The ‘Alternative for Germany’: The rise of right-wing populism at the heart of Europe
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395718777718 |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| Author | Charles Lees |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
research-article2018
Special Issue Article
Politics
2018, Vol. 38(3) 295 –310
The ‘Alternative for Germany’:
© The Author(s) 2018
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The rise of right-wing populism https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395718777718
DOI: 10.1177/0263395718777718
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at the heart of Europe
Charles Lees
Flinders University, Australia
Abstract
This article charts the rise of the ‘Alternative for Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland or AfD)
from its inception in late 2012 to its unexpectedly strong performance in the 2017 Federal
election. In terms of the ‘inward’ aspect of Euroscepticism, the article considers the impact of
the emergence of successively more hardline leaderships in 2015 and 2017, which led to a shift
beyond opposition to aspects of the European integration process to a more profound critique of
German society and politics. In terms of the ‘outward’ aspect, it assesses the significance of these
developments in the wider debates around Euroscepticism and populism. The article concludes
that the AfD’s Euroscepticism is now nested within an ideological profile that increasingly conforms
to the template of an orthodox European right-wing populist party. It argues that the widely
unanticipated level of electoral support for the AfD in the 2017 Federal elections and its status
as the main opposition party in the Bundestag is a systemic shock and potential critical juncture
in the development of the German party system and the contestation of European integration in
the Federal Republic.
Keywords
AfD, Euroscepticism, Germany, political parties, populism
Received: 5 September 2017; Revised version received: 23 March 2018; Accepted: 6 April 2018
Introduction
The result of the 24 September 2017 Federal elections presented a profound shock to the
German political class. It was no surprise that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic
Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) were
returned as the largest party grouping in the Bundestag, but the success of the right-wing
populist ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD) – with 12.6% of the vote – was unprecedented.
For the first time since the early 1950s, a political party had unlocked viable political
space to the right of the CDU/CSU. Not only that, it became the third largest
Corresponding author:
Charles Lees, College of Business, Government and Law, Flinders University, Sturt Road, Bedford Park, SA
5001, Australia.
Email: charles.lees@flinders.edu.au
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Politics 38(3)
Figure 1. The 2017 German Federal election: % vote share and % change since 2013 Federal
election.
Source: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (2017).
party grouping in the Bundestag. The AfD performed strongly across Germany but did
particularly well in states of the former East Germany. Figure 1 provides the 2017
Bundestag election results (with changes since 2013).
The AfD’s disruptive potential was widely recognized since its inception in late 2012
(see inter alia Baluch, 2018; Decker, 2016; Lochocki, 2016; Rohrschneider and Whitefield,
2017; Schmitt-Beck, 2017), and it has only taken 4 years for this potential to become real-
ity. The 2017 Federal election results are of huge significance for the German party system
as whole. The two large catch-all parties, the CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic Party
of Germany (SPD), both did badly, reflecting a longer term trend of steady electoral decline
(Lees, 2005). The CDU/CSU only polled 33% of the popular vote, which was enough to
claim the role of Formateur in any future coalition negotiations, but nevertheless repre-
sented a less than ringing endorsement of ‘Merkelism’. The SPD did even worse, gaining
just over 20% of the vote: its worst Federal election result in the history of the Federal
Republic. The established smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), the
Left, and the Greens, all performed respectably, but it was the AfD that came third.
The immediate impact was on the process of government formation after the election.
Despite the steady decline of the CDU/CSU and SPD, none of the established smaller
parties had taken over what used to be the FDP’s ‘kingmaker’ role (Pappi, 1984). This left
either the CDU/CSU or SPD with considerable voting power and discretion over the pro-
cess of coalition formation (Lees, 2006, 2012). The size of the AfD’s vote in 2017, how-
ever, added a new degree of complexity to coalition building. The AfD was an unacceptable
coalition partner for both CDU/CSU and SPD but its 94 seats in what was now a 709-seat
Bundestag made it even harder for one of the other smaller parties to assume the king-
maker role. This reduced the number of alternative coalition arrangements available to
the CDU/CSU as Formateur and, following an unsuccessful attempt to form a so-called
Jamaica coalition (with the FDP and Greens), Merkel argued that the only alternatives left
on the table were either a return to the now familiar Grand coalition or the prospect of
new elections. The eventual outcome of coalition negotiations was a Grand Coalition,
which meant the AfD became the main opposition party in the Bundestag. This is a major
disruptive event, not just to the day-to-day parliamentary business of the Bundestag but
also to long-held perceptions of the Federal Republic as a stable and centripetal polity
(Smith, 1986).
Lees
297
The AfD’s disruptive impact was further amplified because its performance in the
2017 Federal election surprised many commentators. Most analysts were confident that
the AfD would scale the Federal Republic’s 5% electoral hurdle but, in the months lead-
ing up to the Federal election, the party fell short of the double-digit support in opinion
polls that it had in 2016. It was recognized that the AfD’s political and organizational base
in the European Parliament (albeit reduced by resignations from the party) and in 13 out
of 16 State parliaments made it better prepared to fight the 2017 Federal election than it
had been in 2013. It was also widely acknowledged that the party had now developed its
programmatic profile to encompass a critique of German society that advocated the redis-
tribution of power resources across the political system, between parties, between elites
and ordinary citizens, and between insider and outsider societal groups. But, on the basis
of what most commentators thought they knew about the dynamics of the German party
system and the (historically risk averse) political preferences of German voters, many
assumed that the more potentially transformative the AfD’s political offer became, the
more it would impose clear limits on the party’s political appeal.
The AfD’s actual electoral performance in the 2017 Federal elections shows us that,
although the AfD now conforms to the template of ‘classical right-wing populist par-
ties in Europe’ (Kette, 2016), its electoral appeal was not as limited as we might have
thought. Indeed, I would argue that it allowed the party to present a clear political
message to a distinct set of German voters and erstwhile non-voters. In other words,
the AfD became the third largest party grouping in the Bundestag because and not
despite of the party’s increasing radicalism. In this context, the AfD’s success in the
2017 Federal elections and its aftermath is not just a systemic shock; it could be a criti-
cal juncture in the development of the party system and the contestation of European
Union (EU) integration in Germany.
In this article, I examine how the AfD became Germany’s third political party through
the analytical lens of historical institutionalism (HI) and drawing on Pirro and Taggart’s
(2016) notions of the ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ aspects of populist Eurosceptic politics. The
rest of the article is structured as follows. First, I describe my use of HI and Pirro and
Taggart’s schema by looking at the AfD’s disruptive impact on the development of the
German party system and in the context of the German political elite’s traditional pro-
Europeanism. In the following section, I describe the impact of the three European crises
on German politics. I then go on to chart the emergence of the AfD, its initial failure to
scale the Germany’s 5% electoral barrier in the 2013 Federal election, and its subsequent
run of electoral successes in European Parliament and state parliament elections, culmi-
nating in its 2017 Federal election success. Following that, I examine the internal aspect
of the AfD’s populist Euroscepticism and assess how two significant upheavals in the
party’s senior leadership both reflect and have driven forward the progressive radicaliza-
tion of the party’s programme. I then look at the external aspect of the AfD’s emergence,
how the party’s ideological profile has developed over time, and its significance in terms
of party-based Euroscepticism and populism. The article concludes with a discussion of
its findings in which I return to the notion of the 2017 Federal election being a potential
critical juncture in German party politics.
HI, party system development, and change in Germany
This article draws upon the HI literature (Hall, 1989; Keohane, 2017; Krasner, 1984;
Skocpol, 1992) in that it assumes that institutions develop in an evolutionary process
298
Politics 38(3)
(Pierson, 2004), marked by junctures in which ‘rapid bursts of change [are] followed by
long periods of stasis’ (Krasner,...
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