PEGIDA Knock Adele off the Top of the German Charts
Jenny Stanton, Daily Mail, December 30, 2015
A wordless song released by the anti-Islam group PEGIDA has knocked Adele off the top off the top of Amazon’s German downloads chart.
The song, Gemeinsam sind wir stark! or Together We Are Strong!, is being sold to raise funds for the protest movement, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident.
The tune was made available to download from December 21 and has now overtaken Adele’s Hello.
The Pegida movement first emerged as an anti-Islam movement in October 2014, organising weekly demonstrations against what it termed the ‘Islamisation’ of the western world.
The refugee crisis in Europe has boosted the popularity of PEGIDA’s rallies in the eastern city of Dresden and raised fears about right-wing radicalism.
About a million refugees and migrants, many fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, entered the EU this year, according to the United Nations.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her refugee policies at a congress of her conservative party earlier this month, saying it had been a ‘humanitarian imperative’ to open German borders to refugees camped out in Hungary back in August.
But in a nod to critics within her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who have pressed her to introduce a formal cap on the number of migrants Germany will accept, she also said she would stem the flow.
Merkel is trying to tackle the influx through negotiations to resolve the war in Syria and by encouraging neighbouring Turkey to improve conditions for refugees there, as well as convincing European partners to accept quotas of asylum seekers.
