How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017
Introduction
Radical right parties have become a permanent feature of most West European polities since the 1980s, but Germany has bucked this trend for decades. While parties to the right of the Christian Democrats and the Liberals occasionally found support in subnational elections, far-right politicians faced very high political and social hurdles in Germany, and electoral success at the national level remained elusive. This has changed only recently, when in 2017 the populist radical right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) garnered 12.6 per cent of the vote and became the first new party to enter the Bundestag since the 1990s.
Two factors can help to understand this unexpected development. First, the AfD did not start out as a radical right party but as an outfit that combined soft euroscepticism with economic liberalism and socially conservative policies (Arzheimer, 2015). Although the AfD, from its very beginning, attracted various stripes of right-wingers as members, its leadership initially comprised mainly of disappointed members of the German elite including many professors, lawyers, doctors, and former centre-right politicians, who carefully avoided any associations with traditional German right-wing extremism or the modern radical right parties in other European countries. This strategy made it possible for the party to gain access to the mainstream media and win subnational political representation in a string of state-level elections. Only in 2015, when the AfD's then-leader and many of his supporters left the party, the AfD adopted a populist stance and began to focus on immigration, refugees, and Islam as their new core issues, while the politics of the Euro zone took a back seat.
Second, the party's transformation was followed by Angela Merkel's unexpected decision to temporarily suspend the Dublin Regulation, which in turn led to the unorderly arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in Germany. As a result, the salience of the asylum/migration issue rose, and the AfD's re-positioning has proven very successful ever since. While the AfD remained just under the electoral threshold in the 2013 general election, a remarkable result for a new party, and had some respectable electoral successes from 2014 to early 2015, it has done spectacularly well since 2016. Our core assumption is that behind this development is a dramatic change in the motives of AfD voters. More specifically, the ideological shift of the AfD within a fundamentally changed environment induced voters to decide on the basis of migration attitudes. By testing this assumption, we also ascertain whether the AfD is in any sense a special case as previous research on the party would suggest, or whether support for them is driven by the same perceptions of ethnic threat that radical right electorates in other countries hold.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we present our conceptual framework and spell out our theoretical expectations. We then review the existing research on the AfD's ideology and voters and locate our own contribution within this larger body of knowledge. Following that, we analyse data from the 2013 to 2017 series of German Longitudinal Elections Study (GLES) tracking polls, a series of high-quality quarterly academic election surveys, to trace the evolution of the party's electorate. Our most important finding is that attitudes towards immigration, which were unrelated to the AfD vote in 2013, are now its most important driver. The final section presents our conclusions, and discusses avenues for further research.
Section snippets
Germany: radical right demand without adequate supply
In the 1980s, a new party family on the political right has emerged in Europe. The most prominent approach to describe, delineate, and differentiate these parties was developed by Cas Mudde (2007), who calls this family the “radical right”.
According to Mudde, radical right parties combine nativism - a tendency to regard non-native elements as a threat to the homogeneous nation-state - with authoritarian tendencies (Mudde, 2007, 21–23). What makes them “radical” is their opposition to some core
Leadership and ideology
Unsurprisingly, the meteoric rise of the AfD has prompted a flurry of academic enquiries into its nature. Researchers have collected and analysed information on the party's manifestos, leadership, and parliamentary candidates.
During its founding phase in 2012/2013, the AfD attracted a broad coalition of right-wingers as members (Arzheimer, 2015), ranging from ordo-liberal economists to Christian fundamentalists, but the party's top-tier was dominated by (mostly) men who belonged to Germany's
What do we already know about the AfD's electorate?
Because the AfD is still a relatively new party, only a handful of studies have looked into their national voter base, some of which examine very specific research questions. Moreover, most existing studies provide only snapshots of the electorate at a specific point in time or in a given election.
The 2013 federal election poses a special problem because there were so few AfD voters, but using the 2013 GLES short-term campaign panel Schwarzbözl and Fatke (2016) show that even then, AfD voters
Data, operationalisations, hypotheses, methods
Micro data for the analyses come from the long-term tracking component of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), a quarterly online survey that monitors voting intentions and public opinion for the German academic community.6
Conclusion and outlook
The point of departure for this paper was the observation that for the first time, Germany has a populist radical right-wing party that is entrenched at the national level. The rise of the AfD was facilitated by the fact that it began its political life as a softly eurosceptic, non-radical party that attracted voters and members from a relatively broad spectrum. The leadership crisis and transformation in 2015 could have been the end of the party, but the arrival of hundreds of thousands of
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