I don’t know enough as yet to be able to say that much about Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West), which is described by the (left of center) Guardian as “a populist anti-immigrant movement that has been galvanizing support in Germany for several months,” although I will say that the signal sent out by its name is not entirely reassuring (trust me on this), and nor is this:
Of particular concern are the numbers of participants at Pegida rallies who have far-right connections. Its followers include known neo-Nazis, including members of the National Democratic party (NPD), which until recently had seats in the regional parliament, and at least two football hooligan organisations called Faust des Ostens (Fist of the East) and Hooligans Elbflorenz (Florence of the Elbe Hooligans), [the latter is named after Dresden]
In any event, Chancellor Merkel doesn’t like it one bit.
The growth of Pegida has only increased calls for the government to tighten asylum rules and speed up the deportation process to appease voters. With so much pressure from within her own ranks, Merkel’s hard-hitting reaction to the group last week was therefore bold and surprising. “I say to all those who go to such demonstrations: do not follow those who have called the rallies, because all too often they have prejudice, a chilliness, even hatred in their hearts,” she said in her televised address to the German people.
Merkel, who has previously warned Pegida followers against allowing themselves to be manipulated by the organisers, with remarks that seemed like thinly veiled references to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, was also full of condemnation for their misuse of the slogan “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people). The punchy phrase was adopted by East German anti-communist demonstrators in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and now punctuates Pegida rallies at regular intervals.
But, said Merkel, who spent the first 35 years of her life under communism, far from being an expression of the wish to unite, as it was in 1989, the phrase was now being used to divide. “What they really mean is ‘you are not one of us’, because of your skin colour or your religion,” she said.
But the paper also notes this:
Fears among chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative alliance were already rife that it is losing considerable support to the budding Eurosceptic, and ever more anti-immigration, Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD). Merkel herself has been accused of creating a vacuum on the right due to her consensus style of politics, which the AfD, and now Pegida – to whom the AfD has openly given its backing – have willingly managed to fill.
I would not for a moment compare the AfD with the Sweden Democrats, the unlikable “far right” (to use the usual shorthand) party that has now forced all the other Swedish political parties into a defensive, election-cancelling huddle (the SD is the only parliamentary party prepared to dissent from Sweden’s naively generous pro-immigration orthodoxy), but it does seem that the rise of Pegida is yet another example of the truth of Mark Steyn’s maxim that I will quote yet again:
If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.
Over at EU Referendum, Richard North digs deeper, here looking at what else Merkel said in that speech:
[I]n an obvious rebuke to Pegida, she declared that: “It goes without saying that we… take in people who seek refuge with us”, referring to the estimated 200,000-odd asylum seekers who have come this year to Europe’s biggest economy to ask for a safe haven.
“Immigration,” she argued, was “a gain for all of us.”
North “wonders whether her response might have been different had the Blue Sky M” incident happened a few days earlier”:
In what is a brazen challenge to the European migration system, what appear to have been people traffickers navigated the [Blue Sky M, a ship containing nearly 1,000 migrants, many from Syria] to the vicinity of Corfu and, while the ship was still in Greek waters, set a course for Italy and abandoned ship. [The CNN account of the same incident attributes the crew’s decision to abandon ship to bad weather]
Once in Italian waters, the hard-pressed Italian coastguards found a ship with the engine-room locked and the autopilot set to ram the ship onshore in the Puglia region, heedless of the safety of its passengers. The coastguards took control of the ship and brought it safely to the port of Gallipoli, on the “heel” of Italy.
Four dead were initially reported, but this seems to have been an error. The passengers, numbering approximately 970, have been disembarked and taken to an empty school in the town, as asylum seekers, making over 2,500 of such who have sought asylum since Christmas day and topping 160,000 for the year.
The point here is that no system can cope with this sort of influx. For all Merkel’s preening, in the first half of 2014, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees granted refugee status to only 11,828 asylum seekers, out of 60,000 requests, with (then) 112,000 requests still to process….
Meanwhile, there are reports that Germany’s infrastructure for housing asylum seekers is showing signs of buckling under the pressure, with conditions deteriorating at overcrowded refugee shelters….
And if Germany is struggling, there is plenty of evidence that Italy, a smaller and less wealthy country, has long ceased to cope….
To answer Mr. North’s question, I don’t think that the Blue Sky M incident would have made the slightest difference to what Angela Merkel had to say.