Explaining PEGIDA’s ‘strange survival’: an ethnographic approach to far-right protest rituals

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the link between the ritualization of public protest and movement persistence in the context of contemporary far-right politics. Drawing from interpretive approaches in political science, social movement studies, and anthropology, it introduces the under-researched analytical category of protest ritual to scholarship on far-right social movements. It argues for a strong link between ritualistic protest and far-right movement persistence, conceptualized as symbolic continuity, and suggests the use of ethnographic methods to gain insights into the concrete processes of ritualization. Empirically, the article provides a case study on one of Europe’s most sustained instances of far-right protest: the German ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident’ (PEGIDA). Based on an original ‘patchwork’ ethnographic dataset generated in both conventional and virtual ethnographic fieldwork in 2019–21, the analysis redefines PEGIDA as a symbolic performance expressing dense meanings of ‘democratic resistance’ and highlights the constitutive role of the ‘PEGIDA ritual’ both on the streets and online as a novel explanation for PEGIDA’s continuity beyond its peak in 2014–15. Overall, this study contributes to an emerging body of research focusing on local and extra-parliamentary far-right actors, particularly taking an emic perspective on the meaning-making processes in far-right activism.