A new anti-Islam political party in Germany has captured more votes than expected in its very first election attempt.
Pegida received nearly 10% of the votes for mayor of Dresden, the movement’s home base.
The party’s results of the voting on Sunday came as a surprise as their weekly demonstrations in Dresden have steadily attracted fewer and fewer participants from a high point of 25,000.
Nevertheless, Tatjana Festerling’s 9.6% gave her only fourth position. The only opinion poll taken before the election showed a gain of just 1-2% of votes.
A run-off vote will be held on 5 July as no candidate secured an absolute majority. The highest proportion, 36%, went to the joint candidate for the Social Democrats, Greens and the far-left Linke. The pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) took 31.7%.
The conservative Christian Democrat candidate (Chancellor Merkel’s party) came third with 15.4% of the vote, making Dresden yet another large city which the party has lost.
While major cities in the west have become accustomed to a workforce boosted by immigrants, particularly from Turkey, areas in the east have had few foreign residents. Dresden’s foreign population is only about 7% and its region, Saxony, has one of the smallest immigrant numbers at 2.8% owing in large part to its former Communist control.
Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident) was founded late last year, but has already seen internal strife and scandal among its leaders.
During her campaign, Festerling, 51, urged a “renaissance” of German culture and condemned asylum seekers who have “left family and home because here there’s somewhere nice to live and you get dough from the state.”
