Former Pegida head starts ‘less radical’ splinter group

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/03/ex-pegida-leader-forms-breakaway-group

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A former leader of Germany’s anti-Islamisation movement Pegida has launched a new campaign group, saying she wants to distance herself from the far-right tendencies of the organisation she helped found.

Kathrin Oertel, 37, became the public face of Pegida after the resignation last month of Lutz Bachmann following the publication of derogatory remarks he made about foreigners and a photo of himself posing as Hitler coming to light. But she resigned from the position after a week, because Bachmann was still operating behind the scenes and over the close ties which have been forged with a separate sister movement in Leipzig, which has its roots in the football hooligan scene.

Oertel, initially the spokeswoman for Pegida, whose support has grown swiftly since its inception in November, said she wanted to “prevent a civil war” by forming her own movement.

Launching Direkte Demokratie für Europa (direct democracy for Europe) in a traditional German restaurant in Dresden, she said: “Our main goal is to ensure that the German people get a direct mandate on the federal level.

“We don’t want to topple the government … but we had a real fear that the discontent in Germany could end in civil war, and we wanted to avoid that.”

Oertel would like to see Germany embrace a Swiss-style form of direct democracy which would see major parliamentary decisions on issues from policing to asylum laws, put to the general vote.

Currently modern Germany only has representative democracy due to its Nazi past, stemming from a fear that plebiscites could too easily be exploited by extreme powers.

Oertel cut a significantly more confident figure as she addressed a group of foreign journalists than the woman who began her political career by giving speeches from the Pegida campaign caravan when the group first started attracting crowds of tens of thousands in December. Oertel’s strained voice often got lost in the chants of the crowds, and she found it hard to speak without referring repeatedly to her notes, leading one political commentator to remark: “She is no Timoshenko,” in reference to the Ukrainian opposition politician.

As the founder of DDFE Oertel said she was motivated by the desire to give ordinary German people a voice, concerns over immigration, and fears over insufficient security within Germany. She remained vague on her group’s specific programme, sometimes stumbling over its acronym, and occasionally mistakingly referring to Pegida, but said it would be available soon.

The group, headed by Oertel and six other former members of Pegida, is due to take to the streets of Dresden on Sunday evening. Bachmann is planning to march on Monday, most likely together with the more aggressive Leipzig arm of the movement, Legida. The big question is whether Oertel, who is positioning herself as less radical, or Bachmann, whose utterings have underlined his xenophobic tendencies, but is more charismatic, will draw a bigger crowd. At its height, Pegida has attracted 25,000 followers.

“We are starting from the very bottom again,” Oertel said. “We have no money, only our own, and we have to wait for donations to come in. But even if we just get 50 people at our first demo, as long as I have their trust, I will be happy.”

In a shift from her stance just three weeks ago, she said she would not rule out trying to form a political party.

Oertel, who has attracted as much attention for her drawn-on eyebrows as for her politics, said she had turned against Bachmann after disparaging remarks he had made about refugees came to light, in which he referred to them as “cattle”, “scumbags” and “trash”. The Hitler selfie, she said, had been of little concern. “The Hitler selfie, which at present is going round the world, well, it’s just a satirical picture which other politicians and prominent people have also done. The main point for me was the posts in which he expressed himself in a very derogatory way, and we are not of that opinion.”

Oertel was flanked by fellow DDFE member Achim Exner, who said he was her bodyguard and that Oertel, a management consultant and mother of three, had been “receiving significant threats”.

One Pegida rally in January was cancelled after Bachmann was said by German intelligence to be a target for Islamic terrorists.

Despite distancing herself from Pegida, Oertel said she had been appalled by the media’s approach to it and the discrimination felt by its members. “We were turned into bogeymen,” she said, adding that members had lost their jobs after employers had spotted them at rallies. “The fact is that if you have an opinion that’s different from that of the mainstream, you’re very easily and quickly demonised for that,” she said.

Oertel, who has been referred to as the “ice queen of Dresden” by the local media for her stern appearance, stressed that her group was not anti-foreigner and had nothing against “reform” or non-radical Muslims. She said her children attended a so-called “integration school” with many other nationalities. But she railed against the lobbies that were controlling Germany, including the “asylum industry”, which she said, allowed asylum seekers to stay in the country long after their applications had been turned down.

“Look at how big the asylum industry in Germany is,” she said. “How many people are earning money from it, from those who provide them with accommodation to those who feed them, the doctors who treat them?”

She said the DDFE was preparing to publish information on research it had conducted into the subject, but that she wanted it to be checked by lawyers first.