The court reportedly said that Bachmann’s comments made on Facebook dating back to 2014 not only incited racial hatred but also “disrupted public order” and constituted an “attack on the dignity” of refugees.
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These began in Dresden and spread across Germany, attracting tens of thousands of supporters.
English-language German news outlet Deutsche Welle interviews protesters outside the court, and discusses whether or not PEGIDA “has had the wind taken out of its sails”.
The co-founder of Germany’s anti-Islam PEGIDA group arrived at a Dresden court on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ Time) for his trial on incitement charges wearing a rectangular black strip obscuring his eyes in a mocking gesture towards the German media and privacy rules.
“That is punishable as sedition”, he said, a charge that carries a sentence of between three months and five years in prison.
The group was founded in the fall of 2014 and initially drew just a few hundred supporters, before gaining strength, peaking with rallies of up to 25,000 people in 2015.
In recent months Mr Bachmann has described asylum seekers as “criminal invaders” and “rapefugees”.
The PEGIDA leader’s trial gives the lie to the neat narrative being spun about the Böhmermann case – that Erdogan is twisting German law for his own ends, while Angela Merkel, keen to keep him onside during the refugee crisis, is happy to sell free expression down the river.
In the late 1990s, he left Germany for South Africa to avoid a jail term, but was extradited two years later and served some 14 months behind bars in Germany.
Despite the influx of over 1 million migrants to Germany previous year, the grassroots movement’s appeal has waned.
The suspects, four men and a woman, are accused of belonging to a far-right terrorist organization called the Freital Group.
The federal prosecutors’ office said the five German nationals were arrested on Tuesday and several apartments in the eastern state of Saxony searched.
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Prosecutors said the group acquired more than 100 firecrackers from the Czech Republic. The assaults include using the fireworks to blow out the windows of the kitchen of a refugee shelter in Freital in September 2015.
