Germany's Pegida anti-Islam movement looked to be unravelling on Wednesday after five of its leaders resigned a week after its founder quit, and a weekly demonstration scheduled for next Monday was abruptly cancelled.
The resignations included Kathrin Oertel, who emerged as the new face of
Pegida after its founder, Lutz Bachmann, was forced to quit over a photo
of him posing as Adolf Hitler.
The movement, which has brought
up to 25,000 people onto the streets under the banner of
Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West, or Pegida, claims
it is trying to defend Germany from "Islamisation" at the hands of
Muslim immigrants.
The apparent crisis in its leadership came as senior member of Germany's
rapidly rising Eurosceptic party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), called
for a ban on immigration from the Middle East.
A statement on Pegida's Facebook page claimed Ms Oertel had resigned because
of "massive hostility, threats and career disadvantages."She has sacrificed herself for the cause," the statement read, "but even the strongest of women has to take time out when at night photographers and other strange figures are sneaking around outside her house." But it quickly emerged that four other members of Pegida's executive board had also resigned, and German press reports claimed the real reason was Mr Bachmann's recent behaviour and racist statements.
Mr Bachmann officially stepped down after the publication of the Hitler photograph and a series of Facebook posts in which he described immigrants as "filth", "trash" and "brutes".
But a report in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper claimed he remains influential behind the scenes. The newspaper quoted one of those who quit, Bernd-Volker Lincke, as saying Mr Bachmann was the real reason for the resignations.
In a statement, Pegida vowed the movement would continue. It said next Monday's Dresden rally had been cancelled for "organisational and legal reasons", but that weekly protests would resume the week after.
Pegida appeared to be on the verge of collapse even as a leading member of the Eurosceptic AfD described it as a "people's movement", and called for a ban on immigration from the Middle East.
"We should not encourage immigration of people who are completely foreign to our cultural tradition, indeed we should avoid it," Alexander Gauland told Tagesspiegel newspaper.
"There are cultural traditions that make it very difficult to integrate here. I don't want any further immigration from this cultural tradition. This cultural tradition belongs in the Middle East," he said.
If immigration from the Middle East was allowed to continue, he warned, "parallel societies" could develop in Germany "which we won't be able to cope with in the end".
The backdrop to Mr Gauland's remarks is a rift within the AfD over how to respond to Pegida. The party has emerged as a threat to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats on an anti-Euro message and opposition to German financial assistance for Greece and other ailing southern European economies.
Mr Gauland, a party vice-chairman and deputy spokesman, has emerged as leader of a faction within the AfD which wants to make immigration a more central issue in the wake of Pegida's success.
But the AfD leader, Berndt Lucke, is deeply opposed to any contact with Pegida, which he sees as potentially toxic.
A counter-protest movement has seen crowds of up to 100,000 march against Pegida.
Credit to Justin Huggler
