The rise of the AfD: A wake-up call without a clear answer

The success of the AfD is a wake-up call, a sign, a symbol, it was said again and again when it came to making sense of the most recent election results in Saxony-Anhalt. Many voters say they want to give the federal government a “reminder” with their vote. But even a decade and a half after the rise of right-wing populist parties began in Western European democracies, the question of what exactly is on this piece of paper, what this rise means and symbolizes, has not been answered satisfactorily. Significant emphasis is placed on increasing numbers of populist voters and falling approval rates among established parties, because the situation is indeed dramatic. But as soon as it becomes clear what this fever tells the political system about the deficiencies and structural problems of society, what can really be learned from it, most commentators fall silent or pull reforms out of the hat that they always thought were right anyway.

Where does this strange gap between crisis rhetoric and crisis interpretation come from, which only seems to widen with every election success? Part of the explanation lies with the AfD itself. Having so far been kept away from any important political office (and itself hesitant for a long time), the party has had no reason to convert the discontent that has brought it so many votes into a coherent government program, the success or failure of which it would then have to justify to its voters.

See F.A.Z. articles more often in your search results

F.A.Z. prefer on Google

This creates room for maneuver: The party leadership has so far felt very comfortable with collecting the dissatisfied from all levels without committing to fixed goals and the associated conflicting goals. That could now change in Saxony-Anhalt, although it is more likely that the party will also use its newfound power to portray itself as a victim of the EU, the federal government and the judiciary.

The legal intellectuals aren't helping either

What is even more remarkable, however, is that the right-wing populist movements themselves hardly make a serious attempt to interpret their success intellectually and make it available to their own voters as an ideology - unlike the labor movement or political Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries. While there are plenty of thinkers who have jumped on the populist bandwagon and are throwing their own personal theories and philosophies of history into the ring - Laura K. Field recently expertly mapped this terrain for the American case in her book Furious Minds - it's hard to argue that any of it really gets to the heart of the matter.

If the right-wing intellectuals even agree to present their concerns in the register of historical verifiability and do not focus on conspiracy theories and end-time scenarios like Curtis Yarvin, Christopher Rufo, Steve Bannon or Peter Thiel, they too will only end up with criticism from left-liberal elites who just have to get rid of them and everything will be fine again.

Furthermore, there is no agreement at all about where the journey should go - to the techno-libertarian utopia, to re-Catholicized communitarianism, to the ethnic community of fate in which especially the advisors close to the AfD see salvation? There has so far been no manifesto for right-wing populism, nor a theoretical self-declaration of the movement.

Things are not much different for voters. The social sciences have now compiled vast amounts of survey data to get to the bottom of voting motives. A similar picture emerges again and again: great dissatisfaction with the political system, coupled with a pronounced anti-immigrant sentiment, are - not surprisingly - the two attitudes with the highest predictive power.

And in fact, when it comes to migration, the closest connection can be made to objective social developments: many Western countries have experienced remarkably large waves of immigration in recent years - in Germany, the proportion of people with a migrant background has increased by half within just over a decade. It would be strange if such a rapid change in the social structure did not give rise to political conflicts.

Nevertheless, the problem seems to go beyond the desire for a more restrictive migration policy. Studies repeatedly show that xenophobia in Germany has not noticeably increased, and in some cases has even decreased. At the same time, there is a repeatedly measured connection among right-wing populist voters with status fears, feelings of national decadence, worries about job losses, demographic decline and economic insecurity, which play an important role as background factors. If you leave the regression analyzes aside and listen to some voters, you will see this immediately: When asked to talk about their motives, the respondents repeatedly glide from the alleged threat from Muslims to gender, to the lack of doctors' offices and supermarkets, to the heating law or to factories being closed.

Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey clearly described this phenomenon in their book “Destructive Lust”. Above all, AfD voters know that they are dissatisfied, and they also know who is to blame, but why and what should be seriously done about it disappears in the fog of general discontent. Nils Kumkar borrowed the apt term “indefinite negation” from Hegel for this phenomenon: the certainties of the political elite are vigorously rejected, but without offering them a well-defined alternative. You just grab what you can find.

Mere rhetoric will not be enough

All of this doesn't make it easy for the political system (and its observers) to filter out the information content of the free-floating discontent. After Merkel's term in office, the CDU/CSU parties drew the obvious conclusion of pursuing a more restrictive immigration policy in order to win back disgruntled voters. It hasn't helped anything so far. Especially since what is being sold as “pure CDU”, cuts to the welfare state and cuts in subsidies, tends to drive citizens even further away. The SPD, the Greens and the Left Party, on the other hand, are making the second adjustment and hope that the defense and expansion of the welfare state will help regain lost trust. But the economic fear and feeling of injustice that lies in the background of the populist election decision does not seem to be affected by this. The official welfare administration and the tax state are generally not very popular with AfD voters.

So only the level of rhetoric remains. The Chancellor took this route after the election when he announced that he would firmly adhere to the federal government's reform course, but wanted to offer voters more emotionally. He wants to tell better stories. One can imagine how it will be received by the audience to put nice stories over a boring and initially expensive bill.

Others, in turn, have moved on to denying the objectivity of right-wing populist discontent and declaring the misery complained about to be a fantasy that just needs to be talked out of people strongly enough. You then promote your own party by pointing out how terrible an AfD government would be. The Greens had quite a bit of success with this in Saxony-Anhalt. But this strategy also wears out over time - at some point the number of people who want to try it out due to a lack of alternatives grows.

So what to do? If it is true that the rise of right-wing populism is more than an irrational mood or a grievance that can be remedied through individual measures, if it actually hides a structural problem of historical significance, everything will be decided in the next few years by whether the political system is able to develop a theory that guides action on what really underlies the discontent that has so far only been expressed in a confused way. To put it more simply: Do the parties that have supported the Federal Republic so far find a good reason to be as dissatisfied as the AfD voters are? Only then, one can assume, can the omnipresent feeling of indignation be directed in a different, politically manageable direction. As long as this fails, the rise of right-wing populism will continue.