Thousands of anti-asylum protesters marched through the German city of Dresden on Saturday for the Islamophobic Pegida movement, but crowds supporting the group at other locations across Europe looked small in comparison to its home audience.
Pegida staged the Dresden march and events in other cities under the title “Fortress Europe” in protest against the recent influx of migrants to the continent.
In Dresden, up to 8,000 people took to the streets in support of Pegida’s anti-foreigner cause, according to Durchgezaehlt, an online group that researches the size of public gatherings.
The numbers painted a more modest picture of the gatherings compared to earlier police estimates, which said that around 25,000 people were expected to take to the streets in total.
The Pegida rally in the eastern German city was punctuated by chants of “Merkel must go,” as protesters lashed out at Chancellor Angela Merkel’s role in allowing over 1m asylum seekers to enter Europe last year.
While numbers in the Czech Republic were in the thousands, in Poland, France, Britain, Latvia and Denmark, the Fortress Europe movement failed to bring more than a few hundred out onto the streets in each city.
In a “Prague declaration” of support to the so-called Fortress Europe movement, members warned that 1,000 years of Western culture could soon be lost to the “Islamic conquest of Europe.”
