Promoting democracy
January 22, 2015
Is Germany's PEGIDA movement losing steam in the streets of Dresden and Leipzig?
Many people feel the end is near for street protests that have been difficult to contain. While several people were injured in Wednesday's PEGIDA march in Leipzig, police say only about 15,000 people followed the call to express their concerns about being overwhelmed by immigrants in Germany, rather than the record 40,000 expected by the organizers.
It's a bitter setback for the movement that calls itself the "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West". And to top it off, Lutz Bachmann, the leader of the movement, stepped down after a picture emerged showing him sporting a Hitler-style haircut and moustache, accompanied by comments on Facebook describing asylum seekers as "livestock," and "gang of turds."
Supporters in the wings
People who believe the leaderless, shrinking movement may slowly be disintegrating and drifting toward the political and media margins might be mistaken.
PEGIDA is struggling - but beware!
Even if the movement's openly far-right founder has left, the supporters are there to stay: Sympathizers who routinely insult politicians as traitors and vilify journalists as the lying press; people who appear to be bitterly disappointed by Germany and it's free market economy 25 years after the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification.
Whether these people actually take to the streets in Dresden or Leipzig, or whether they vent their frustration in their personal environment: in both cases, they damage peaceful cooperation.
Ignoring them and looking the other way is no way to unmask PEGIDA's ideas as misdirected within the discourse of a democratic society.
Vague fears and distorted images will survive in many people's minds, even if the demonstrations decrease in size.
At the same time, the current power vacuum at the head of the PEGIDA movement also represents a chance to separate mere followers from true far-right extremists and ask for trust where it seems to have irrevocably vanished.
Model behavior
That won't work if politicians, like Chancellor Merkel, tor he heads of the federal states and mayors, resort to dull xenophobic slogans. And it also won't work if anti-Islam slogans are given a platform that would only serve to accelerate their being spread via the media.
It can work, however, if democratically elected representatives and journalists once again remember their very personal function as role models - a capacity in which they are not meant to resign themselves to parts of society (like the members of the PEGIDA movement) as lost and not worth fighting for.
Society now needs people who can give the virtues of GErmany's constitution a face in everyday life, visibly and audibly. False stereotypes and distortions will only fade in the face of more democratic role models who advocate tolerance and actual democracy.
In the end, it won't be enough to convince all of the PEGIDA movement's followers critical of Islam to give Germany in its present form a second chance.
But every single person who turns his back on this movement would be a gain for democracy. It might not be easy, but the time has come to advocate democracy!