Orhan Sattarov, European bureau of Vestnik Kavkaza
Last Monday, a mass demonstration in Dresden against the spread of Islamism in Europe shook calm Germany. Nobody could expect that 15 thousand German citizens would go to protest on the streets. A week before, a demonstration gathered 10 thousand, but observers believed that the protests would decrease afterwards. But the movement with the name "Patriotic Europeans against Islamization of Europe" (Patriotische Europäer gegen Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA) mobilized a huge mass of people, and politicians have to notice them.
The German left, socialists and greens at first all called the members of Pegida "neo-nazis". Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière from the CDU admitted: "Among those who protested in Dresden there are many people who in this form express their concern at the challenges of our time. We need to take these concerns seriously, we need to consider this question."
No doubt, among the Dresden protesters there were many populists, football hooligans and neonazis who try to capitalize on the current situation. But they are not the core of this movement and its organizers deny accusations of neo-nazism. When certain rightist radicals started shouting Nazi slogans, the organizers of Pegida immediately notified the police about them.
The rally in Dresden is a reflection of Germam society on the threatening processes in the world, where radical Islamism is gaining strength, symbolized by Islamic State with its anti-humane ideology. News programmes regularly report on German jihadists fighting in Iran and Syria, on terror attacks such as events in Sydney or the attack on the school in Pakistan; the flow of refugees from the war-torn Middle East does not stop – and all these factors make German society move towards the right-wing. Many German believe that in the current condition they have to defend their values more actively.
There are many who believe that taxpayers money should not go toward the welfare of refugees while Germans have problems of their own. This is the German variation of the Russian motto "Stop feeding the Caucasus". Germany, in fact, has many to feed. According to official statistics, in the period between January and November 2014 more than 180,000 refugees came to the country, more than a third of them are from Syria and Iraq. By the end of the year their number could exceed 200,000. In 2013 127,000 refugees came to Germany. Settling down and integrating those people is not a simple task for the government.
It is not easy to reduce that refugee flow. The problem is that after entering the Schengen zone, where countries have no regular border control, refugees naturally go to the more economically-advanced countries. Germany and Sweden naturally attract them more than Bulgaria and Romania, whose citizens themselves want to move to Western Europe. Germany is not very happy with this situation, but the attempts by European bureaucrats to created mechanisms for the equal redistribution of refugees across the EU have so far been unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, even for economically-strong Germany it's becoming more and more difficult to cope with the refugees. Normally, they are placed in dormitories for asylum-seekers called Asylantenheim, and conditions there can be unacceptable. In Bavaria some refugees had to sleep outdoors, even without blankets. 2500 had to live in a building meant for 1000. Bavarian prime minister Horst Seehofer openly admitted those problems which German media called "the Bavarian migrant crisis". The attacks on these asylums by the radical right also became more frequent. The scandal in Burback shook the country: and internet video revealed how private security guards abused the refugees, stepping on the head of the handcuffed man. Many ask questions about the degree of abuse and violence against those who fled from atrocities in their countries. Clearly, the living conditions of refugees need tighter control. But obviously no system of control can function efficiently in the overloaded conditions.
Apart from the infrastructural problems there are also social ones, as migrants integrate into German society very slowly. Possibly, the society simply can't integrate so many migrants whose values and cultural norms are so radically different.
Pegida organized similar actions in other German cities, for instance in Kassel and Dusseldorf, but they can't compare to the rally in Saxony. According to the
local media, in Dresden the movement reached the middle-classes while in the other cities it mostly brought together the radical right-wing. Paradoxically, the number of Muslims in Saxony is very small - only 4000, or about 0.1% of the Saxon population. Yet in the former GDR lands the attitude towards migrants is much worse than among "western" Germans. According to the research of the Friedrich Ebert foundation, every fifth German in the country is negative about migrants, but in Eastern Germany this proportion is 26%.
At the moment, Germany has between 3.3 and 4.3 million Muslims, 1.8 million of whom have German citizenship. The number of Salafis is only 7000, but this group is growing fast.
Interestingly, a third of Salafis are converted Germans.Is Pegida a "shame for Germany" as the Minister of Justice Heiko Maas from the SPD called it? There is no unity about it in the German ruling coalition. Furthermore, the government does not seem to know how to deal with the protestors - to distance itself as Maas proposed or enter into dialogue as the conservative de Mesiere says, whose family by the way lives in Dresden. This is such a sensitive topic for German society that every party of the ruling coalition risks losing the support of their voters by taking a position on this question. The CDU and CSU, conservative parties with Christian inclinations, know that condemning the demonstrations of Pegida could affect their popularity. Socialists have to admit that the aura of "class struggle" that Pegida created, posing as the mouthpiece of the common people, allowed it to reach some socialist voters.
At the moment only chancellor Angela Merkel has tried to create a line. "In our country there is no place for hating and defaming people who come to us. Everyone has to take care not to become an instrument in the hands of those who organize such events." Meanwhile, the liberal circles of Germany warn of a repetition of the 1992 events, when in Rostock Lichtenhaged neo-nazis burned down a dormitory of Vietnamese migrant workers with the support of a 3000-strong crowd. The police were helpless in front of those pogrom-makers, and those events in Rostock Lichtenhagen entered history as the worst racist pogroms in post-war Germany.
The German police, however, are more afraid of other scenarios. The German Federal Service for the Protection of the Constitution is afraid of clashes between the ultra-right and radical Islamists. Recall that on October 26 in Kolm between 3 and 5 thousand joined the demonstration of the movement "Hooligans against Salafis". Unlike the protest in Dresden, the demonstration in Koln was not peaceful at all, and 59 policemen were injured in the street fights.
