2015年经济学人 德国政治 消失的极右领袖（在线收听）

German politics

Gone boy on the right

How an anti-foreigner, anti-establishment group is changing German politics

Bachmann: only joking, honest

THE march on January 19th in Dresden by Pegida, or “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident”, would have been its 13th.

But it was cancelled because the police had “concrete” information of plans to assassinate its organiser, Lutz Bachmann.

On January 21st Mr Bachmann was exposed in German tabloids for posing as Hitler on his Facebook page.

He called it a joke, but later resigned his position. Pegida plans to resume its marches next week.

Among its followers, despite Mr Bachmann's antics, neo-Nazis are a small minority.

The typical marcher is a middle-aged, middle-class Saxon man who, says Hans Vorl?nder at the Technical University of Dresden,

is alienated from politics and the liberal media, and yearns for a homogenous fatherland.

The marches may have “passed the peak”, adds Dieter Rucht at the Berlin Social Science Centre.

Yet there will be political fallout. Nine-tenths of Pegida supporters back the Alternative for Germany (AfD),

founded only in 2013 and represented in three eastern state parliaments.

The AfD began with an anti-euro message. Some leaders, such as Hans- Olaf Henkel, from Hamburg, want to keep it that way.

But, especially in the east, the party has used populist innuendo against asylum-seekers, immigrants and homosexuals.

Party elders like Alexander Gauland, in Brandenburg, openly flirt with Pegida. This is straining the AfD, which has three leaders.

Bernd Lucke, an economics professor, favours an anti-euro message; Frauke Petry, a businesswoman from Saxony, and Konrad Adam,

a former journalist, sympathise with Pegida. Mr Lucke wants to lead alone, but Ms Petry and Mr Adam have resisted him. In a compromise,

Mr Lucke will take over as boss only next December.

German democracy is responding without hysteria. Marchers against Pegida have recently far outnumbered those for it.

The centre-left Social Democrats and Greens refuse to debate with Pegida, and Chancellor Angela Merkel,

leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, has condemned it. Others are open to dialogue.

One Christian Democrat, Jens Spahn, even joined a televised debate with Kathrin Oertel, one of Pegida's organisers.

That was a big step for a group that had previously refused to talk to the media.

Its marchers chant “Lügenpresse” (“lying press”), a term once used by the Nazis.

Yet on the very day of the cancelled march, Pegida held its first-ever press conference.

In the public glare, its leaders tone down their language. When confronted, their counter-arguments seem weak.

Asked why Saxons should worry about Islam when only 1% of Saxony's population is Muslim,

Ms Oertel said some Germans march for the rainforest though Germany has none.

The gradual conflation of the AfD and Pegida is a new and worrying phenomenon.

There must never be a legitimate party to the right of the CSU, the Christian Democrats' Bavarian sister party, said Franz Josef Strauss,

a longtime leader of Bavaria, with Germany's Nazi past in mind. Such a party has now arrived, and could enter the Bundestag in 2017.