The Pegida Movement and German Political Culture: Is Right-Wing Populism Here to Stay?

Abstract

This article outlines the rise and fall of the ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’ (Pegida), a right-wing populist street movement that originated in the city of Dresden in October 2014 and peaked in January 2015. The Pegida movement combined fear of ‘Islamisation’ with general criticism of Germany’s political class and the mainstream media. This ambivalent and largely undefined political profile proved its strength in mobilising a significant minority of right-wing citizens in the local context of Dresden and the federal state of Saxony, but generally failed to spill over to other parts of Germany. The social profile of the Pegida movement, which included ‘ordinary citizens’ with centre-right to far-right attitudes, points to significant overlap between general disenchantment of the political centre ground in Germany with the political system, as outlined in recent sociological research, and the ability of a largely leaderless populism to mobilise in the streets.