Right rising? Pegida comes 4th in Dresden mayoral election with 9.6%
With 9.6 percent, Festerling, 51, came behind left-leaning
frontrunner Eva-Maria Stange, the joint candidate for the Social
Democrats, Greens and left-wing Linke, who was first in Sunday's
first round, taking 36 percent of the vote. Stange was followed
by a candidate from the right-wing Free Democrats party (FDP),
who won a little over 31 percent. The candidate from Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party came third, with 15.4
percent of the vote. Since no single candidate managed to win an
absolute majority, the election will go to a run-off on July 5.
Pegida has, at its peak, attracted up to 25,000 people onto the streets of Dresden in an anti-immigration rally. But according to pre-election polls, published by the Technical University of Dresden, Pegida (an acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) was expected to win just 1-2 percent of the votes. Festerling's supporters on Facebook said it was "a good, respectable election result."
In recent months the far-right movement, viewed as racist by its opponents, cut down its activities as Pegida leaders were busy with internal strife. Since October, the group had held weekly rallies for five months, with its rallies often challenged by counter-protests that in some German cities reportedly outnumbered the group's supporters.
Pegida calls for an introduction of a new immigration law that would boost immigrants' integration and ban Islamists fighting alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq from returning to Germany. While its manifesto opposes extremism and calls for Germany’s Judeo-Christian religious culture to be protected, the group has been looking to raise the alarm over the rise of the influence of Islam on European countries.
READ MORE: Anti-Islam & pro-tolerance demonstrators take to German streets (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)
Pegida calls for an introduction of a new immigration law that would boost immigrants' integration and ban Islamists fighting alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq from returning to Germany. While its manifesto opposes extremism and calls for Germany’s Judeo-Christian religious culture to be protected, the group has been looking to raise the alarm over the rise of the influence of Islam on European countries.
CLICK TO READ MORE
Pegida has, at its peak, attracted up to 25,000 people onto the streets of Dresden in an anti-immigration rally. But according to pre-election polls, published by the Technical University of Dresden, Pegida (an acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) was expected to win just 1-2 percent of the votes. Festerling's supporters on Facebook said it was "a good, respectable election result."
In recent months the far-right movement, viewed as racist by its opponents, cut down its activities as Pegida leaders were busy with internal strife. Since October, the group had held weekly rallies for five months, with its rallies often challenged by counter-protests that in some German cities reportedly outnumbered the group's supporters.
Pegida calls for an introduction of a new immigration law that would boost immigrants' integration and ban Islamists fighting alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq from returning to Germany. While its manifesto opposes extremism and calls for Germany’s Judeo-Christian religious culture to be protected, the group has been looking to raise the alarm over the rise of the influence of Islam on European countries.
READ MORE: Anti-Islam & pro-tolerance demonstrators take to German streets (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)
Pegida calls for an introduction of a new immigration law that would boost immigrants' integration and ban Islamists fighting alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq from returning to Germany. While its manifesto opposes extremism and calls for Germany’s Judeo-Christian religious culture to be protected, the group has been looking to raise the alarm over the rise of the influence of Islam on European countries.
CLICK TO READ MORE
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