Anti-Islam group plans demonstrations in 14 countries

Rallies against “the Islamisation” of Europe are planned for 6 February in 14 European countries including Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland, far-right organisers said on Saturday.

The demonstrations are being organised by the anti-foreigner German group PEGIDA, an acronym for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident".

Tatjana Festerling of PEGIDA made the announcement after a meeting with like-minded groups in Roztoky, near Prague.

“The fight against the Islamisation of Europe is our common objective,” Festerling said in a statement after the meeting.

The Roztoky meeting was organised by the Czech group “Bloc Against Islam,” whose leader, Martin Konvicka, called Europe's policy on migrants “stupid and suicidal”.

PEGIDA began in October 2014 as a xenophobic Facebook group, initially drawing just a few hundred protesters to demonstrations in the eastern city of Dresden, Germany, before gaining strength, peaking with turnouts of 25,000 people. 

Interest began to wane after overtly racist comments by founder Lutz Bachmann and the surfacing of “selfies” in which he sported a Hitler-style moustache and hairstyle.

The group has seen a revival amid the record influx of migrants to Germany in 2015, followed by a wave of sex assaults and robberies of women in Cologne on New Year's Eve blamed on young men from Arab countries.

PEGIDA’s growth has presented politicians with a dilemma over how to uncouple a strong neo-Nazi element believed to form the core of the protests from ordinary Germans with grievances against the government, who make up the bulk of the protesters, according to the Guardian

Almost two-thirds of Germans responding to a poll taken for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, think Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34 percent think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation,” the Guardian said.