PEGIDA in Germany

DW: After the resignation of one of its leaders, Lutz Bachmann, PEGIDA aims to reorganize itself - it wants to be taken more seriously. But there have been major ructions within the movement. Does it have a future, and if so, as what exactly?

Thomas Schmidinger: It is a local phenomenon in Saxony. It hasn't really gone beyond a small group of die-hard protesters anywhere else. I don't think that PEGIDA has a bright future as a Germany-wide, or even European movement.

In Saxony, it's different though. There, we've seen strong far-right activity, with the NPD party in parliament and some far-right politicians in local councils. In the last 25 years since reunification, a lot of vague and often incoherent social protest potential has built up there, both on the far right and the far left.

PEGIDA is by and large not an intellectual movement. It's a mass protest of those in Saxony who feel they've been given short shrift. But the latest ructions mean that, yes, there will be further protests, but the movement is past its peak.

Do you believe the movement will fade into the background soon?

Yes, PEGIDA will fizzle out. The bigger problem that I see, however, is the increasingly hostile mood when it comes to migrants from Muslim countries in general and among the political elites. The jihadi attacks and the anti-Muslim mood, which culminates in these types of protests, exacerbate the problem. That's where I see the problem, but I wouldn't limit it to PEGIDA.

The movement uses words that can be perceived as nationalistic - the German words "Heimat" (homeland) and "Abendland" (occident), for example. Yet, many protesters insist they are not xenophobic.

If you use the word "Abendland" without quotation marks, that belongs to the far-right camp. The word signifies an anti-Islamic construct, it was created in Europe to juxtapose what was known as the "Orient," the Islamic world with the European Christian world, the "Occident."

The term is designed to create a Christian European world, without Islam, and whoever uses it subscribes to that concept, i.e. a Europe without Islam, although Islam has been a part of European society consistently since 711 AD.

Are you in favor of dialogue with PEGIDA or should it be ignored?

I wouldn't talk to PEGIDA as an organized movement as such. But you have to ask the question why there is so much non-coherent and vague discontent in that particular region of Germany and what social and economic reasons there may be for this.

But I wouldn't allow the leaders of PEGIDA to assume that kind of leadership, to legitimize them as representatives of that movement.

How can we tackle the anti-Islamic sentiment you've talked about?

We need policies that are aimed at both economic stability and integration so that migrants and those from Germany, or Europe, interact, both in everyday life as well as in educational facilities.

Once you stop perceiving Muslims as this homogenous group that you don't know at all and once you realize that there are different groups and religious versions within Islam, you dismantle that image of a homogenous alleged "danger."

Thomas Schmidinger is a lecturer at the University of Vienna and the Voralberg Polytechnic, where he specializes in intercultural cooperation, migration and jihadi movements. He is co-founder of the Austrian NGO "Netzwerk sozialer Zusammenhalt" ("social cohesion network") that aims to improve cooperation and dialogue between people from different backgrounds.