Demonstrators protesting against the PEGIDA rally yesterday face riot police in Dresden’s historic centre.

AFP/DPA/Berlin

Hours before a new rally in Dresden organised by the Islamophobic movement PEGIDA yesterday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that the group’s anti-Muslim sentiments were harming the nation’s image abroad.
“At home we under-estimate the damage that PEGIDA’s xenophobic and racist slogans and placards have already had,” Steinmeier said in an interview with daily newspaper Bild, published shortly before the start of PEGIDA’s 13th rally in Dresden since the movement was launched there on October 20 last year.
“Whether we want it or not, the world is watching Germany with great attention,” Steinmeier continued, saying that scrutiny makes “it all the more important that we say clearly and strongly that PEGIDA does not speak in Germany’s name”.
Germany’s top diplomat warned he was “incessantly being asked about” the apparent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment by his foreign peers.
He also reminded readers that mobilising crowds with facile attacks on scapegoats like immigrants and asylum seekers was “easier than by (raising) complex subjects like insufficient infrastructure or the ageing of the population”.
Yesterday’s rally by PEGIDA (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West”) is the first since its founder and leader, Lutz Bachmann, stepped down January 21 after a photo of him with a Hitler-style haircut and moustache was published along with racist slurs he posted on Facebook.
A PEGIDA rally in Dresden planned for January 19 was cancelled due to threats made against Bachmann. Its previous demonstration in the city – the movement’s birthplace and stronghold – drew its largest ever crowd of 25,000 people on January 12.
Later in the day police estimated about 17,300 supporters of PEGIDA turned out at the rally, marking the first time the rallies have seen turnout drop off between events.
A rally two weeks ago drew 25,000 people. A rally scheduled for lastweek was cancelled after a terrorist threat.
Yesterday’s rally was held in the square in front of the city’s main opera house, the Semperoper, while a counter-demonstration was held in a nearby square in front of the Catholic cathedral.
An anti-xenophobia concert is planned for today in the centre of Dresden under the slogan “Open and Colourful – Dresden for Everyone” with artistes like Herbert Groenemeyer on the performers’ list.