Even locals admit there's not much to see or do in Perba. With just 175 residents, Perba is a tiny dormitory village a 40-minute drive northwest of Dresden. In recent weeks, the people of Perba have headed to the Saxon capital in eastern Germany to join marches organised by Pegida.
Growing exponentially each week, to a record 25,000 on Monday, the marches are ostensibly to protest against the threat of unchecked immigration and the “Islamisation” of the West. Joachim Möhler and his neighbours from Perba say they have taken to the streets to demand a rethink of how Germany does local politics.
Years of disconnect from local decisions came to a head when an empty apartment block in Perba was revealed as a new home for 50 asylum seekers, all single men.
“There’s nothing here but a bus stop, it was simply decreed from above without thinking anything through,” says Möhler.
The nearest shop is in a town 6km away and the trip there by bus, on a route catering for schoolchildren, is long and winding. “I felt Pegida was the only way of expressing my frustration.”
Regional hostility
Asylum is similarly controversial in Bautzen, 60km east of Dresden. Last year, after a call from the authorities for facilities, local hotel owner
Peter Kilian Rausch
transformed his 80-room building into an asylum-seeker home. As a result, Rausch says he has been threatened and spat on by locals. A fence now runs around the hotel – more to keep the locals out, he says, than keep in the 208 asylum seekers from
Libya
,
Syria
and
Somalia
.
“The locals here are just waiting for one of my residents to do something that’s not allowed so they can say ‘we told you so’,” says Mr Rausch.
A majority of locals have signed a petition against the home. Many have marched in demonstrations organised by the local neo-Nazi NPD party. They fear the asylum home has made the surrounding park and reservoir less attractive to day-trippers and holiday-makers. There is talk of increased crime thanks to the asylum seekers, though statistics show no change so far.
"We're all afraid that all our efforts to turn this into a recreational area are being undermined," said one local woman, Marlies Jakobeit.
As in the village of Pegda, Bautzen locals say they feel steamrolled by their politicians. But hotel owner Rausch is not convinced. Complaints that locals haven’t been engaged is a smokescreen, he says, from people who “simply don’t have the gumption to admit they don’t want asylum seekers near them”.
“We Germans are a special case, everything has to be orderly and anything that might bring a little disorder is automatically a threat,” says Rausch. “We’re a rich country that is terrified of having to give up a cent to help others.”
He has no regrets over his decision to open the home. But he worries that Pegida has brought concerns over asylum in Bautzen beyond the working classes and the local neo-Nazi NPD, and into the middle classes.
Triggering xenophobia
Across Saxony – and, indeed, around Germany – the burning question is whether Pegida is a catch-all group for people diverse frustrations, many of which are about politician/voter distance, or is Pegida channelling these frustration to shatter taboos and catalyse xenophobia?
It is a pressing question given how Germany accepted 202,000 asylum applications in 2014: a 60 per cent rise on 2013 and the third-largest figure in German history.
Over coffee in Dresden, social worker planner Sylvia Bachmann recalls countless meetings she has attended about new asylum homes in local towns and villages.
“We are obliged to take asylum seekers, that’s the law, but we need to talk in a better way with people about how it’s organised,” she says. “It’s important to know that, alongside asylum opponents, there are countless groups in communities here in Saxony anxious to make this work.”
Calm solution
At a meeting on Tuesday in Perba, the asylum stand-off was defused when local officials presented a new plan: instead of 50 single men, the first asylum seekers will be families, mostly Coptic Christians from
Eritrea
.
Möhler says locals are satisfied and now working to welcome the new arrivals next month.
He is sure most Pegida supporters, like him, are using the group as a tool to force attention from their disconnected political class.
But he agrees it is too soon to say for sure whether concerned citizens are using Pegida or vice-versa. It’s a crucial question, given the reputation of some Pegida organisers and the scores of young neo-Nazis at the Monday marches.
“There is a danger that it will be taken over by some extremists,” says Möhler.
“Personally, I’d like Pegida to become superfluous because our politicians listen to our concerns and deal with them.”
