Politics of protest

With the acronym PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident), a group of men began “walking” every Monday evening through the streets of Dresden, reaching at the top 25.000 participants in January. Beyond the undeniable anti-immigrant attitudes of many PEGIDA-adherents, there seems to be a general challenge to the concept of representative liberal democracy. The specificity of the movement was discussed by German political scientist Dr. Dietrich Herrmann on the expert seminar and in his subsequent analysis.

The post-transition Hungarian protest sector grew to an unseen size during the years of the second Orbán government. Democracy frames gained momentum with large-scale left-liberal protests organized in defense of liberal democracy. Protest event analysis and secondary sources were used during the third expert seminar with Mihály Gyimesi to explain interactions between popular support and dissent.