The Left Party and the AfD (original) (raw)
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The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?
Within less than two years of being founded by disgruntled members of the governing CDU, the newly-formed Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has already performed extraordinary well in the 2013 General election, the 2014 EP election, and a string of state elections. Highly unusually by German standards, it campaigned for an end to all efforts to save the Euro and argued for a re-configuration of Germany’s foreign policy. This seems to chime with the recent surge in far right voting in Western Europe, and the AfD was subsequently described as right-wing populist and europhobe. On the basis of the party’s manifesto and of hundreds of statements the party has posted on the internet, this article demonstrates that the AfD does indeed occupy a position at the far-right of the German party system, but it is currently neither populist nor does it belong to the family of Radical Right parties. Moreover, its stance on European Integration is more nuanced than expected and should best be classified as soft eurosceptic.
The Left Party in the 2017 German Federal Election
German Politics, 2018
After the 2013 federal election the Left Party (LP) had three good reasons to be satisfied. First, it had maintained its status as the third largest party in eastern Germany (and in some states, the second largest). Second, by 2013 it had made substantial electoral inroads in western Germany, clearing the 5 per cent hurdle in several state elections and increasing its share of the vote in the west in the federal election as well. Finally, with the SPD joining in another grand coalition, the Greens falling behind the LP's vote total, and the FDP failing to gain entry to parliament, the LP relished a new role as the leading opposition party in the Bundestag. Coming into the 2017 federal election, in contrast, the LP had clearly been unsettled. In state elections in 2016 in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and in Saxony-Anhalt, the party suffered huge election losses, falling to 16.3 per cent of the vote in the latter and to 13.2 per cent in the former. Meanwhile, the 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD) rocketed to 24.2 and 20.8 per cent in these two elections respectively. Post-election analyses revealed that while most AfD voters came from previous non-voters and from disaffected CDU voters, a significant number also deserted the LP to vote for the AfD (Abdi-Herrle, Venohr, and Blickle 2017). For the LP, the AfD's rise had started to represent an existential threat. The LP therefore had two main goals for the 2017 election: to demonstrate solid electoral support by achieving a double-digit result as it had in 2009; and, despite the certainty that the AfD would be represented in parliament, to be the largest of the small parties and, if possible, retain its status as the largest opposition party in the case of another grand coalition (Deggerich 2017). To be sure, although it had set its sights on continuing to be a fundamental opposition to Merkel and the CDU, the LP did not entirely foreclose the possibility of a red-red-green government. During the early stages of the campaignwhen Martin Schulz was in the ascendancy and appeared to have at least an outside chance to unseat Merkelthe SPD and LP conducted some preliminary discussions on this. But the Saarland state election in the spring of 2017 (where the Social Democrats failed to perform as expected) had halted this momentum. According to Stefan Liebich, a leading figure in Berlin state politics and a prominent pragmatist within the LP, the SPD 'just lost its nerve' for seriously discussing redred-green (Deggerich 2017). Moreover, while the reformist, pragmatic wing of the LP represented by Dietmar Bartsch continued to suggest that a left-wing coalition was at least within the realm of possibility, Sarah Wagenknechtthe voice of the more orthodox wing of the partyconstantly took shots at the LP's potential coalition partners, arguing that before a coalition could be on the table the SPD would need to take a 'Corbyn turn' towards a more traditional left-wing programme. The Linke,
The Political Quarterly, 2020
The article sheds light on one of the key developments in recent German politics and relates it to the broader debate on the electoral success of the far right. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) is also a story about Germany's internal political divide three decades after 'reunification' as the party is about twice as strong in the east than in the west. The article analyses the country's east-west divide, strongly visible in widespread sentiments of societal marginalization among eastern Germans. The key socio-structural differences between the east and the west relate to matters of economics, migration, and representation-and provide a setting suitable to AfD strength in the east. In explaining the party's electoral success in eastern Germany, the article echoes recent scholarship rejecting narrow explanations for the strength of 'populism', and instead highlights its multiple causes.
The rise of the AfD - resurgent far right wing in Germany (2018)
Defence Viewpoints www.defenceviewpoints.co.uk, 2018
The national socialist train hasn't arrived again in Germany yet – "but if you listen closely, you can hear it coming," says Der Spiegel. From nowhere the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) burst upon the political scene in 2013. Despite fragmentations, it's the third largest party in the Bundestag. What does it actually stand for? And are people right to fear the future for Germany?
The Rise of Germany's New Radical Right
There are “Nazis again in parliament” (Associated Press, 2017). So said Green Party co-leaders Cem Özdemir and Katrin Goring-Eckardt as Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany or AfD) claimed what can only be described as a victory in German parliament. Words that were hardly ever expected to be uttered again in Germany have now made headlines. With the September 24th, 2017 federal election, the AfD capitalized on its recent regional successes and entered Germany’s federal parliament—the first time a far-right party has done so in Germany since 1933. Founded in Dresden in 2013 on the basis of Euroscepticism, the AfD’s platform has since shifted to an emphasis on anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political discourse. In doing so, the AfD, along with their non-political arm PEGIDA, challenge the status quo of German collective identity articulated and reinforced by the dominant discourse of Germany’s two largest parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social-Democrat Party Deutschland (SPD). Not only has the AfD set a precedent for a far-right entry into Germany’s parliament, polling in at over 13% (Stone 2017), it has done so overwhelmingly, having taken its place as the third largest party in Germany in terms of seats held in the Bundestag. The question is: What explains the conditions of possibility for radical right-wing populism to re-emerge, given Germany’s history? In other words, how is it possible, for this position to be articulated? While many scholars offer up economic explanations or talk about how the political opportunity was right, none of those explanations offer up an understanding of how this rhetoric resonates with parts of the German population, despite efforts to completely bury such sentiments. Discourse helps to formulate and map conditions of possibility, and I argue that by mapping the changing discourses in Germany, we can trace how the changes in the conditions of possibility allowed for the success of the AfD and PEGIDA.
Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 2019
The 2017 federal elections in Germany propelled the far-right party "Alternative für Deutschland" ("Alternative for Germany"-AfD) to become the third largest party in the federal parliament. I argue that this electoral success can be explained by the party's ability to mobilize a large part of the electorate that had abstained in previous elections. Theoretically, I argue that the AfD was able to asymmetrically mobilize voters because of its unique position in the German party system and because of a perceived centrist move of the CDU/CSU. Drawing on data from the Federal Returning Office, I show that the AfD was able to mobilize the electorate more successfully than other parties and that the party's electoral success was in large part due to this mobilization success with the change in turnout the second strongest predictor of AfD vote shares. Furthermore, employing individual level data, I show that a) a plurality of those voters who did not participate in the 2013 elections but participated in the 2017 elections voted for the AfD; and b) that the centrist move of the CDU is perceived much more pronouncedly among AfD voters than among non-AfD voters.