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Politics

Quadriga - Pegida goes Europe - Fear is the Key

January 22, 2015

The Pegida movement of “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West “has now found supporters outside of Germany. A new study indicates that adherents are middle class and fear a slide into poverty.

https://p.dw.com/p/1EPFG

What unites all national Pegida groups is the fear that the national identities of their individual countries are under threat. But the goals of this Europe-wide anti-Islam movement differ. Some are only protesting against Islamists, others also want to put the brakes on the number of refugees taken in by their countries. However beyond Dresden, where the most recent demonstration drew 25 thousand supporters to the streets, support for Pegida has been minimal. Pegida Sweden has only been active in social media so far. An Austrian Pegida group intends to hold its first demonstration in February.

Pro-Pegida Demo in Kopenhagen 19.01.2015
Image: DW/M. Brabant
Infografik Pegida-Demos und Gegendemos am 12.1.2015 Englisch
Dresden Pegida Demonstration 12.01.2015
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Burgi

In France there has been a certain amount of surprise concerning the German Pegida movement. Some commentators see Germany’s “culture of tolerance” in crisis. But in contrast to the extreme-right Front National Pegida is an explicitly “European” movement.

Anti Legida und Pegida Demonstration in Leipzig 21.01.2015
Image: REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Opinions differ on whether Pegida could really take hold as a significant Europe-wide phenomenon. In Germany a recent poll indicates 75% of the population rejects Pegida and its concerns. Could the movement really organize at a European level? Or will it go the way of other short-lived protest movements and eventually falter and wane?

What do you think? quadriga(at)dw.de

Our guests:

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Judy Dempsey- After training as a journalist in Ireland, Ms Dempsey embarked on an international career: From the 1980s to early 1990s she reported from eastern Europe. In 1996 she took over the Financial Times' bureau in Jerusalemwhere she remained until 2001. Judy Dempsey has won numerous awards for her work, including the Anglo-German Prize and the Foreign Press Association Award. She was a Columnist for the International Herald Tribune and works now as a Senior Associate at Carnegie Europe and editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe.

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Johannes Leithäuser- is a historian, political scientist and an economist. As a student, he freelanced for a number of newspapers, before eventually taking a job with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He's been there ever since. Fifteen years ago he joined the paper's Berlin bureau as its East German correspondent. He also served as a correspondent in London for several years. Today, his areas of expertise include domestic politics, as well as European and foreign affairs.

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Zafer Şenocak - is a writer and essayist. He was born in Ankara, grew up in Istanbul and Munich, and has been living in Berlin since 1989. He studied German literature, politics and philosophy at university and has been publishing poetry, essays and prose in German since 1979. His writings have been translated into many languages. Şenocak has been a professor in the US at Boston and Berkeley and his thoughts on Islamic traditions and Turkish identity are regularly printed in German newspapers.