Populist Politics of Time and Space: The Case of Far-right Protest in Dresden

This contribution studies populism through the lens of the politics of time and space. Drawing from the postfoundational approach to populism, it argues that a focus on the dimensions of time and space sheds new light on how populism as an antagonistic logic of community-making works at the local level. To this end, the study focuses on a specific case of populist mobilization, namely the far-right Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA), that organize demonstrations in the eastern German city of Dresden since 2014. Acting within the dense mnemonic structures of the erstwhile war-torn city of Dresden, PEGIDA is conceptualized as a “critical case” of populist mobilization in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, a region in which the politics of space and time are particularly salient. The discourse-theoretical analysis yields three key findings: Firstly, in applying the postfoundational “populism formula”, it explores PEGIDA’s populist logic of community-making that construes so-called civil movements as a collective subject through the evocation of (alleged) political difference beyond an antagonistic frontier. Based on original ethnographic data generated in 2019-2021, the analysis then shows how PEGIDA’s politics of time charge the self-declared democratic “us” and its antagonistic frontier with multi-layered meanings via the appeal to local and regional history and memory of revolution and resistance on the one hand, and totalitarianism and oppression on the other. Finally, it demonstrates how PEGIDA’s politics of space construe the urban symbolic landscape of Dresden as an “us-space”.