Germany's new far-right populists rail against Islam

They march in their thousands every Monday evening, wave German national flags and angrily protest against "criminal asylum seekers" and the "Islamisation" of their home country.

In recent months, Germany has witnessed the emergence of a far-right populist movement that has drawn support from hardcore neo-Nazis and also a small but growing anti-euro party, the AfD.

Germany was rattled this week when the latest in a series of marches in the eastern city of Dresden by the "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident", or PEGIDA, drew over 10,000 people.

The group's name is in itself "a veritable call to arms by far-right populists", evoking echoes of Christian crusaders and Nazi propaganda, said Hajo Funke of Berlin's Free University.

"It's about the mobilisation of resentment, about establishing an enemy. It becomes dangerous if it turns into contemptuous aggression and the awakening of mob instincts," the political scientist told AFP.

PEGIDA, launched in October, has grown and spawned smaller copycat groups nationwide, provoking much soul-searching in a country haunted by its history of Nazi terror and the Holocaust.

The protests have been fuelled by a sharp rise in refugees seeking political asylum in Germany, which is scrambling to house them in converted schools, office blocks and container villages.

Germany has received more than 180,000 asylum applications since January, a 57-percent spike from last year, mostly from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Somalia but also from several Balkan countries.

Experts on Germany's far-right have noted a new mainstream character to PEGIDA, likening it to anti-foreigner movements in France, the Netherlands, Austria and Greece....