Pegida – praag.org

Wilders rallies thousands of PEGIDA followers

Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders rallied thousands of PEGIDA followers in eastern Germany Monday to counter society’s “Islamisation”.

The “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident”, founded half a year ago in the city of Dresden, had aimed to top their previous record from January of 25,000 people joining a rally.

Many were waving Germany’s red-black-gold national flag and yelling their standard chant of “we are the people”.

“Dresden is showing how it’s done,” said the flamboyant Dutch politician with the trademark peroxide blond hair, who has called Islam a fascist religion and compared the Koran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.

“We have had enough of the Islamisation of society,” he said, speaking in German to loud cheers from the crowd.

“Immigrants have to adopt our values, not the other way around.”

He also insisted that “we don’t hate Muslims, but they have to integrate” and demanded the reintroduction of border controls within the European Union.

More than 2,000 anti-fascist counter-demonstrators had rallied in the afternoon, away from the PEGIDA protest site which was blocked off by police.

PEGIDA marches, which have also targeted “criminal asylum seekers”, mainstream political parties and the media — began with several hundred supporters last October and peaked in January, just after the deadly Islamist attacks in Paris.

Wilders, 51, who heads the Party for Freedom, was again accused of inciting racial hatred after pledging last year to ensure there will be “fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands.

The German integration commissioner, Aydan Ozoguz, had warned citizens against attending the PEGIDA event, saying that by inviting Wilders the group had shown its true extremist colours.

“Anyone who still marches behind their flag is joining an openly far-right movement,” Ozoguz told the Welt daily.

Saxony state Interior Minister Markus Ulbig said: “This is not a good day for Saxony. With Geert Wilders they have invited a person who has hate inside him, who is divisive”.

Dresden police declined to provide a crowd estimate for the PEGIDA event.

Source: AFP

Dull leftists attack Pegida with snobbery

The views of the Stammtisch [pub regulars] are a growing force in Germany.

The new popular movement in Dresden — Pegida, or ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’ has highlighted intra-German divisions: not only those between immigrants and ethnic Germans but also those between most German voters and the country’s small, vainglorious politically correct establishment.

Lutz Bachmann, founder of anti-Islam movement Pegida, said on Monday that the group was ready to choose a candidate to run for Dresden city hall in June.

As thousands once again flocked to the rally in the city, the fifteenth since the movement began last October, Bachmann said that there were three possible candidates, and the person selected would be introduced soon.

Bachmann himself is out of the running, as he has a criminal record and was forced to step down from leading the group after “evidence of racist comments” he had made against immigrants emerged online.

At the meeting, Bachmann also reported on a conference he had held with Pegida offshoots from different cities and put forward ten political demands under the title “Dresden Theses”.

One of the key points in the list is the immediate deportation of people whose asylum applications are rejected.

Other cities saw smaller demonstrations by Pegida copycats on Monday, including Leipzig, Chemnitz, Magdeburg and – for the first time.

In snobby and gay Berlin adherents are called Sachsenschweine — Saxon pigs. It seems that dull leftists everywhere – including South Africa – believe insults, snobbery and vanity are actually arguments.

As The Spectator from January 31, 2015 reported:

The French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève was right to predict that, in a post-modern globalised world devoid of traditional values, the only remaining factor structuring society would be snobbery. When Kathrin Oertel, the de facto leader of Pegida, appeared on a chat show on 18 January, she was asked by the anchorman, ‘Who are Pegida’s supporters?’ ‘Ordinary people like you and me,’ she replied. Quick as a flash, the presenter retorted, ‘Like you, maybe. Like me, maybe not.’ Seldom has a member of the media super-class spoken so lucidly.

Snobbery was also the prime mover behind the great anti-Pegida concert organised by the Dresden city authorities on Monday night. One after another, ageing luvvies came on stage to express their contempt for the movement. ‘Pegida is an uprising of stupid ignoramuses,’ a 60-year-old rocker told the crowd to applause. The propaganda was grotesque: one Muslim woman claimed that immigrants now do not feel safe on the streets of the city — what tosh! — while a Spanish student at the university said that Pegida should learn to accept people from different backgrounds.

Angela Merkel put on her glummest rainy-afternoon-in-Chemnitz face to give Pegida supporters a sound telling-off during her New Year’s broadcast to the nation earlier this month. ‘I say to those who go to these marches, don’t follow these people! They have prejudices, coldness, even hatred in their hearts!’ This is the same woman who, in 2010, wowed a room full of CDU young bloods with a full-frontal attack on uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism.

Another PEGIDA protest banned in Germany

Supporters of the PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of Europe) movement in Germany’s eastern city of Leipzig, where the movement is called LEGIDA, had once again planned to take to the streets on Monday.

But the city called off the protest, saying police do not have enough officers to provide security and prevent violence.

Not enough police officers? The demonstrators think that reason was given as a false pretense to prohibit them from exercising a basic right. The ban amounts to “surrender by the constitutional democracy”, says Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union.

Demonstrators at a previous PEGIDA rally

It’s a fact that the anti-Islamization movement has for weeks embarrassed quite a few politicians in Saxony state. They have been forced to explain why it would seem that the Saxon cities of Leipzig and Dresden are hotbeds of xenophobic radicals. They would like to be rid of the bothersome protesters. A ban looked like an option, and referring to a lack of police officers could block the freedom of assembly for weeks because the authorities have the right to ban protests if the police can’t guarantee safety during a demonstration.

Unfounded conspiracy theories

On closer inspection, conspiracy theories and suspicions that a basic German right is being eroded turn out to be untenable.

“I absolutely don’t see the erosion of the freedom of assembly,” says Daniel Schily of the “More Democracy!” group.

An assembly ban is “an exception,” says former constitutional judge Hans-Jürgen Papier, adding that it must always be well-founded, and can’t be exercised arbitrarily.
NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss Hans-Jürgen Papier

While in fact, thousands of jobs have been cut in Germany’s police forces in the wake of reforms, Saxony’s police have so far managed to pull in reinforcements from other states when needed. This Monday was different, however: so many rallies were registered in Saxony and other German states that instead of the requested 31 groups of 100 police officers, only eight groups would have been available.

2,000 police officers are not enough

According to the police risk assessment, Leipzig Mayor Burkhard Jung pointed out that 800 police officers would not have been enough to safeguard the rally. More than 2,000 officers were deployed at the last PEGIDA protest in the city and even that wasn’t enough to prevent clashes between PEGIDA supporters and opponents, Jung argued. Banning the demonstration was thus by no means an arbitrary act, he said.

Every demonstration application must be processed by local authorities. Permits are not administered based on the political orientation of the demonstration, but on whether or not it poses any threat to the constitution. Under freedom of opinion and freedom of assembly laws, the constitution guarantees the right to state opinions publicly, no matter how outlandish they may seem.

Observers thus fear that the developments among the parties in Saxony and the new demonstration ban may prompt people to challenge this in a court of law. Any German citizen is able to legally challenge an assembly ban. In such claims in the past, many administrative courts have in the end allowed the demonstrations to take place – most recently in the autumn of 2014, when Hannover’s administration court ended up approving a hooligan demonstration, despite it having been banned by the local assembly authorities. As long as the right to file suits is upheld, experts on constitutional law see no danger to Germany’s freedom of assembly.

The increased number of banned demonstrations in Saxony has become a special concern for the state that does not apply to other states. “In Saxony, it seems the police, the interior ministry and the politicians are fighting for their own interests,” Daniel Schily believes. Chancellor Angela Merkel has already stepped in, saying in January that she wanted to protect the freedom of assembly. If need be, she said, more federal police should be made available so that demonstrations could take place. – Deutsche Welle

Hitler photo delivers blow to Pegida

In Pegida’s first ever press conference in Dresden on Monday, Lutz Bachmann insisted that the group was not racist, and distanced themselves from footage during a lively television debate showing Pegida demonstrators delivering racist remarks.

Bachmann has been most keen to stress his Muslim credentials, showing photographs on his Facebook site of his Turkish best man.

Meanwhile a Catholic priest who took part in a demonstration organised by the Pegida-offshoot group Dügida in the western city of Duisburg in Germany on Monday has been banned from preaching by his religious elders, after he compared the movement to the Crusades.

The head of the German anti-Islamisation has stepped down after a picture of him jokingly posing as Adolf Hitler was unearthed. Bachmann, 41, is a butcher’s son from Dresden.

Bachmann’s Facebook page, was accompanied by the line: “He’s Back,” after Timur Vermes’ best-selling 2012 satirical novel of the same name about Hitler.

The Dresden Morgenpost somehow got hold of a private Facebook conversation between Bachmann and one of his Facebook contacts, in which he described immigrants as “cattle”, “scumbags” and “trash”. The comments were posted on 19 September.

Pegida spokeswoman Kathrin Oertel, told Spiegel Online Bachmann’s resignation was the “only possibilty for the movement”.

A spokesman for Bernd Lucke, the head of the political party Alternative für Deutschland, an anti-euro party which has publicly expressed an allegiance with the aims of Pegida, said that with his “sad utterings and disgusting jokes”, Bachmann had “embarrassed the people of Pegida who have been compelled by honest concerns to take to the streets”.

Responding to the picture, Bachmann told Wednesday’s Bild: “I took the photo at the hairdresser’s, for the publication of the audiobook of the satire He’s Back … you need to be able to joke about yourself now and then”. Asked about the derogatory comments he allegedly made about immigrants, Bachmann replied: “We don’t comment about private matters.”

Bachmann, who has multiple convictions for burglary, assault and drug possession, was said by German intelligence services to be a target for Islamist terrorists who said on social media sites they intended to kill him.

German PEGIDA cancels rally over death threats

German PEGIDA movement, which stands against ‘the Islamization of the West’ has canceled next week’s rally in the city of Dresden after threats were issued against one of its top organizers.

The Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) movement has been holding protests every Monday in the eastern German city of Dresden since October.

The rallies, which initially gathered no more than 500 people, hit a record attendance of 25,000 last week.

PEGIDA announced on its Facebook page that the rally planned for January 19 has been called off after the police said “there is a specific threat against a member of the organization team.”

According to DPA news agency, the threats were filed by Islamic radicals against the movement’s co-leader, Lutz Bachmann.

The German police were informed of the threats against Bachman by foreign secret services, the agency added.

A spokesman for the Dresden police said that they had placed a “general ban” on all public gatherings on Monday, Reuters reported.

“The police in Dresden have received information of a concrete threat against the weekly PEGIDA rally,” a statement by Dresden police said. “Assassins have been called up to mingle among the PEGIDA protestors and murder one of the individuals leading the rally.”

Instead of taking to the streets, PEGIDA called on all Europeans who oppose “religious bigotry any kind” to hang the national flag of their country out of their windows and light a candle on Monday.

PEGIDA is currently the most supported anti-immigration movement in Germany as rallies by similar organizations in other cities have so far been unable to draw anywhere near as much people.

The Dresden group was criticized by many German politicians, with Chancellor Angela Merkel calling PEGIDA “racists full of hatred.”

Record crowd turn up for PEGIDA rally

‘Today Paris, tomorrow Dresden,’ read one sign. Another’s message was: ‘Better to stand tall for Pegida today than to be on your knees for Mecca tomorrow’

The latest mass-rally of the self-styled “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West” came just hours after the chancellor Angela Merkel said that “Islam has a place in Germany.” German politicians previously called on Pegida to cancel their weekly march.

But in Germany, citizens are increasingly worried, with 57% of non-Muslims seeing Islam as a threat.

Overall, 61 percent of Germans say Islam isn’t compatible with life in the West, up from 52 percent three years ago. The country has 4 million Muslims out of a population of 81 million.

“There’s deep frustration over the silent Islamization taking place in Germany,” said Gerd Medger, 67, who advises companies seeking business contacts in Brazil and attended the Dresden rally waving a German flag. “If our governments let such violent people into Europe then we shouldn’t be surprised at these acts of violence.”

PEGIDA has said on its Facebook page that the killings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris confirmed its own views.

“The Islamists, which PEGIDA has been warning about for 12 weeks, showed France that they are not capable of democracy but rather look to violence and death as an answer,” it said.

The supporters of the populist movement claim solidarity with victims of the Paris attacks, with some of them carrying signs that read “They can’t kill our freedom” and “Je suis Charlie.”

According to the police estimates, some 25,000 people gathered in an anti-immigration rally in Dresden.

Besides Dresden, which serves as a central city for the movement, marches are organized in several other cities, including Berlin, Munchen, and, for the first time, Leipzig.

The number of people protesting against PEGIDA is also growing every week.

Monday’s rallies come ahead of a planned vigil for “tolerance and openness” in Berlin,which is set for Tuesday.

Germany’s Muslim leaders, with Chancellor Angela Merkel as well leaders of Germany’s Jewish community will attend.

“Politics cannot ignore this: they have to do something even if it’s only symbolic on immigration or security,” Joerg Forbrig, the senior program director at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., said by phone from Berlin.“The CDU must take this seriously. They have to preempt the AfD otherwise there will be a stronger momentum building behind the party.”

Swiss activists have founded a local branch of the popular German anti-Muslim PEGIDA movement. The group is boasting a fast growth in supporters and plans to hold a demonstration next month.

The Swiss branch of PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) was launched two days after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine.

The PEGIDA group’s Facebook page calls on potential supporters to come to a demonstration planned for February 16 at an as yet undisclosed location.

The spokesman for Swiss PEGIDA is Ignaz Bearth, current head of the Swiss Direct Democracy Party, a small party with links to France’s Front National party, according to AFP. He is also a former member of the far-right Swiss Nationalist Party.

Vilification of Germany’s PEGIDA

Actually it’s more than that. It has now come to falsification and censorship. Says Udo Ulfkotte, German maverick journalist and whistleblower

Is there a Nobel Prize for media falsification, lies and betrayal of readers? Judging by the way German mainstream media are covering PEGIDA there has to be one, argues Udo Ulfkotte in his latest piece for KOPP online, his publisher’s news website.

The tactics honed against Russia are now being put in place to defame PEGIDA – those Dresden conservatives who dare peacefully to protest uncontrolled immigration and Islamization, as well as the creation of parallel sharia tribunal in Germany, among other things.

PEGIDA also has a soft spot for Putin’s Russia, judging from some of the placards seen during their demos.

MDR is Germany’s first channel in the Eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. On Jan 06 it asked its viewers „Do you think PEGIDA damages the city of Dresden?“.

Some 10,958 viewers took part in the snapshot survey.

Surprise surprise. Only 7% agreed with the preset answer: „Yes, because it casts the city in a false light“, while 92% of respondents chose: „No, why? At last somebody dares to speak the truth“.

Be it Iraq, Crimea or PEGIDA, ordinary Germans just will not think the way the media tell them to. Journalism (asking people what they think) and propaganda (telling them what to think) are increasingly hard to reconcile in the age of social media, as journalists found out during the Ukraine crisis.

What to do with these embarrassing survey result? What to do?

It could not be blamed on Russian propaganda. Nor on Kremlin trolls. So there seemed to be no way out… Germany’s first channel had apparently shot itself in the foot again.

Wait: what about a little censoring? After all, it is for a good cause, the MDR editors must have thought. So the snapshot survey quietly disappeared from their website, hoping nobody would notice. Except that lots of people did. And they resorted to protesting on Facebook.

The result: after apologizing to their angry viewers MDR put the survey back online. It seems some media hacks occasionally dislike what they see in the mirror.

The survey and its censoring having gone wrong, German media have now started to make unfounded claims against PEGIDA. Apparently it has been „infiltrated“ by Nazis.

As if Germans had not seen enough real Nazis, supported by the USA and the EU, doing real Nazi things, from burning people alive in Odessa to cluster bombing civilians in Donbass.

As if, ignored by Western media, a real Nazi parade had not been staged as recently as Jan 1 in Kiev!

But this time we don’t have to worry: PEGIDA alleged infiltration is being carefully monitored by never heard before „constitution protection groups“. After all, Nazism is illegal in Germany – unless it operates near Russian borders that is.

According to Ulfkotte, the message is clear: „dear citizen, don’t get involved with PEGIDA if you don’t want to be monitored by the constitution protectors“.

Sounds vaguely Orwellian, doesn’t it?

Finally, Ulfkotte proves the bias of German media with a recent example.

A God-hater whom the media called Moroccan badly damaged a Church in South Tirol, Italy’s only German-speaking province:

„Imagine if a Christian or an Atheist had damaged a mosque in a German-speaking region,” says Ulfkotte, “there would be candle-lit demonstrations all over the country, and you could not turn a television on without hearing about it.”

“But it was a Muslim who did it, and in the name of the Koran. What has happened then? You can see for yourself. Nothing”

“Next time a journalist assures you that Islamization is not taking place, please remember them that the Moroccan in question, who had damaged churches before, never spent a single day in jail for it. He was placed under house arrest instead”.

One needs not agree with Ulfkotte about the link between lenient treatment by the Italian judiciary and alleged Islamization. But the more general points he makes about German media are correct and have been vindicated time and time again.

MDR is part of ARD, a public network of public broadcasters known in Germany as “Das Erste” or the first channel.

When, in June 2014, ARD’s own advisory board released a report, defining ARD coverage of the Ukraine crisis as “inadequate, one-sided and biased”, news of the report took three months to begin circulating in the… wait for it… alternative media.

And it never did in the mainstream media.

Source: Daniele Pozzati

Arson attack on German newspaper

A Hamburg daily that reprinted satirical cartoons from French newspaper Charlie Hebdo was hit by arsonists at the weekend, raising security concerns in Germany on the eve of a planned mass rally against Islam in the city of Dresden.

Islamist militant attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher deli in Paris this week that killed 17 people have fuelled fears of similar assaults in other European countries and prompted a warning from German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.

“I am very concerned about well-prepared perpetrators like those in Paris, Brussels, Australia or Canada,” he told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. There were about 260 people in Germany regarded as dangerous Islamists, he said.

Bild am Sonntag said US intelligence agencies had tapped conversations of senior Islamic State (IS) members in which they said the Paris attacks were the start of a series in Europe.

In Hamburg, two people were arrested after an incendiary device was thrown into a building of the Hamburger Morgenpost daily, setting some documents on fire, police said.

Source: Reuters

Germans rally against Islam

Protesters marched in several German cities again on Monday against higher levels of immigration and what they see as the growing influence of Islam, in defiance of an appeal from Chancellor Angela Merkel to spurn rallies she views as racist.

The rallies, organized by a new grassroots movement known as PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, have become an almost weekly event in the east German city of Dresden in recent months.

Some 18,000 people, the biggest number so far, turned out in Dresden on Monday but similar rallies in Berlin and the western city of Cologne were heavily outnumbered by counter-protesters who accuse PEGIDA of fanning racism and intolerance.

The PEGIDA protesters waved Germany’s black, red and gold flag and brandished posters bearing slogans such as “Against religious fanaticism and every kind of radicalism”.

One poster in Cologne called for “potatoes rather than doner kebabs”, a swipe at ethnic Turks who at around three million represent Germany’s largest immigrant community.

Germany has some of the world’s most liberal asylum rules, partly due to its Nazi past. The number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany, many from the Middle East, jumped to around 200,000 last year — four times as many as in 2012.

In her New Year address last week, Merkel urged Germans to shun the anti-Muslim protesters, saying their hearts were full of hatred.

“We need to … say that right-wing extremism, hostility towards foreigners and anti-Semitism should not be allowed any place in our society,” Merkel said on Monday in the eastern town of Neustrelitz.

In Cologne, home to a large Muslim population, there were 10 times as many counter-demonstrators as PEGIDA protesters. In similarly multi-ethnic Berlin, some 5,000 counter-demonstrators swamped around 400 anti-Muslim protesters, local police said.

“Germany is a country where refugees are welcome and the silent majority must not remain silent but rather go out onto the streets and show itself,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said at the Berlin counter-demonstration.

Cologne Cathedral, one of Germany’s most famous landmarks, switched its lights off to protest against the anti-Muslim rallies. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate turned off its floodlights in a similar gesture of solidarity.

PEGIDA has unsettled Germany’s political establishment and at first looked likely to help the Euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD). But the party, already suffering an internal power struggle, is split over how to deal with the movement.

Source: Reuters

Thousands rally in Dresden against criminal immigrants

On Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden, Germany, carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

The Anglo-Saxon presstitutes were unsurprisingly wild-eyed with indignation about the “extremists”, but could find no Nazi’s at the rally.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-immigration campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in peacefully chanting “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”.

The slogan was adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

According to the British Guardian “unnamed sources” in the rally said Muslims were “plotting to infect German food chain with their excrement”, but the “sources” were probably from the Guardian itself.

It was the ninth week in a row that Pegida had taken its protest to the city’s streets in the eastern German state of Saxony, but nobody looked worried about tainted food. Rather they decried the recent decision by local politicians to increase the number of homes for asylum seekers, inviting more in.

Its first march, advertised on Facebook and other social media, attracted just 200 supporters. By last week the figure had risen to 10,000. By Monday night it had grown to an estimated 15,000.

A middle-aged woman in a red leather jacket, said she was shocked that “asylum seekers in Germany have expensive mobile phones, while I cannot afford such luxury and others still cannot afford to eat properly”.

There were no racist slogans and marchers spoke of the “demise of the West” due to the rise of Islam, salafism, sexual abandon and licentiousness.

Old and young men and women, including families with children in pushchairs, many of whom said they had no political affiliation, joined the march.

Almost two-thirds of Germans, according to a poll for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, believe that Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34% think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation”.

According to the Anglo-Saxon press, these citizens should all qualify as Nazi’s while the foreigners and immigrants are “open-minded” folks who refuse to speak German.

The Guardian went beyond the farcical in denouncing the rally, claiming that Germans “bark” when they speak.

Led by Bachmann, a 41-year-old butcher’s son who runs a PR agency, Pegida has many clones across Germany. Legida is the name of the Leipzig branch, Bogida the Bonn branch, while in Darmstadt it is known as Dagida.

At a recent rally in Dresden, Bachmann’s hometown, he explained that while asylum seekers enjoyed luxury accommodation, many impoverished German pensioners were “unable to even afford a single slice of Stollen” (German Christmas cake).

Bachmann maintains that he plays a small part of the movement. “I’m just a small cog in a much bigger wheel,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in a rare interview.

German resentment over a sharp rise in the number of refugees seeking political asylum in Germany, many from war-torn countries including Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, has grown in recent months.

All these countries have been ravaged by Anglo-Saxon meddling and expansionist imperial policies.

Last Friday, a newly refurbished home for asylum seekers in Nuremberg in southern Germany was badly damaged in an arson attack. Anti-foreigner slogans and swastikas were found daubed on the walls.

The attack may have come from worried security agents desperate to smear Pegida.

Germans take to the streets against Islam

Anti-immigration protest is sweeping across Germany, as thousands take to the streets against what they say is the growing “Islamisation” of the country.

Demonstrators have adopted the old rallying call of the protests against the East German communist regime that brought down the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, “Wir sind das Volk”. They say they want to preserve Western culture.

The protests come as Bavaria’s ruling Christian Social Union (CSU) is seeking to distance itself from a draft proposal for its party conference which said that immigrants should speak German not only in public, but at home as well.

Germany is now the second most popular destination in the world for migrants, after the US, and the country is struggling to cope with an unprecedented influx of asylum-seekers.

Thousands have defied sub-zero temperatures to join weekly marches each Monday in Dresden under the banner of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of Europe, or Pegida.

The protests were started by a local man, Lutz Bachmann, with no background in politics. When he called his first demonstration in October, only a few hundred turned up, but the movement has snowballed, and last week 7,500 came.

Pegida has inspired similar movements across Germany. Though the numbers have not been as high as in Dresden so far, marches have been called in cities from Düsseldorf to Munich.

Bachmann has been at pains to stress that he is not opposed to genuine political refugees, only to economic migrants who “take advantage” of the German system, and has no problem with Islam but is worried about erosion of German culture.

Concerns for the German culture plunged Bavaria’s ruling CSU into its own controversy, after a draft proposal for the opening motion at the party conference called for immigrants to speak German at home.

“Whoever wants to live here permanently should be encouraged to speak German in public and within the family,” the draft said.

After a storm of criticism, including the Twitter hashtag YallaCSU, Arabic for “Let’s go, CSU”, and questions over how such a policy could possibly be enforced, Andreas Scheuer, the party’s general secretary, sought to limit the damage.