Germany

Case notes

Die Linke

After German unification in 1990, the former ruling communist party of the eastern German Democratic Republic became the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). While maintaining a presence in the Bundestaag in the 1990s, the PDS party was generally seen as an eastern regionalist party without national appeal. This changed somewhat when it merged with the renegade left faction of the Social Democratic Party opposed to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005, the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG), to form Die Linke (“The Left”). This was technically an electoral alliance in 2005 but was formalised as a unified political party in 2007. According to several scholars, Die Linke was a fundamentally different party to the old PDS (Patton 2013, 220). The new party’s vote doubled in 2005 from the PDS’s previous performance, and peaked at 11.9% in the 2009 election. While there is an argument that the PDS itself should be included in the dataset, several scholars have argued that its political style and platform did not constitute populism as practiced by Die Linke (Decker and Hartleb 2007, 447).

Die Linke advocated a clearly populist agenda and style under the leadership of former WASG member and federal Minister for Finance Oskar Lafontaine, who led the party until 2010. The party’s ideology, while generally far left, has always been somewhat undefined and simplistic (Hough and Koß 2009, 82). According to Hough and Koβ, its platform has been a combination of a broad opposition to neoliberalism, advocacy of pacifism in foreign policy, and a populist opposition to “bad guys” – especially financial elites and big business (Hough and Koß 2009, 82; Thomeczek 2023, 5) (OTH_ECONOMIC = 3). Aside from economic elites of various stripe, the party opposes the threat of foreign imperial forces (the US and NATO) (OTH_FOREIGN = 2), and the political class of elite politicians supposedly owned by capital (Hough and Koß 2009, 85; Hough and Keith 2019) (OTH_POLCLASS = 2). In both these registers however, the party does not quite reach a 3 by our definition. There is no evidence of any populist rhetoric regarding OTH_ETHNIC (although there is a case to be made that is regionalist in representing the interests of East Germans), OTH_IMMIGRANT, or OTH_MILITARY (all = 1).

While Die Linke had organisational roots and factional divisions, Lafontaine’s leadership of the party does seem to have been substantially significant to its political meaning and appeal (Decker and Hartleb 2007, 449; Patton 2013, 222). This does not appear to have been replicated by any leader since his departure in 2010 (Patton 2013, 231) (CHARISMA = 2 2005-2009, 1 2009-2020). The party advocates a rethinking of German democracy, including more direct forms of participation and decision making (Hough and Koß 2009, 84; Olsen 2018, 77). As it stated in 2017, “elections become a farce if those elected allow their decisions to be dictated by big corporations and the wealthy and thus evade democratic scrutiny” (Hough and Keith 2019, 137). While this reflects a general criticism of the status quo of German liberal democracy, it is not clear that this constitutes a threat to LIBDEMNORMS in any way that would register on our scale (= 1).

Alternative for Germany

The Alternative for Gernamy (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) was formed with several minor members of the centre-right CDU-CSU before the 2013 election, driven principally by opposition to German bailout of debtor nations in the Eurozone. The party narrowly missed the federal electoral threshold of 5%, but grew rapidly in its early months and started to articulate clearer policy stances on matters other than the Eurozone issue (Arzheimer 2015, 541), causing some conflict among the various factions that had flocked to it as a general protest party of the right in 2013. The party entered Parliament in the following 2017 election with 12.6% of the vote, by which time it had moved many of its policies closer to the conventional European far-right.

According to many scholars (Arzheimer 2015; Arzheimer and Berning 2019, 1; Dilling 2018), at the time of the 2013 election the party was not particularly populist or radical, acting as a general protest party and avoiding German taboos about the radical right. In fact, Angela Merkel’s move of the CDU/CSU to the centre, coupled with the fact that most of the new AfD had ties to that party’s conservative wing, led some to consider the AfD a new centre right challenger to the CDU/CSU (Dilling 2018) (note that the party is not coded for this election in any case as it was under the 5% threshold). In 2015, a power struggle saw the departure of moderate party leader Bernd Lucke and his faction, leaving those in favour of more nativist and populist rhetoric in charge. Months later, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal response to the refugee crisis of 2015-16 saw a rise in support for the party based on the hardline anti-immigration and anti-Islam stances of its new leaders (Arzheimer and Berning 2019, 3).

Since the fall of fascism, German politics is extremely hostile to radical nativism and highly pro-EU integration, making even small movements on these scales seem relatively significant even when they do not match regional or global standards. While awareness of this fact should temper allegations of any party’s radicalism, the AfD did employ populist and radical stances on several key variables in the 2017 election. New leader Frauke Petry made headlines by suggesting that refugees could be shot at the border, and built ties with the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and other far right parties (Arzheimer and Berning 2019, 3). The party also allied with the radical Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA) organisation (Dilling 2018, 88), started to advocate closing borders with European neighbour states in order to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers (Dilling 2018, 89), and claimed outright that “Islam does not belong in Germany” (Olsen 2018, 78). For these stances it is generally seen by the literature to feature the kind of anti-immigrant and ethnonationalist stances as other populist right wing parties in Europe (Hartmann, Kurz, and Lengfeld 2022, 139) (OTH_IMMIGRANT = 3, OTH_ETHNIC = 3).

After 2015 the party also adopted a populist rhetoric against the “political class of career politicians”, a.k.a. the “political cartel” (Dilling 2018, 88), earning it a 3 on OTH_POLCLASS (see also Hansen and Olsen 2019, 3; Olsen 2018, 71; Goerres, Spies, and Kumlin 2018; Berbuir, Lewandowsky, and Siri 2015, 173). In one election program, the party spoke of a “political class whose overriding interest is only its own power, status, and material benefit” (Olsen 2018, 79). While attacking all established parties as enemies of the “volkisch” (a highly sensitive word in Germany given its association with Nazism), the party focused its rhetoric on Merkel in 2017, who is deemed to have betrayed “the people” by allowing refugees to enter (Nociar and Thomeczek 2018, 2). The party is Eurosceptic, but not exceeding a 2 on OTH_FOREIGN.

While many have accused the AfD of being an authoritarian radical right party, it is not evident that it should register on the LIBDEMNORMS scale. While its original members were insiders in the CDU/CSU, these were not powerful enough to register on the INSIDER variable by 2017. It is also not evident that the CHARISMA of the party leaders is particularly important for its political meaning.

References

Arzheimer, Kai. 2015. ‘The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?’ West European Politics 38 (3): 535–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1004230.

Arzheimer, Kai, and Carl C. Berning. 2019. ‘How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Their Voters Veered to the Radical Right, 2013–2017’. Electoral Studies 60 (August): 102040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.04.004.

Berbuir, Nicole, Marcel Lewandowsky, and Jasmin Siri. 2015. ‘The AfD and Its Sympathisers: Finally a Right-Wing Populist Movement in Germany?’ German Politics 24 (2): 154–78.

Decker, Frank, and Florian Hartleb. 2007. ‘Populism on Difficult Terrain: The Right- and Left-Wing Challenger Parties in the Federal Republic of Germany’. German Politics 16 (4): 434–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644000701652466.

Dilling, Matthias. 2018. ‘Two of the Same Kind?: The Rise of the AfD and Its Implications for the CDU/CSU’. German Politics and Society 36 (1): 84–104.

Goerres, Achim, Dennis C. Spies, and Staffan Kumlin. 2018. ‘The Electoral Supporter Base of the Alternative for Germany’. Swiss Political Science Review 24 (3): 246–69.

Hansen, Michael A., and Jonathan Olsen. 2019. ‘Flesh of the Same Flesh: A Study of Voters for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the 2017 Federal Election’. German Politics 28 (1): 1–19.

Hartmann, Jörg, Karin Kurz, and Holger Lengfeld. 2022. ‘Modernization Losers’ Revenge? Income Mobility and Support for Right- and Left-Wing Populist Parties in Germany’. European Sociological Review 38 (1): 138–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab024.

Hough, Dan, and Dan Keith. 2019. ‘The German Left Party: A Case of Pragmatic Populism’. In The Populist Radical Left in Europe, edited by Giorgos Katsambekis and Alexandros Kioupkiolis, 129–44. https://www.routledge.com/The-Populist-Radical-Left-in-Europe-1st-Edition/Katsambekis-Kioupkiolis/p/book/9781138744806.

Hough, Dan, and Michael Koß. 2009. ‘Populism Personified or Reinvigorated Reformers? The German Left Party in 2009 and Beyond’. German Politics and Society 27 (2): 76–91.

Nociar, Tomas, and Jan Philipp Thomeczek. 2018. ‘Far Right Politics in Germany: From Fascism to Populism?’ Online resource. LSE European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) Blog. London School of Economics and Political Science. 24 January 2018. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog.

Olsen, Jonathan. 2018. ‘The Left Party and the AfD: Populist Competitors in Eastern Germany’. German Politics and Society 36 (1): 70–83. https://doi.org/10.3167/gps.2018.360104.

Patton, David F. 2013. ‘The Left Party at Six: The PDS–WASG Merger in Comparative Perspective’. German Politics 22 (3): 219–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2013.794454.

Thomeczek, Jan Philipp. 2023. ‘Moderate in Power, Populist in Opposition? Die Linke’s Populist Communication in the German States’. Journal of Political Ideologies 0 (0): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2023.2196516.