Germany's "new" right party AfD has seen ups and downs during its short history. Founded in 2013, they were ignored by existing parties as best as possible until they managed to get into three state parliaments and got 7.1% of the vote in the 2014 European Parliament elections.
After leadership upheaval in 2015 resulted in several founders leaving, the nice branding of the party as "center right" has undergone a change to "right" or even "extreme right", especially in the wake of an address of one leading member at the one year anniversary of the "anti muslimization" movement PEGIDA.
For this post, the finer - or rather not so fine - points of these organizations on the right are not of interest. For example, how many refugees should be allowed into Germany under what specific conditions is less important when the debate itself is on a firm xenophobic foundation.
In this post, we are interested in the explanations given by politicians and the most influential media when previously marginal right wing parties make gains or new actors pop up and acquire enough votes to be taken seriously.
While "center-left" and "left" went for the language of exclusion pretty quickly (riff-raff being the most famous quip), the "center-right" took on some of the catch phrases, especially that of "worried citizens". Only when they perceived AfD and PEGIDA as too closely allied, and with increasing arson attacks on refugee shelters, did they become more exclusionary.
A few standard stereotypes prevail in describing the rise of the "right". They are also used in the nowadays rare case when a substantially "left" movement gains steam, such as in Greece or Spain.
Disenchantment with the parties in power, the uneducated marginalized poor and incorrigibles make up the trio of prevalent arguments in everyday reporting. While experts try to examine the phenomenon in more detail, the dominant media outlets are generally happy to stick with the easy answers until election time.
Only in the aftermath of elections, or in historical studies, is a wider public given some better answers. When journalists report on the movement of voters from and to parties in an election, some trends appear. In the context of substantial gains on the right in recent German elections, a pattern described in Der Spiegel for a state election in Saxony in 2014 takes shape. The AfD gained a lot of votes (about 33 K) from the center-right CDU, and sizable numbers from the free market FDP (18K) and the Linke left (15K). A lot fewer came from the social democrats (about 8K) and the greens (3K).
"Disenchantment with the parties in power" is an easy label for this but does not really hold up. A detailed, if limited to one big city, study of AfD success in the city of Essen, where it reached 6.1%, did not support the disenchantment argument.
What about the poor?
The truly marginalized poor, i.e. those on the bare bones means tested long term assistance scheme Hartz IV did in fact show a preference for the AfD. The greater the proportion of Harz IV recipients, the better AfD did.
Unemployment did - surprise - not drive voters to the AfD, quite the opposite, in areas of higher unemployment, the party fared worse. In the full time but very low wage community, the AfD did again somewhat better.
The author of the study highlights a very narrow spread of votes across all 50 polling districts, a low of 4.4% and high of 8% for the right wing party in contrast with all others, such as FDP (low 1,1 high 11.6).
In socio-economic terms, this indicates that people in wealthy districts voted right-wing in a very similar pattern, though maybe not for the exact same reasons, as folks in poorer districts.
Germany's historically "most successful" and most thoroughly studied right-wing party, the Nazi NSDAP, has been described by researchers as a "people's party with a middle class bulge". German society has changed quite a bit since then, but maybe someone is willing to check if the democratic diet has eliminated the middle class bulge.
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