How Do Far Right Movements Survive? Processes of Ritualization in Dresden-Based Anti-Islamic PEGIDA

This paper addresses the ritualization of protest politics within radical right movements based on ethnographic fieldwork within the Dresden-based “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (acronym: PEGIDA). Asking how and why PEGIDA was able to survive after more than five years even though its political agenda was adopted by right-wing political parties, this paper suggests that the ritualization processes of PEGIDA’s protest activity have been key in keeping the movement alive. PEGIDA emerged as a street-based protest movement in late 2014 and peaked in early 2015, mobilizing a maximum of 25,000 demonstrators for its ‘evening strolls’ in Dresden’s city center. Later that year, the then newish Euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD) turned towards the far right, adopting PEGIDA’s illiberal political agenda on immigration and integration into its national political program. Since then, many journalistic and scholarly observers declared the death of PEGIDA. However, a core of 1,000-1,500 PEGIDA regulars continues to gather in Dresden’s city center at a biweekly rhythm up until the present day. The demonstrations always follow the exact same procedures, deploy the same symbolism, gather the same speakers, and declare the same political messages. Drawing on literature from the field of symbolic approaches to political ethnography, this paper explores how PEGIDA has transformed from a movement of contention into a protest ritual, and how this development relates to the movement’s continued presence on the streets of Dresden. In particular, it traces the processes of standardization and dramatization of the regular protest events, and analyzes the associated dense symbolism. Its corpus was generated throughout six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dresden between September 2019 and February 2020. Specifically, the corpus draws on the participant observation of ten public PEGIDA events, eight of which constituted ‘regular demonstrations’ and two of which were declared ‘special occasions’ or ‘festivals’ by the PEGIDA organizers. The analysis suggests that PEGIDA’s highly ritualized events typically constitute a leisure activity which offers the possibility to engage in superficial conversations about politics as much as to catch up on daily affairs with family and friends. Moreover, PEGIDA’s events are an occasion to perform collective identity publicly on the streets, most importantly by symbolically appealing to a selection of memorable events in the past such as the 1989 East German ‘Peaceful Revolution’ or the resistance against Nazism. This paper aims to make a contribution to the literature on PEGIDA, the radical right, and social movements more broadly. Questioning rational choice approaches to radical right and contentious politics, it highlights the relevance of the discursive-performative construction of collective identities through inclusive ritualization of protest for the survival of movements after their peak. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates the value of interpretive approaches to the study of politics.