ANTI-RACIST campaigners turned the tables on far-right Pegida demonstrators across Germany on Monday night, flooding city streets with tens of thousands of supporters.

Police in the racist campaign’s home city of Dresden said that a total of 25,000 had turned out to the latest Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West demonstration.

That may have been significantly up from last Monday’s demonstration, which drew around 18,000 people, but across the country over 100,000 anti-racists turned out to reject the organisation’s insidious brand of prejudice.

Pegida still had the bigger demonstration in Dresden, with around 7,000 anti-racists confronting them in a counter-demonstration, shouting: “Pegida, you’re racist” and “Germany is ashamed of you.”

But across the country, the tables were turned. 

Officials in Leipzig estimated that 30,000 people turned out to a demonstration to counter what would be the first Pegida protest in the city, which drew less than 5,000 people.

In the capital Berlin nearly 50,000 people took to the streets to demonstrate against the local branch of Pegida, which only managed to mobilise around 400.

And in Munich a broad alliance of political parties and trade unions mobilised around 20,000 people for a demonstration in favour of racial and religious tolerance.

“We are against all forms of racism, anti-semitism and right-wing violence,” Munich mayor Dieter Reiter told the demonstrators.

Thousands of anti-Pegida demonstrators also took to the streets of a number of other German cities on Monday evening, including Duesseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover and Saarbruecken, while only a few hundred turned out in support of Pegida. 

Nationwide, news agencies estimated the total number of anti-Pegida demonstrators at around 100,000.

Yesterday, Chancellor Angela Merkel took part in a vigil in Berlin organised by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany under the banner: “Let’s be there for each other. Terror: not in our name.” 

They remembered the 17 people killed in Paris at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket.