possibility that these more radicalized groups will merge
with other groups in the country,” he said, apparently referring to
the National Democrats (NPD), a far-right, xenophobic party which has
seats in several state assemblies and local councils.
“We
know where you and your kids live” — threat reportedly received
by journalists covering PEGIDA
PEGIDA began as an
orderly weekly demonstration in Dresden against the perceived
Islamization of Germany, though the speakers frequently digressed to
issues including dislike of the mandatory license fee Germans pay for
state TV and radio.
However, the
movement’s credibility took a beating thanks to infighting and then
the embarrassment of its former figurehead, Lutz Bachmann, posing on
Facebook as Hitler. He has since been charged with incitement.
New aggression
Speakers at Monday’s
event called for acts of civil disobedience, according to media
reports, while the target of the protests has broadened from its
initial focus on Muslims and migrants from the Balkans to asylum
seekers in general as well as politicians — “betrayers of the
people” — and the media, the only ones there in person to hear
the message.
A small group of
migrants walk over the bridge to cross the Austrian-German border
Local journalists
reporting on PEGIDA say they receive hate-mail denouncing them as
“rabble-rousers” with threats such as “We know where you and
your kids live.” Two reporters were kicked and punched at recent
rally while the crowd cheered.
Uta Deckow, head of
political coverage in the state of Saxony for public broadcaster MDR,
said one of her reporters covering a PEGIDA event last weekend in the
town of Sebnitz had a sticker pinned to her back with Lügenpresse on
it, and when a woman from the crowd tried to pin another to her
breast, bystanders just took photographs.
“The level of
aggression has increased,” Deckow said, “and the stickers with
‘lying press’ are definitely a new dimension.”
“The verbal attack
on our liberal, democratic order — about which we have warned right
from the beginning — has indeed radicalized to a degree that we now
see full-blown physical violence on the side of these rallies,”
said Christin Bahnert, a leader of the Greens in Saxony.
Right-wing extremism
remains a fringe phenomenon in Germany, as does its left-wing
equivalent, and groups like the NPD don’t sit in the federal
parliament. However, the eastern state of Saxony, where Dresden is
located, is a stronghold for the far-right party. Human rights groups
say it has the highest rates of racist violent crime in Germany,
despite having relatively few immigrants.
When Chancellor
Angela Merkel visited a refugee center in Saxony in August to show
solidarity with asylum seekers following violent anti-immigrant
protests at the shelter, she got a hostile reception from the crowd.
That was an early sign that her generous policy on refugees from war
zones like Syria was starting to run into resistance.
And the Saxon
resentment came before she announced that Germany would let in
hundreds of thousands of refugees who had amassed on the Hungarian
border trying to reach Germany and Austria — which was followed by
a rapid U-turn under pressure from her own conservative allies.
Her government has
not yet responded to Bild’s report of 1.5 million refugees in, or
on their way to, Germany.
Authors:
Janosch Delcker
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário