The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?

AbstractWithin 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 extraordinarily 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 reconfiguration 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. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. E.g. Stuttgarter Zeitung, 18 September 2013, p. 4; TAZ, 2 July 2014, p. 5.2. Most parties will of course try to alter this environment to their advantage.3. In a broader sense, the party’s organisational structures and deployment of campaign funds could also go under that rubric, although these obviously depend on recruitment and supply of external resources.4. The ‘Law and Order Party’ (PRO) of the early 2000s initially took a similar approach, but was not interested in Euroscepticism and remained confined to the city-state of Hamburg.5. The original manifesto is archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20120923000310/http://www.wa2013.de/index.php?id=208.6. Merkur online, http://www.merkur-online.de/aktuelles/politik/alternative-deutschland-afd-zustrom-enorm-ueber-10000-mitglieder-zr-2873622.html (accessed 3 July 2014).7. RP Online, 1 December 2013, http://www.rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/joerg-burger-ist-neuer-afd-chef-in-nrw-aid-1.3857120 (accessed 3 July 2014); Spiegel Online, 28 December 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-lucke-will-hessischen-landesvorsitzenden-abwaehlen-lassen-a-941072.html (accessed 3 July 2014); Zeit Online, 14 June 2014, http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2014-06/afd-thueringen-ruecktritt (accessed 3 July 2014).8. Süddeutsche Online, 23 March 2014, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/europa-parteitag-afd-lehnt-sanktionen-gegen-russland-ab-1.1919526 (accessed 3 July 2014).9. Deutsche Welle Online, 29 March 2014, http://www.dw.de/united-against-the-european-union/a-17530053 (accessed 3 July 2014).10. Lucke himself, Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former president of the Umbrella Organisation of German Industry (BDI), who favours a minimal state and has likened the EU to the former Soviet Union (Handelsblatt, 3 October 2011, http://www.handelsblatt.com/meinung/kolumnen/kurz-und-schmerzhaft/henkel-trocken-use-eudssr/4681178.html (accessed 3 July 2014)), Bernd Kölmel, a public servant with the Baden-Württemberg State Court of Auditors, Beatrix von Storch, an insolvency lawyer and fringe Christian-conservative homophobe activist, Joachim Starbatty, a retired professor of economics who has repeatedly (though unsuccessfully) sued the government over the euro, Ulrike Trebesius, a civil engineer, and the aforementioned Marcus Pretzell, a lawyer and property developer.11. The figures show the average of the boot-strapped point estimates. For the parameters that determine word ‘loadings’ on the ideological dimension, these tend to differ somewhat from the maximum likelihood estimates, but for the parameters, the two sets are virtually identical.12. For the sake of readability, words are used here instead of the actual stems.13. However, in the vast majority of the 500 bootstrap samples, the CSU is estimated to be slightly more right-wing than the AfD.14. E.g. Spiegel Online, 22 March 2014, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-parteitag-in-erfurt-bernd-lucke-attackiert-medien-a-960230.html (accessed 7 July 2014).15. Zeit Online, 18 March 2013, http://www.zeit.de/2013/17/alternative-fuer-deutschland-ausrichtung (accessed 7 July 2014).16. With the tacit blessing of the leadership, a group of backbenchers have voted against the bailout legislation and subsequently asked the Federal Constitutional Court to nullify these bills. The party’s core political project in the 2013–2017 parliament is a special road charge for cars registered abroad that would probably violate EU law, and the central plank of their 2014 campaign was the slogan ‘kick welfare cheats out’, which referred to alleged ‘benefit tourists’ from the eastern EU member states.17. This interpretation was emphasised by the design of the campaign posters, which surrounded the ‘EU’ in ‘Deutschland’ with the 12 European stars (shown in Figure 2).18. http://www.alternativefuer.de/konrad-adam-wie-wird-man-zu-einem-gefaehrlichen-buerger.19. More generally, Lucke and his party are the object of very intense scrutiny by their political adversaries and the mainstream media, yet there are very few verifiable public statements by Lucke or other members of the national leadership that could qualify as right-wing populist (see the borderline examples in Häusler and Roeser Citation2014: 37).20. This number excludes automatically generated overview pages for authors, tags, categories, and year of publication.21. Another relatively prominent male is Starbatty (20), now a MEP. On the other hand, there are only five references to female MEP von Storch, and the second female MEP Trebesius is mentioned just once. The image of the party leadership that the website projects is reflected in the coverage by the German media: For the period from 1 February 2013 to 11 July 2014, LexisNexis lists 2,096 news items mentioning both the AfD and Lucke and 622 items that refer to Henkel and the AfD. Adam, however is mentioned only 232 times, Gauland 231 times, and Petry 185 times. Von Storch is referenced 169 times, Starbatty 150 times, Trebesius 20 times, Pretzell four times, while there is just one article that mentions Casale.22. All 16 state level chapters as well as various regional and local chapters have set up their own fanpages, but those have much smaller fanbases, ranging from several thousands to less than 100.23. This number could be inflated, as the Facebook API returns about 264 posts which contain neither messages nor links, and which created no reactions. Presumably, these are either drafts or were retracted.24. This number includes URLs and symbols such as the hashtag sign.25. The number could be even smaller, as three of the most prolific posters have very similar surnames: Otto Blank, Andrea Blanc, and Andrea Cnalb.26. FAZ Online, 20 October 2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/machtkampf-in-der-afd-lucke-und-die-ruecktrittsdrohung-13220047.html (accessed 7 November 2014); Spiegel Online, 29 November 2014, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-bernd-lucke-laut-alexander-gauland-ein-kontrollfreak-a-1003889.html (accessed 29 November 2014).