BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plea to German voters to resist participation in anti-Islamist protests was rejected Monday in Dresden as a record number of demonstrators for such rallies gathered in the eastern city.
About 18,000 people joined a march through the city that started at 7:30 p.m. in a park near Dresden’s center, police said. Fewer than 4,000 counter-demonstrators rallied at other locations in the city.
Protest organizers, who call themselves Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, demand stricter immigration and asylum laws. The group’s demands have raised concern among Germany’s business community, which increasingly relies on skilled immigrants as the population shrinks.
Volkswagen turned off the illumination of its glassy Transparent Factory in Dresden, where the Phaeton model is made, in protest for several hours. Migration ensures growth and prosperity in Germany, the BDI Federation of German Industry, which represents 100,000 companies with 8 million workers, has said.
Dresden’s Monday-evening protests have grown in size since they started Oct. 20 with only a few hundred participants. In other German cities, anti-Islamist protesters were outnumbered by counter-demonstrators after Merkel, in her New Year’s speech, urged Germans not to follow those who carry “prejudice, cold, yes, even hatred in their hearts.”
Pegida in a 19-point position paper on its Facebook page calls for an immigration policy similar to Canada’s and Australia’s. Germany also mustn’t allow “parallel societies” to exist with Sharia laws, Sharia police and Islamic justices of the peace who replace civil courts, according to the group.
About 4 million Muslims live in Germany out of a total population of 81 million, according to the Central Council of Muslims in Germany’s website. While the share of Muslim immigrants is well below the national average in the formerly communist eastern half of the country, cities like Berlin have a larger Muslim minority.
‘No place for racism’
More than a third of Germans said an accent-free command of the German language, abstaining from wearing a headscarf and having German ancestors are important ingredients to being German, according to a Humboldt University poll of 8,270 people cited in a study published Monday by the Berlin-based BIM institute for immigration studies.
Addressing supporters of her Christian Democratic Union party in the north-eastern town of Neustrelitz on Monday, Merkel said “racism and anti-Semitism can find no place in our society.” Her comments were a reference to voter support for the anti-foreigner National Democratic Party, which won 6 percent of the votes and five parliamentary seats in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in a 2011 election.
Merkel carries responsibility for the rise of anti-Islamist protest groups and the anti-euro Alternative for Germany party, Hans-Peter Friedrich, a former minister from the Christian Social Union, her Bavarian ally, told Spiegel magazine.
Her bloc has “dealt too lightly in the past with the question of the identity of our people and our nation,” Spiegel cited him as saying in an interview.
