page_title: Pegida
section_title: Participants and supporters
hierarchical_section_title: Pegida / Participants and supporters
caption_attribution_description: English: Around 25,000 - 15,000 demonstrators are here for many political themes in Germany. The first time, they demonstrate under the sunlight. The leftwing demonstrators become quiet after 10min and were hearing the speeches by PEGIDA with interest or turned on the music.
context_page_description: Founded in Dresden in October 2014, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, abbreviated Pegida, is a pan-European, anti-Islam, far-right political movement. German Pegida believe that Germany is being increasingly Islamicized and defines itself in opposition to Islamic extremism.
  Pegida wants to curb immigration; it accuses authorities of failure to enforce immigration laws. Pegida has held many demonstrations; often there have been many public demonstrations against them as well. In 2015, Lutz Bachmann, the founder of Pegida, resigned from the movement after reportedly posing as Adolf Hitler and making racist statements on Facebook. He was later reinstated.
  Though nationalism is a central feature, Pegida offshoots have formed in various countries.
context_section_description: According to Frank Richter, director of Saxony's Federal Agency for Civic Education, Pegida is "a mixed group—known figures from the National Democratic Party of Germany, soccer hooligans, but also a sizable number of ordinary citizens". Werner Schiffauer, director of the Migration Council has pointed out that the movement is strongest where people have hardly any experience with foreigners, and among "easterners who never really arrived in the Federal Republic and who now feel they have no voice".
  In December, Gordian Meyer-Plath, president of the Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz of Saxony, said that initial suspicion that Pegida might tie in with the riots staged by Hogesa earlier in Cologne were not substantiated, so the movement was not put under official surveillance. He said there were no indications that the organizers were embracing right-wingers. This assessment was contested by the weekly Die Zeit who researched the ideological proximity of Pegida organizer Siegfried Däbritz to the German Defence League or the European Identitarian movement. In a Tagesspiegel interview on 19 January Meyer-Plath reaffirmed that the participant spectrum was very diverse and that there was no evidence of radicalisation.
  Dresden University of Technology (TU) interviewed 400 Pegida demonstrators on 22 December 2014 and 12 January 2015. According to the poll, the main reasons of their participation were dissatisfaction with the political situation (54 percent), "Islam, Islamism and Islamisation" (23 percent), criticism of the media and the public (20 percent), and reservations regarding asylum seekers and migrants (15 percent). In all, 42 percent had reservations regarding Muslims or Islam, 20 percent were concerned about a 'high rate of crimes' committed by asylum seekers, or feared socio-economic disadvantages. The author, Vorländer, did not see Pegida as a movement of right-wing extremists, pensioners or the unemployed, but stated that the rallies served as a way to express feelings and resentments against a political and opinion-making elite which have not been publicly articulated before.
  A group of social scientists led by Dieter Rucht from the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, WZB) collected data both by flyer and online survey. Despite a participation rate of only 18 percent in the online survey, it largely had similar results to the survey in Dresden. According to data from the WZB, Pegida was a male-dominated group, participants were mostly employees with a relatively high level of education, they had no confidence in institutions and they sympathized with AfD. In some cases the participants demonstrated far-right and right-wing extremist attitudes. The conclusion emphasized that Pegida supporters cannot be viewed as 'ordinary citizens', since they articulate group-focused enmity and racism.
  As of January 2016 on Facebook, the Pegida fan page had about 200,000 supporters. According to political consultant Martin Fuchs, the fanpage allows the users there to present and more easily spread their ideas, which are not represented in the mainstream media.
  In December 2014, representatives of the NPD encouraged people to participate in Pegida rallies, as did the German Defence League and the internet blog Politically Incorrect in an uploaded 'propaganda clip'. According to the police, a few hundred "violent hooligans" have been participating in the Dresden rallies since December 2014. The journalist Felix Menzel supports Pegida with his new right youth magazine Blaue Narzisse.
caption: Pegida demonstration in Dresden
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