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“This isn't a protest vote anymore. Five or six years ago, the majority of AFD voters still said ‘I vote for them despite their positions’. Now the majority of AFD voters vote for them because of their positions.”
German-born University of Edinburgh academic Dr Jan Eichhorn is reflecting on the growing success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party which secured an unprecedented 43% of the vote at last week’s local elections in his home state of Saxony-Anhalt. AfD, which is already the main opposition in the national parliament – the Bundestag – now hopes to govern an entire region for the first time. But what underlies their burgeoning success in a nation still psychologically scarred by the rise of the Nazis and the experience of World War Two?
Dr Eichhorn, a political scientist who has polled voters in Saxony-Anhalt, has been sharing his insights with the Byline Times Podcast and says that the AfD (like Reform in the UK and the MAGA movement in the United States) has been successful at diverting the blame for economic grievances towards migrants rather than billionaires and a system that encourages inequality.
“We see that yes, anti-immigration sentiment has increased, but most people, including in Saxony-Anhalt, don’t think migration is the number one problem. The number one problem for them has to do with real, material changes – the changes in their communities, the lack of public services, all these things come through,” says Eichhorn. But voters are then (mis)led by the AfD into “scapegoating” recent arrivals – “whose fault it isn’t” – for these broader and more complex societal problems.
Rather than challenging the AfD’s narrative, he argues that mainstream politicians have made the problem worse, by appearing to endorse the party’s anti-migrant stance – much as Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government echoed Reform’s language over asylum seekers. Eichhorn points an accusing finger at Germany’s former Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “There was a famous moment where Scholz said ‘we are going to remove en masse people who aren’t allowed to stay in the country.’ None of that benefited Social Democrats or [their mainstream rivals] the Christian Democrats. The only ones who benefited, like everywhere else, was the AfD, because it normalised that discourse. It increased the salience of migration far beyond where most people had it.”
One of the AfD’s most successful tactics has been to animate a sense of nostalgia for a mythical bygone era of greater prosperity and low crime. In the UK, the far-right has ramped up the fear of rising violence in similar fashion, even though official statistics show a falling crime rate. Eichhorn says “what’s really essential here is that the AfD benefits from tapping into the sense of decline, the sense of deterioration, even in places that are doing economically well, and even amongst people who personally say ‘my household finances are great’. That overarching sense of deterioration is something that that they have been able to mobilise around.”
For all the parallels between the AfD, Reform and Trump’s Republican Party, there is also a specifically German dimension to the party’s success in areas like Saxony-Anhalt. The tumult resulting from the reunification of the country in 1990, following the dissolution of the DDR (East Germany), meant that many of the old certainties disappeared, along with the safe, state-funded jobs on which millions relied for their income.
Eichhorn observes that “although we also have West German [areas] that have gone through massive deindustrialization, they didn't, on top of this, have to go through a massive change of political and societal system as well. It's no surprise that the age group most likely to vote for the AfD are middle-aged people. It's actually quite different to the age structure in Britain, where we see that the older you get, the more likely you are to vote for the far right. In Germany, it's the middle-aged group that is most likely to do this, and in particular, middle-aged men in East Germany. That disruption of the 1990s resonates. There was a period of unemployment above 20% – that's the time when I grew up in in Saxony. We were the worst state in Germany with 21-22% unemployment. Employment figures are better now. We're at about 8% unemployment, still above the national average, but it's not as dramatic. But what it has created is a sense, overall, of disempowerment.”
It’s also clear that the discomfort previous generations felt at supporting a far-right party has now disappeared. The AfD is officially classed as ‘confirmed right wing extremist’ by the nation’s intelligence service; it is ethno-nationalist, anti-Muslim, Euro-sceptic and pro-Russian.
Yet despite (or perhaps, because of) that, it is evidently growing in popularity, at least in some areas. Eichhorn suggests that while the party may tweak their policy to appeal to voters in different regions at different moments, we should be in now doubt as to their underlying ideology. “Their positions are really extreme. They even talk about removing people who have German citizenship from the country if they don't fit, if they're not ‘really German’. Obviously they're trying to downplay some of those more extreme positions at the moment, but a lot of them have neo-Nazi backgrounds. There's nothing hidden here. This party is that extreme in their views.”
Watch or listen to the latest episode of the Byline Times podcast here.