MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Pegida’s candidate, Tatjana Festerling, came in fourth, with 9.6 percent of votes, during the first round of elections after an opinion poll predicted she would gain between one and two percent only.
The German-based Pegida, for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, began organizing rallies in its home city of Dresden in October 2014, attracting tens of thousands of supporters.
In the wake of founder Lutz Bachman's early 2015 resignation, after posting a photograph of himself looking like Adolf Hitler to Facebook, more recent Pegida rallies have drawn around 2,000 supporters.
The movement inspired several anti-immigration protests in other European countries and Canada.
