Right-wing group PEGIDA slammed for racist remarks over Kinderschokolade ad

Members of the German anti-immigration and anti-Islamic group PEGIDA complained about images of non-white children on Kinder chocolate bar packets only to realise that the move wasn’t an intelligent one.

When they noticed that the blond, blue-eyed boy on Kinder chocolates had been replaced with black and brown children, the group said in a Facebook post: “They’ll stop at nothing. Can you really buy these? Or is it a joke?”

It however didn’t take long before PEGIDA, which stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, was informed that the photos of the children in question were actually of players in Germany’s national football team.

The two children PEGIDA complained about were Ilkay Guendogan and Jerome Boateng who are both German nationals.

The right-wing group PEGIDA admitted they had “really dived into a wasp’s nest” after realising the mistake.

In a marketing campaign ahead of the Euro 2016 football tournament, Italian confectionary company Ferrero launched a special edition of Germany’s beloved “Kinder Schokolade” chocolate bars by using childhood photographs of the German team’s players.

Reacting to the story, Ferrero wrote: “We would like to explicitly distance ourselves from every kind of xenophobia and discrimination. We do not accept or tolerate these in our Facebook communities either.”