Dresden, Germany - Germany's anti-Islam PEGIDA movement, whose weekly demonstrations have steadily dwindled, has its sights set on gaining a political foothold when its eastern stronghold city of Dresden goes to the polls Sunday.
At its height, PEGIDA, short for "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident", rallied up to 25,000 people on the streets of Dresden, where voters will cast ballots after the conservative mayor's resignation for health reasons.
The group, founded late last year, quickly became beset by internal strife and scandal among its leaders but managed to spur PEGIDA clone groups in other cities, as well as sparking often far bigger counter-protests.
Days before the election, police said around 2,000 supporters attended a campaign rally for PEGIDA candidate Tatjana Festerling held in a picturesque old square between the River Elbe and a castle that once housed the kings of Saxony state.
Above the crowd fluttered dozens of German flags, while placards focused on a gamut of issues from the "lying press", to decrying Islam and the other political parties, or depicting Chancellor Angela Merkel dressed as "Fatima" in a headscarf.
Others denounced President Joachim Gauck as "Uncle Asylum" and showed him dressed in a turban.
From a makeshift stage in a truck, a voice boomed out the campaign slogans that are also plastered on boards across the historic city promising "radical change".
In campaign speeches, Festerling disagrees with political correctness, calls for a "renaissance" of German culture and condemns those asylum-seekers who have "left family and home because here there's somewhere nice to live and you get dough from the state".
The campaign speeches by the 51-year-old divorcee and mother of two also raise the spectre of Germany's supposed decline and have a clear "us against them" bent in their tenor.
AFP
