The Political Culture of Far-right Populist Protest: Ritual, Memory, and Ideology in the PEGIDA Movement

Against the backdrop of the rise of the populist far right in Central and Eastern Europe, this paper investigates the political culture of far-right populist protest politics in post-socialist eastern Germany. The fundamental research design is the single-case study, with a focus on the political organization PEGIDA from the eastern German city of Dresden. Mobilizing against immigration and the political establishment since 2014, PEGIDA can be regarded as a social movement organization embedded in a broader far-right populist social movement active in Germany, Europe, and beyond. The case of PEGIDA constitutes a critical case for social movement scholarship due to its ‘strange survival’ over more than six years, including the COVID-19 pandemic, despite scarce resources. This paper suggests the concept of political culture to understand and explain PEGIDA’s persistence. In contrast to conventional approaches to political culture as the distribution of psychological orientations towards the political system, this paper proposes an actor-centered, semiotic (or: anthropological) approach to investigate PEGIDA’s political culture. Conceptualizing culture as a set of meanings, such understandings focus on political meaning-making practices based on the display of symbols, rituals, and myths, and approach political actors as strategic agents. In line with this, an ethnographic approach to both data generation and analysis is at the core of this research. Specifically, this study triangulates various sorts of empirical data: ‘conventional’ ethnographic fieldwork in PEGIDA’s public protest events in fall and winter 2019-2020, ‘virtual’ ethnographic fieldwork in PEGIDA’s public protest events in spring and summer 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic), research on PEGIDA’s web pages, media reports on PEGIDA in the local daily newspaper Sächsische Zeitung, and literature review of the main publications on PEGIDA based on original empirical data. The analysis focuses on three elements which are key to understand and explain PEGIDA’s survival: ritual, memory, and ideology. It shows how the ritualization and symbolization of PEGIDA’s regular public protest events have created a special and specific cultural sphere, in which participants generate and perform collective identity and emotions. Furthermore, the analysis reveals how PEGIDA constructs collective interpretations of public protest based on the strategic display of collective memories of the 1989 ‘Peaceful Revolution’ in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), amongst others. Finally, the analysis gives insight into the public construction of ‘Europeanist’ ideology both as a justification strategy and genuine claim to transnationalism. Overall, this paper adds to existing scholarship by refining the notions of political culture, protest ritual, and memory politics in the context for public protest. Proposing that the creation of alternative political cultures can be read as a way to reclaim sovereignty thirty years after western-style transformations of Central and Eastern European politics, economics, and societies, it invites for debating novel explanations of the rise of far-right populism in post-socialist Europe.