Radical Right Populism in Germany

AfD, Pegida, and the Identitarian Movement

Ralf Havertz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367371463
• eBook ISBN: 9781000368888
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of radical right populism in Germany. It gives an overview of historical developments of the phenomenon and its current appearance. It examines three of the main far-right organizations in Germany: the radical right populist party AfD (Alternative for Germany), Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the Occident), and the Identitarian Movement.

The book investigates the positions of these groups as expressed in programmes, publications, and statements of party leaders and movement activists. It explores their history, ideologies, strategies, and their main activists and representatives, as well as the overlap between the groups. The ideological positions examined include populism, nativism, authoritarianism, volkish nationalism, ethnopluralism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, antifeminism, and Euroscepticism. The analysis shows that these ideological features are sometimes strategically interlinked for effect and used to justify specific political demands such as the stronger regulation of immigration and the exclusion of Muslims.

This much-needed volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers of German politics, populism, social movements, party politics, and right-wing extremism.

1
INTRODUCTION

When Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) was established in 2013, Germany “finally” got its own radical right populist party, as some observers remarked (Arzheimer, 2015; Berbuir et al., 2015). The comment referred to Germany’s status as a latecomer in this political field. At the time of AfD’s founding, almost all of Germany’s European neighbours already had their radical right popu-list parties. Some of them, for instance, the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) and the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP), were rather successful, as their present or past participation in government showed. Meanwhile, AfD has managed to gain larger shares of the votes in elections on subnational, national, and European levels and has placed members in all parliaments of the 16 states which Germany is comprised of, in the Bundestag (the federal parliament) and the European Parliament. After the 2017 federal election, AfD became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.

The remark about a radical right populist party “finally” appearing on the political stage in Germany implies some form of normalization in German politics compared with the politics of other European countries. Voting for a radical right or extreme right party has indeed not been perceived as normal in Germany for some time. This is an especially sensitive issue in Germany, because of its devastating history with right-wing extremism during the Nazi period (1933–1945). After the Second World War, a stigma was attached to voting for parties of the far right (Decker, 2015), which is why they had only little electoral success. With the exception of the German Party (Deutsche Partei), which gained few seats in the Bundestag in the 1950s, this success was restricted to the regional and local level. The stints of the radical right populist party Die Republikaner (The Republicans, REP) and of right-wing extremist parties such as the National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD) and the German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion, DVU) in state legislatures were only brief and lasted mostly just for one term or – in exceptional cases – two consecutive terms.

This post-war period is clearly over now: History has lost its restraining effect on many voters who sympathize with radical right populist parties. Citizens who feel attracted by movements such as Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islam-isierung des Abendlandes, Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident) show no inhibition when they voice their anger and resentment at rallies organized by the movement. A number of changes have happened in the socioeconomic, cultural, and media environment of the political system in Germany, which all converged at roughly the same time and produced a situation that opened up a few opportunity structures for the radical right.

First, there was the transformation of Fordist capitalism into a neoliberal system, which brought higher levels of competitive pressure as well as increasing insecurities and uncertainties for workers (Ptak, 2018). This development was accompanied by a significant degradation of the social welfare state with the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s, which curtailed social benefits and exerted increasing pressure on welfare recipients. Then came the global financial crisis of 2008 and the euro crisis which started in 2009 with all their bail outs and transfers of public funds that never seemed to find their way into the pockets of the average citizen. Many citizens responded to this situation with frustration, anger, and fear. It also resulted in a general change of the public atmosphere, with increasing suspicion toward other citizens and reduced levels of solidarity (Detje & Sauer, 2018; Lorenzen et al., 2018). This is where a window of opportunity opened for populist entrepreneurs who were keen to exploit the anger and resentment by channeling it against “the elite” or optionally “the establishment.”

Second, since the student movement of 1968, German society has gone through a phase of modernization and liberalization; it has become more open and more accepting of differences, which involves differences in culture and lifestyle and the protection of minorities such as refugees, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. The position of women in German society has improved considerably. Women are now more strongly participating in the economy and in politics than they did ten or 20 years ago. Even though much has been achieved, Germany is still far from reaching gender equality (Quent, 2019). Not everyone is happy with these cultural changes and the need to adapt to them. Some actually see this modernization as a menace to their identity and their traditional ways of life that is based on patriarchal ideals and clear social hierarchies. Populist entrepreneurs can use the dissatisfaction with these changes (and the need to adapt to them) to organize a cultural backlash, which may again be directed against “the elite” – with a particular focus on its cosmopolitan character – but also against all those minorities that are the beneficiaries of these changes.

Lastly, changes in the media landscape, with the emergence of the internet and social media such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter, have altered the way citizens communicate with each other. This new media environment also led to modifications in political communication, which can now be more direct and unfiltered. Radical and extreme messages can reach a targeted audience more easily, because the algorithms that are at the heart of social media connect users with similar interests, opinions, and prejudices. In their online groups people get confirmation of their views from like-minded users and rarely if ever encounter critique of their worldviews. As Jan-Werner Müller (2016a, p. 36) observed, “everything that might contradict what we are already thinking is silenced in the echo chamber of the Internet.” This has opened plenty of opportunities for radical right populists with an internet connection. It has also resulted in the increasing political polarization of society in Germany. With these changes in the media environment it has become easier to spread conspiracy theories, fake news, and fear, which populists may want to do to generate outrage and mobilize people. These trends in the socio-economic, cultural, and media environment have converged and opened up opportunity structures for the radical right populists of AfD that were closed or at least not as wide open for its precursors.

It is important to note that these developments are also connected to what political scientists have termed the crisis of representation. Citizens turn to populist parties because they do not feel properly represented by the mainstream parties in the political system of Germany anymore (sometimes also in order to send a message of protest to these mainstream parties). This especially concerns the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), which has largely abdicated its role as defender of the “little people” and joined the neoliberal mainstream. Most social-democratic parties in Europe failed to realize the opportunities that were created by the neoliberal transformations of society. Hence, “the neo-liberal turn in recent decades left the field open to other parties” (Brubaker, 2019, p. 35), and many of these parties were populist parties on the left and the right, in Europe primarily on the right.

Social-democratic parties recently experienced severe electoral losses in countries such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. But citizens were also disappointed with other established parties. This resulted in a marked disengagement of citizens from politics. Peter Mair (2013, pp. 21–22) found a consistent pattern of “citizen disengagement” throughout Europe, which could be traced back several decades. The main features of this disengagement process are a decline in electoral participation, party loyalty, and party membership and an increase in electoral volatility. This pattern is connected to the phenomenon which Colin Crouch (2004, pp. 3–4) called “post-democracy.” According to Crouch (2004), with the turn of the century, liberal democracy has become a system where capitalism is generally accepted as the economic model. Mass participation of the citizenry in the political process is mostly restricted to elections, while there is increasing influence of lobbying groups on the outcome of policy considerations by government. In this situation, “public electoral debate” has become a “tightly controlled spectacle” (Crouch, 2004, p. 4). The majority of the citizens play a “passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given to them” (Crouch, 2004, p. 4).

A feature of this crisis of representation is that many citizens have lost trust in representative democracy and its institutions. AfD in Germany (like radical right populist parties elsewhere) takes advantage of this lack of trust. In its rhetoric, the party confirms the grievances of the citizens about their lack of influence and tells them that this is all the result of a ploy by “the political class” who is trying in all sorts of ways to betray “the people.” This opposition of “the people” versus “the elite” is at the centre of Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s (2017) “minimal definition” of populism. In their ideational approach of populism, they understand populism as an ideology and/or discourse. They define populism as an ideology with a thin centre; that is, an ideology which includes only few concepts. The fact that populism has a thin centre does not mean that it is an ideology of low complexity. On the contrary, as my analysis of populism as an “essentially contested concept” in Chapter 2 shows, which relies on Walter Bryce Gallie (1956) and Jürgen Mackert (2019a), the continuous contestation of populism with its many different understandings makes it a highly complex concept.

The second important element of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s (2017) definition is, as mentioned earlier, the opposition of “the people,” who are imagined as “pure, innocent, and always hard-working” (Müller, 2014, p. 485), and “the elite,” who are depicted as corrupt, incompetent, and only interested in their own personal gain. In radical right accounts of populism, “the elite” betrays “the people” and favours undeserving outsiders or minority groups – refugees, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, women, LGBTQ people – over “the people” – at “the people’s” expense. “The elite” may be described as “political class” or “oligarchy” that undermines popular sovereignty by giving away decision-making power to supranational or international institutions which are not democratically controlled, and in doing so prevent the implementation of the “general will.” The assumption that the people are capable of forming a general will is the third important element of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s (2017) definition.

“The people” and “the elite” who are assumed to be in opposition to each other are both conceived as homogenous groups. The presumed “purity” of “the people” has a moral side to it, because “the people” are always perceived as good; but it may, especially in the radical right populist’s mind, also refer to certain collectivities such as the nation, ethnie, or race, which are imagined as homogenous and to which the community of “the people” is thought to be intrinsically connected. The assumption of purity and homogeneity creates opportunities for the connection of populism with other ideologies, especially those which have a similar structure due to their own focus on homogeneity. In fact, some populism researchers have found that populism cannot exist as an ideology on its own. Populism necessarily needs to connect with other ideologies; only in this way can it exist (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Stanley, 2008). In the case of radical right populism in Germany, the ideologies that are connected with populism are particularly those which insist on cultural, ethnic, or national homogeneity. In volkish nationalism, which is, as I will show in this book, of primary importance for radical right populism in Germany, all these idealized homogeneities are linked together. Because such homogeneous collectives do not occur in the real world and, in the sense of Benedict Anderson (2016), can only be understood as imagined communities, certain cognitive and imaginative operations must be performed through which homogeneity is established – at least in the populist’s mind. As will be shown in this book, two such operations are the ethnicization and the subsequent essentialization of the assumed characteristics of certain groups in society.

In this book, I will devote myself both to the analysis of populism as ideology and discourse and to the study of the many ideological facets which populism in Germany is combined with to form a specific type of radical right populism. In doing so, I will rely on some works in the German language that have been published in recent years on the subject of radical right populism. The works of Frank Decker, Alexander Häusler, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Helmut Kellershohn, Armin Pfahl-Traughber, and Samuel Salzborn (and some others who I cannot all mention here) were of particular value for the understanding of recent developments of this phenomenon in Germany. The Authoritarianism Studies of Leipzig University and the Mitte-Studies of Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation were also very helpful, because they provided a sound empirical foundation for the more theoretically oriented research that I conduct in this book. Some English articles have been published on radical right populism in Germany, primarily focusing on phenomena such as AfD and the anti-Islam movement Pegida, many of which are referenced in this book. So far there are only very few monographies on radical right populism in Germany in the international literature (Klikauer, 2020; Langenbacher, 2019; von Beyme, 2019; Vorländer et al., 2018).¹ Although all of these works provide some valuable insights into the phenomenon, they do not give an exhaustive overview and analysis of the main ideological facets of radical right populism in Germany. This book tries to fill this gap in the international literature.

Alexander Häusler (2018a) stressed that to gain a deep understanding of AfD’s radical right populism, it is not sufficient to focus on ideological facets only, but it is indispensable to also scrutinize their discourse strategies in the various political dispositifs they are engaged in. In order to grasp the essence of radical right populism in Germany, one has to look into the rhetorical maneuvers of their protagonists and make them more transparent (Niehr & Reissen-Kosch, 2018). Hence, the discourse analysis in this book will concentrate on the analysis of their arguments, their use of metaphors, and on the “symbolism of collectivity” in their utterances (Jäger, 2004, p. 15). This will allow me to determine how a speaker connects disparate issues in seemingly plausible ways, veils contradictions, and evokes certain effects (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Populism and radical right populism
• 3 Radical right populist precursors of AfD
• 4 A short history of AfD
• 5 AfD’s radical right populism
• 6 Volkish nationalism as core ideology
• 7 AfD’s reluctant hard Euroscepticism
• 8 Radical right populist hostility toward Islam
• 9 Antisemitism and historical revisionism
• 10 AfD as “anti-gender party”
• 11 Strategy of ambivalence: AfD between neoliberalism and social populism
• 12 Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index