Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament (Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy) [1 ed.] 0367634082, 9780367634087

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This extremely informative volume proves the importance of combining the analysis of street politics and institutional politics. Looking at the different facets of the interactions between protests and elections, social movements and political parties, the book represents an important contribution to understanding the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany. Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy This compelling volume is a must-read for scholars and students seeking to understand the interconnections between far-right protest and electoral politics in general and Germany’s radical and extreme right in particular. Analysing the rise of the far right from street protests to parliamentary office, the authors creatively contribute to many important debates in the field. Swen Hutter, FU Berlin and Social Science Center Berlin (WZB), Germany Bringing together a diverse collection of German and international experts, this book provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the German far right in its various shades and shapes. Moreover, the various chapters firmly ground the German experience in a broader international context. This makes Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics a must read for scholars of both German politics and the international far right. Cas Mudde, author of The Far Right Today (2019)

CONTEMPORARY GERMANY AND THE FOURTH WAVE OF FAR-RIGHT POLITICS

This volume provides a state-of-the-art analysis on the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany by leading scholars in the field. Innovatively, the book focuses not only on the role of the electoral breakthrough of AfD, the Federal Republic’s first-ever nationally established far-right party, but also on the many crucial instances of non-party activism, such as the ‘New Right’ intellectual circles, PEGIDA street protest, and political violence. For a long time, Germany was regarded as an exceptional case because of the lack of an established far-right party on the national level. Times have changed – but Germany still remains unique. The book highlights four features that continue to make the case exceptional within Western Europe: (I) The strong diversity of vibrant far-right political players in Germany and their many interconnections, (II) the electoral success of AfD, i.e. the delayed electoral breakthrough of an only recently founded far-right party on the national level, (III) the importance of ‘militant democracy’, specifically how established players have responded to AfD, and (IV) the relevance of the east-west divide for understanding far-right politics in Germany. Contributions on these topics highlight the broader theoretical relevance of the analysis of the German far right, connecting to many research questions that have occupied scholars also in other contexts. The book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the far right, German and European politics, as well as in the interconnections among political parties, social movements, and subcultural milieus. Manès Weisskircher leads a research group on far-right politics and climate action (REXKLIMA) at the Institute of Political Science, TU Dresden, and is affiliated to the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo, and the Center for Civil Society Research, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). His research interests are social movements, political parties, democracy, and the far right.

Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy Series Editors: Caterina Froio, Sciences Po, Paris, France, Andrea L. P. Pirro, Università di Bologna, Italy and Stijn van Kessel, Queen Mary University of London, UK Founding Series Editors: Roger Eatwell, University of Bath, UK and Cas Mudde, University of Georgia, USA

This series covers academic studies within the broad fields of ‘extremism’ and ‘democracy’, with volumes focusing on adjacent concepts such as populism, radicalism, and ideological/religious fundamentalism. These topics have been considered largely in isolation by scholars interested in the study of political parties, elections, social movements, activism, and radicalisation in democratic settings. A key focus of the series, therefore, is the (inter-)relation between extremism, radicalism, populism, fundamentalism, and democracy. Since its establishment in 1999, the series has encompassed both influential contributions to the discipline and informative accounts for public debate. Works will seek to problematise the role of extremism, broadly defined, within an ever-globalising world, and/or the way social and political actors can respond to these challenges without undermining democratic credentials. The books encompass two strands: Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy includes books with an introductory and broad focus which are aimed at students and teachers. These books will be available in hardback and paperback. Europeanisation of the Contemporary Far Right Generation Identity and Fortress Europe Anita Nissen Radical Left Voters in Western Europe Raul Gomez and Luis Ramiro Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics From the Streets to Parliament Edited by Manès Weisskircher For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Extremism-and-Democracy/book-series/ED

CONTEMPORARY GERMANY AND THE FOURTH WAVE OF FAR-RIGHT POLITICS From the Streets to Parliament

Edited by Manès Weisskircher

Designed cover image: © Sabine Volk 2019 First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Manès Weisskircher; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Manès Weisskircher to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weisskircher, Manès, 1987- editor. Title: Contemporary Germany and the fourth wave of far-right politics : from the streets to parliament / edited by Manès Weisskircher. Description: New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge studies in extremism and democracy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023014490 (print) | LCCN 2023014491 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367634087 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367634094 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003120049 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Conservatism--Germany--History--21st century. | Populism--Germany--History--21st century. | Germany--Politics and government--21st century. | Right-wing extremists--Germany--21st century. | Alternative für Deutschland (Political party) | Political violence--Germany-21st century. | Pegida (Organization) Classification: LCC JC573.2.G3 C66 2024 (print) | LCC JC573.2.G3 (ebook) | DDC 324.243/030905--dc23/eng/20230601 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014490 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014491 ISBN: 978-0-367-63408-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-63409-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12004-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Introduction: German Exceptionalism During the Fourth Wave of Far-right Politics Manès Weisskircher PART I

The Far Right Outside of Legislatures

ix xi xii 1

19

1 Germany’s New Right: Between Neo-National Socialism and Liberal Democracy Uwe Backes

21

2 Germany’s Anti-Islamic Pegida Movement: A Local Phenomenon and its Broader Impact Maik Herold and Steven Schäller

39

3 Interconnected Realities: The Hybrid Dynamics of Far-Right Online and Offline Mobilisation Matthias Hoffmann and Julia Rone

57

viii Contents

4 Fitting in, Standing Out: Far-Right Youth Style and Commercialization in Germany Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Annett Gräfe-Geusch

76

5 The Violence of the Far-Right: The Three Decades after German Reunification Pascal D. König and Sebastian Jäckle

91

PART II

The Electoral Breakthrough of the AfD

113

6 The Politicization of Immigration and Radical Right Party Politics in Germany Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger

115

7 The Electoral Breakthrough of the AfD and the East-West Divide in German Politics Kai Arzheimer

140

8 Far-Right Parties and Divisions Over Movement-Party Strategy: The AfD and the Anti-Corona Protests of Querdenken Manès Weisskircher

159

9 The Power of Anti-Pacting in Germany: History and Outlook David Art

174

10 Learning how to Respond to the AfD: Uploading from the Subnational to the National Level? Anna-Sophie Heinze

189

11 The AfD’s Influence on Germany’s Coalition Landscape: Obstacle or Opportunity for the Center-right? Frank Decker, Fedor Ruhose, and Philipp Adorf

205

Conclusion: Toward a Fifth Wave of Far-Right Politics in Germany and Beyond? Manès Weisskircher

220

Index

231

FIGURES

5.1 Violence-prone far-right and far-left extremists in Bavaria, Brandenburg, Berlin, and Baden-Wurttemberg from 1990 to 2019 5.2 Violence-prone far-right and far-left extremists in Bremen, Hesse, Hamburg, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania from 1990 to 2019 5.3 Violence-prone far-right and far-left extremists in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Schleswig Holstein from 1990 to 2019 5.4 Violence-prone far-right and far-left extremists in Saarland, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia from 1990 to 2019 5.5 Violence-prone far-right extremists in 2019, per 100,000 German inhabitants 5.6 Politically motivated acts of violence in Bavaria, Brandenburg, Berlin, and Baden-Wurttemberg from 2001 to 2019 5.7 Politically motivated acts of violence in Bremen, Hesse, Hamburg, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania from 2001 to 2019 5.8 Politically motivated acts of violence in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Schleswig Holstein from 2001 to 2019 5.9 Politically motivated acts of violence in Saarland, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia from 2001 to 2019 5.10 Violence against asylum-seekers (sum of personal injuries and arson attacks on accommodations) (2014-2019) 5.11 Number of people killed by far-right violence (1990-2020) 6.1 Immigration and asylum applications 6.2 Public support for immigration to Germany

94 94 95 95 96 97 97 98 98 100 101 117 120

x Figures

6.3 Immigration as one of the two most important issues facing Germany 6.4 Frequency of immigration-related terms in party manifestos 6.5 Frequency of immigration-related terms in parliamentary speeches 6.6 Immigration salience across EU member states 7.1 Support for the AfD 2013-2022 (elections and national polling average) 7.2 A structural equation model of AfD voting 7.3 Distribution of latent nativism and populism in the eastern and western states 7.4 Nativism and predicted AfD support in both regions

121 122 123 127 143 149 152 154

TABLES

4.1 5.1 6.A1 6.A2 6.A3 6.A4 6.A5 6.A6 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 10.1 11.1

Youth association with the far-right scene Overview of selected events for the analysis of media discourse Immigration-related terms SPD CDU/CSU Left Party (Die Linke/PDS) Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) AfD Indicators for populism Indicators for right-wing extremism Indicators for nativism/anti-immigrant sentiment Measurement models Correlations between latent variables Attitudinal east-west differences Regression of AfD vote on extremism, nativism, and populism Mainstream parties’ responses to the AfD AfD voting behavior on CDU initiatives in the state parliament of Rhineland-Palatinate in 2019 11.2 AfD voting behavior on initiatives of the ‘traffic light’ coalition (government and parliamentary groups that are part of the government) in the state parliament of Rhineland-Palatinate in 2019

85 104 132 133 134 136 137 139 148 148 149 150 151 151 153 194 215

215

CONTRIBUTORS

Philipp Adorf is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department for Political Sciences

and Sociology, University of Bonn. His research focuses on US politics, right-wing populism, and the working-class vote.

David Art is a professor at the Department of Political Science, Tufts University. His research focuses on extremist political parties and movements, the politics of history and memory, and comparative historical analysis in the social sciences. Kai Arzheimer is a professor at the Department of Political Science, University of

Mainz. His research focuses on electoral behavior, populist radical right parties, German politics, and research methods.

Uwe Backes is deputy director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism

Studies (HAIT) and a professor at the Institute for Political Science, TU Dresden. His research focuses on extremism, the far right, and autocracy.

Frank Decker is a professor at the Department for Political Sciences and Sociology,

University of Bonn. His research focuses on party politics, democracy, right-wing populism, and federalism.

Theresa Gessler is an assistant professor in comparative politics at European University Viadrina. Her research focuses on conflicts around democracy, immigration, digitalization, and patterns of party competition.

Contributors  xiii

Annett Gräfe-Geusch is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DEZIM e.V.). Her research interests include (migration-related) diversity in organizations, education policy, and the far right. Anna-Sophie Heinze is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political

Science and the Trier Institute for Democracy and Party Research (TIDUP), Trier University. Her research focuses on political parties, democracy, populism, and the far right.

Maik Herold is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mercator Forum Migration and Democracy (MIDEM) and the Institute of Political Science, Technological University of Dresden. His research focuses on the far right, migration, and political theory. Matthias Hoffmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communica-

tion, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on social networks, protest, and social media.

Sophia Hunger is an assistant professor in computational social science at the University of Bremen. Her research focuses on protest movements, political engagement, party competition, political communication, and applied quantitative methods. Sebastian Jäckle is an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg. His research focuses on quantitative methods, (political) attitudes, electoral studies, and far-right violence. Pascal D. König works as an advisor for the German Corporation for International Cooperation and was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, and a postdoctoral researcher at TU Kaiserslautern. His research mainly deals with technological change, democracy, and governance. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor at the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education and director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), American University. Her research focuses on nationalism, extremism, education, and higher education. Julia Rone is a postdoctoral researcher at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and

Democracy at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on contentious politics, the politicization of digital sovereignty, and the complex intersections between media and politics.

xiv Contributors

Fedor Ruhose is state secretary at the Ministry for Labour, Social Affairs, Trans-

formation, and Digitalization, Rhineland-Palatine. His research focuses on party politics and right-wing populism.

Steven Schäller is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mercator Forum Migration and Democracy (MIDEM) and the Institute of Political Science, Technological University of Dresden. His research focuses on the far right and Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court. Manès Weisskircher leads the research group REXKLIMA at the Institute of

Political Science, TU Dresden, and is affiliated to the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo, and the Center for Civil Society Research, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). His research interests are social movements, political parties, democracy, and the far right.

INTRODUCTION German Exceptionalism During the Fourth Wave of Far-right Politics Manès Weisskircher

Introduction

Up until the electoral breakthrough of Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) in the mid-2010s and its reelection in the Bundestagswahl of 2021, scholars of far-right politics usually treated Germany as an exceptional ‘negative’ case: For about seventy years, the Federal Republic did not experience a successful far-right political player in the organizational form that constitutes ‘the vital principle of representative government’ (Bagehot 1867), i.e., a political party. While several such parties enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame, gaining seats in regional legislatures or the European Parliament, the national party system of the Federal Republic remained free of such political forces and therefore markedly distinct from most of the rest of Western Europe. Crucially, post-fascist West Germany was also special in comparison to the two post-fascist societies of Austria and Italy, countries that saw relatively successful far-right parties soon after the end of World War II, along with several instances of far-right government participation. No surprise then that scholars have been occupied with explaining the weakness of the far right in post-war West German party politics (e.g. Decker 2000, McGowan 2003, Art 2006) – and how this eventually changed with the rise of the AfD (e.g. Berbuir et al. 2015, Arzheimer 2019, Hansen and Olsen 2019, Mader and Schoen 2019, Weisskircher 2020). Still, this ‘latecomer story’ is only one, albeit relevant, interpretation of farright politics in Germany. Other than this perspective, Germany has also been described as a positive case of ‘extremism without successful parties’ (Backes and Mudde 2000), in reference to the long-term presence of important far-right forces outside of the Bundestag. And indeed, several extra-parliamentary players have shaped far-right politics in the Federal Republic outsides of legislatures. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-1

2  Manès Weisskircher

In the late 20th and early 21st century, when compared to most Western European countries, Germany stood out in several respects. When it comes to street mobilization, the Federal Republic experienced a comparatively high share of antiimmigration protest (Minkenberg 2003, Hutter 2014). Most drastically, the level of far-right political violence was higher in Germany than in most other Western European countries (Koopmans 1996, Ravndal 2018). Additionally, research has also emphasized the strength of the German far right in less visible settings, reflected for example in a significant youth scene (Miller-Idriss 2009) and in ever-growing online networks (Caiani et al. 2012). In sum, if one takes a broader perspective on far-right politics, one comes to the conclusion that ‘pre-AfD Germany’ was not only a latecomer in terms of party representation at the national level, but also a frontrunner when it comes to other forms of far-right mobilization. With the electoral success of the AfD, ‘populist right-wing radicalism became (almost) normal in Germany’ (Arzheimer 2019). Importantly, though, this does not mean that Germany has quickly turned into a case just like (almost) any other in Western Europe. Comparative research has long maintained that the establishment of a far-right party in parliament typically leads to the demobilization of farright non-party activism (Minkenberg 2003, Giugni et al. 2005, Hutter 2014). The stronger a far-right political party, the weaker the far right outside of parliament, or so the assumption goes. The reasoning behind this is that far-right parties may channel the discontent of their sympathizers, making them (even) less inclined to pursue ‘unconventional’ political action such as protesting on the streets. Moreover, in trying to appear ‘respectable’, far-right party leaders may hardly have an interest in staging protest events that bear the risk of attracting unwanted guests such as neo-Nazis. However, the case of contemporary Germany shows that the negative relationship between far-right party strength and other forms of far-right activism does not necessarily hold. This observation is essential for the content of this volume: Germany has kept its status as Sonderfall (special case), contradicting widely found patterns in political science. Currently, the AfD is well represented in Germany’s political system, present not only in the Bundestag, but also in all regional legislatures apart from SchleswigHolstein, where it failed to get reelected in May 2022. At the same time, instead of demobilization, observers witness a continuation and even intensification of farright mobilization outside of legislatures: While the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident, PEGIDA) street protests in Dresden were sustained on a small scale after their widely discussed peak in winter of 2014 and 2015, this group and others were still able to mobilize significant numbers of followers on several occasions, such as in Chemnitz 2018 (Weisskircher and Berntzen 2019). During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Corona protests such as Querdenken, while heterogeneous in terms of organizers and in particular followers, were also marked by a support of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, and xenophobia (Nachtwey et al. 2020, Grande et al. 2021). In addition, the online sphere continues to boom: The Reuters

Introduction  3

Institute Digital News Report shows how far-right ‘alternative news’ outlets have a wide audience in Germany, similar to or even larger than in some other Western European countries (Newman 2018). And while French far-right intellectuals had for a long time overshadowed their German counterparts, by now some German individuals and outlets became household names in the European far-right scene (Wagner 2017, Weiß 2018). Far-right political violence increased in particular after the 2015/2016 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, especially in regions that had before witnessed only low levels of such type of criminal behaviour (Frey 2020). While it is wise neither to underestimate nor to exaggerate the strength of the far right in contemporary Germany, the Federal Republic has probably never seen such a diversity of ‘loud and proud’ (Pilkington 2016) political players right of the centre-right as during its contemporary ‘fourth wave’ of far-right politics. In many western European political systems, the early 21st-century fourth post-war wave of far-right politics has been characterised by the normalization and mainstreaming of the far right (Mudde 2019: 20–23). In Germany, the situation has been different: the same period has seen the electoral breakthrough of the AfD at the national level, including its reelection in 2021, and, at the same time, further organizational vibrancy. This volume provides a state-of-the-art analysis of the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany, with contributions from leading scholars in the field. It emphasizes the need to look at both party politics and non-party activism as well as their interconnections. In doing so, it provides the first comprehensive study of the contemporary far right in Germany which is accessible to an English-speaking audience, bridging the German literature with the international study of the far right. While usually being highly insightful, the German literature has often refrained from using the theories and concepts of the cross-national literature (e.g. Pfahl-Traughber 2019), has mainly focused on one type of political player, mostly far-right parties (e.g. Steglich 2010, Schröder and Wessels 2019), and only rarely investigated other major instances of far-right mobilization (see however Vorländer et al. 2015, Patzelt 2016). The present volume provides an in-depth analysis of the German case, focusing on the dimensions that still make it exceptional within the European far-right scene. Moreover, the chapters in the volume relate not only to the most crucial aspects of German far-right politics, but also to key debates in the study of the far right more generally, providing new perspectives on questions that have preoccupied scholars also in other contexts. The (still) exceptional case of Germany

The present volume focuses on four distinct themes that are key for understanding the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany. All chapters in the book cover at least one, typically many, and sometimes all of these characteristic features: (I) The strong diversity of far-right political players in Germany and the interconnections between non-electoral and electoral politics, (II) the electoral success of the AfD, i.e., the delayed electoral breakthrough of an only recently founded far-right party

4  Manès Weisskircher

on the national level, (III) the importance of ‘militant democracy’, specifically how established players have responded to the far right, and (IV) the relevance of the east-west divide for understanding far-right politics in Germany. First, and in line with what was said above, this book puts a special emphasis on the strong diversity of far-right political players in Germany and their many interconnections. The case of Germany clearly shows that the far right does not manifest itself only as political party. This is in line with recent scholarship underlining the importance of studying far-right social movements and ‘subcultural milieus’ alongside political parties – and the often substantial linkages between the non-electoral and the electoral arena (Minkenberg 2003, 2019, Pirro and Castelli Gattinara 2018, Caiani and Císař 2019, Castelli Gattinara and Pirro 2019). Adopting a term from left-wing trade unionism (‘Mosaik-Linke’), some German far-right writers even speak of a ‘Mosaik-Rechte’ (Kaiser 2017), comparing the structure of the far right to a mosaic, which consists of elements of different material, size, shape, and colour, in reference to the organizational, strategic, and, to a lesser extent ideological, plurality of the far right in the country. This volume thus contributes to our understanding of the different forms of far-right activism in Germany, studying not only party politics, but also non-party activism, including social movements, political violence, and subcultural milieus. Acknowledging that the rise of the AfD has not led to the demobilization of other forms of far-right activism, contributors to this volume consider to what extent the different far-right players in Germany cooperate or are in conflict with each other. Such an interactionist perspective is in line with some of the recent scholarship on the German case, which has highlighted, for instance, the relationship between far-right party strength and attacks against asylum-seekers (Jäckle and König 2017), cooperation and competition between PEGIDA and the AfD (Weisskircher et al. 2022) as well as the anti-Corona protestors of Querdenken and the AfD (Heinze and Weisskircher 2022), and the involvement of various far-right activists from both parties and movements in alternative news platforms (Rone 2021, Klinger et al. 2022). Second, the key novelty during the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany is, of course, the late electoral breakthrough of the AfD. While initially emerging as a party controlled by neoliberal critics of Eurozone policies (Arzheimer 2015), far-right forces have come to dominate the national party since the party congress in Essen in July 2015 (Arzheimer 2019, Heinze and Weisskircher 2021). While the ‘refugee crisis’ certainly was a critical juncture in fostering strong levels of public support for the party (Mader and Schoen 2019), the rise of far-right forces inside the party preceded the peak of migrant arrivals in the autumn of 2015. Similar to Sweden, a far-right party quickly emerged as the third strongest political force in a context that was long thought to be ‘immune’ to such political players. This volume sheds light on various aspects of the AfD’s development that have still remained understudied. On the one hand, this relates not only to the importance of contextual factors such as the politicization of immigration and the responses of its competitors (see below), but also to internal developments. The latter have

Introduction  5

constantly shaped the trajectory of the party, which has often been marked by internal conflict. In an attempt to downplay these divisions, its honorary chairman Alexander Gauland once famously described the AfD as a ‘fermenting bunch’ (‘gäriger Haufen’). The exit of previous co-leaders Bernd Lucke and Frauke Petry, the April 2020 suggestion of then co-leader Jörg Meuthen to split the AfD into two ‘sister parties’, and the latter’s departure in January 2022 speak volumes in this regard. Importantly, the question of cooperation with other far-right groups and street protestors has remained a bone of contention within the AfD. In addition to that topic, this book covers other key dimensions of the AfD’s development, including subnational politics as crucial arena for its emergence and establishment as well as the party’s (indirect) impact on coalition formation. Third, far-right politics is not only shaped by far-right players themselves but, crucially, by the responses to them. The AfD established itself despite Germany’s long-held reputation as a prime example of ‘militant democracy’ – a term that Karl Loewenstein (1937a, 1937b), a Jewish emigrant from Germany, coined during National Socialism. In Germany, legal measures included party and associational bans as well as surveillance by the intelligence services (Minkenberg 2006: 38–39). Importantly, the collective memory of National Socialist crimes is often said to have served as a shield against far-right forces, even if it should be emphasized that widespread societal acknowledgement of responsibility did not come in the years following 1945, but was rather the result of long-term political controversy, culminating in Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1985 (Art 2006). Germany’s degree of ‘militancy’ is probably only comparable to Belgium (Bogaards 2020). While Koopmans (1997) argues that the institutional response to far-right public protest and violence in Germany has been effective, Minkenberg (2006: 44) warns that this is not true for all forms of far-right mobilization, where state repression may contribute to ‘ghetto-formation and a hardening of ideology’. Among the different types of responses to the far right, the reactions of other political parties have been considered particularly relevant, an aspect that Minkenberg highlights himself. In 2020, Germany’s cordon sanitaire made international headlines, with the election of FDP politician Thomas Kemmerich as regional governor of Thuringia – with a majority of Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP), Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany, CDU), and AfD. Paradoxically, this event, not the result of coalition negotiations, but of short-term strategic (mis-)calculations to prevent the success of a left-wing candidate, soon showed the strength of the cordon sanitaire in Germany, at least at that point in time. The vote led to harsh public pressure: Within 24 hours, it became clear that Kemmerich would be unable to hold on to his office and that a new majority, not relying on AfD support, would soon need to elect a successor. Thuringia also underlined that on the subnational level, other parties have so far failed to find effective legislative ‘strategies’ to deal with the AfD (Heinze 2020; see also Patton 2020). Contributions in

6  Manès Weisskircher

this volume cover the history, present, and potential future of Germany’s cordon sanitaire, legislative learning strategies in dealing with the AfD, problems in regional coalition-formation for the centre-right CDU and the liberal FDP, as well as state and private responses to far-right online activism. Fourth, the divide between the west and the east is key in understanding the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany. Not only it is the case that far-right parties have been electorally more successful in the east, but also that far-right political violence has been more prevalent there. The same is true for far-right social movement groups’ mobilization, which has been stronger in the neue Bundesländer. The strength of the far right in the east reflects a widespread feeling of societal marginalization and is related to dissatisfaction over economics, migration, and political representation – a result not only of the heritage of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but also of developments following so-called reunification in 1990 (Manow 2018, Weisskircher 2020). The AfD has even robbed the radical left of its status as key protest party (Olsen 2018). On an individual level, the higher share of individuals with anti-immigration views in the east is an important factor explaining AfD strength there (Arzheimer 2020). In the east, AfD voters also tend to be older than in the west (Hansen and Olsen 2022). All of this shows that ‘the wall after the wall’ (Minkenberg 1993) or ‘the wall in the mind’ (Pickel and Pickel 2023) still stands, even if more than three decades have passed since the end of the GDR. This volume highlights the importance of taking the east-west divide into account, something which is reflected in the contributions on non-party activism, for example on the ‘New Right’ and PEGIDA. Moreover, contributors analyse the role of AfD’s eastern branches in its success and explore to what extent the responses of established political parties in the east differ from those in the west. The four waves of far-right politics in Germany

How did we get to the current fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany? Building on von Beyme (1988), Mudde (2019) discusses the history of far-right politics in Western Europe after 1945, adding a fourth wave to the three already identified by von Beyme, each bigger than the previous one. Correspondingly, the fourth wave in Germany comes with a far-right political player which is stronger than ever before in the post-war period. It should be noted that any look at the previous absence of far-right players with parliamentary representation necessarily focuses on the Federal Republic and not on the GDR, where the lack of political freedom drastically reduced the scope for political mobilization, including far-right activism. In Western Europe, the decade after the end of World War II brought the first ‘(neo?)-fascist’ wave of far-right politics, with delegitimized political players and their remaining supporters in the defensive, trying to hold on to what had brought havoc over the continent. Still, in Austria and Italy, far-right parties soon established themselves.

Introduction  7

In the Federal Republic, the main European post-fascist state, the experience was distinctly different. The Sozialistische Reichspartei (Socialist Reich Party, SRP) was banned in 1952, pointing to the importance of ‘militant democracy’.1 Just before the foundation of the SRP in 1949, its leader Fritz Dorls had managed to gain a seat in the German Bundestag on the ticket of another fringe party. In 1951, the SRP managed to enter the legislatures of Lower Saxony (11 per cent) and Bremen (7.7 per cent). Its ban was the first clear reflection of the Federal Republic’s ‘militancy’ against far-right challengers. The established parties, first and foremost the centre-right, effectively managed to collect the votes of those who may have been vivid supporters of National Socialism only a decade earlier. As elsewhere, such as in France with the Poujadists, the Federal Republic saw the emergence of a ‘flash party’ during the second wave of far-right politics, with the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) almost making it to the Bundestag. Founded in 1964, the party entered two regional parliaments in 1966 (Bavaria, Hesse), four more in 1967 (Bremen, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein) and, again a year later, the one of Baden-Württemberg, with a record vote share of 9.8 per cent. The party’s rise coincided not only with economic problems and a grand coalition between CDU and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Decmoratic Party, SPD), but also with the 1968 protest wave. Against widely held expectations, however, NPD failed to enter national parliament: The party gained only 4.3 per cent in the 1969 election, short of the 5-per cent threshold.2 Der Spiegel (30.09.1969) commented that ‘the furor teutonicus incarnate turned out to be harmless flatulence of the German people’s soul’. Still, if the threshold to enter German Bundestag had been similar to other countries such as Austria (4 per cent), NPD would have gained seats. This observation points not only to the importance of this seemingly small institutional difference across countries, but also to the role of ‘contingency’ in political developments – to the dismay of social scientists who usually prefer more structural explanations. How future waves of far-right party politics in Germany would have looked like from the 1970s onwards if the NPD had only organized a slightly more successful electoral campaign in 1969 is a matter of speculation. In reality, the NPD quickly imploded as the party leader von Thadden, first name Adolf, immediately came under fire from his comrades in the aftermath of the election. A Berlin NPD functionary went as far as to accuse him of obeying Moscow (!) and stated that his staying in charge would be as ‘if Franco or the Pope were heads of the Comintern’ (Der Spiegel 10.11.1969). Interestingly enough, von Thadden later turned out not to be working for Russia, but for the British foreign intelligence service MI6 (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger 14.03.2002, Backes 2016). During the second wave, the German far right also remained a failure outside of the legislative arena. Perhaps striking is the fact that ideological innovation within far-right political thought did not come from Germany but from France, first with Dominique Venner, then with Alan de Benoist. In the words of the Swiss far-right

8  Manès Weisskircher

political writer Armin Mohler (1985/2017: 26), ‘the German right experienced the breakthrough of the “Nouvelle Droite” in France with amazement, joy, and probably envy’. The Kassel-based intellectual circle of the Thule-Seminar, founded by the French (!) Pierre Krebs in 1980, was merely a failed copy. The third wave of far-right politics in Western Europe saw the national breakthrough of many far-right parties, perhaps most importantly the Front National. Not so in Germany. Still, the country saw another ‘flash party’, Die Republikaner (The Republicans, REP), a party founded by Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union, CSU) renegades in 1983, which achieved prominence in 1989, when it managed to first enter the state parliament of Berlin (7.5 per cent) and then the European Parliament (7.1 per cent). The latter result was the highest ever nationwide far-right success in the history of the Federal Republic. In the 1990s, however, Baden-Württemberg remained the only regional stronghold of REP – where they were represented from 1992 to 2001. Everywhere else, apart from local exceptions, they soon lost relevance. Apart from intraparty struggles, the restrictive ‘Asylkompromiss’ policy changes in 1992/1993 are often referred to as having curtailed the rise of REP. However, the party also had to face Germany’s ‘militancy’: In the 1990s, the country’s intelligence service started to observe the party, further reducing its public appeal. The so-called reunification allowed the far right to experience a revival in the late 1990s in the east of ‘reunited’ Germany. This did not apply to REP – in 1990, its then-leader Franz Schönhuber was banned from entering the GDR. However, two older far-right players started to successfully mobilize in the east. First, the German People’s Union (DVU, Deutsche Volksunion) entered the legislatures of Brandenburg (1999–2008) and Saxony-Anhalt (1998–2002). DVU was the brainchild of far-right publisher Gerhard Frey, who unsuccessfully attempted to be nominated by the NPD for the crucial 1969 Bundestag election, a party with whom he had enjoyed a love-hate relationship. Second, and after years of grassroots work, the NPD managed to stage a comeback, entering the legislatures of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (2006–2016) and Saxony (2004–2014). Apart from legislative politics, ‘the fight for the streets’ was a key pillar of the renewed NPD, also in the west, such as during public protest against an exhibition on the Wehrmacht in March 1997 in Munich. In 2003, an attempt to ban the NPD – initiated by the federal government and both chambers of parliament – ended in embarrassment: Instead of issuing a judgement, Germany’s Constitutional Court closed the case: The high share of intelligence service undercover agents in NPD leadership positions resulted in the farright party’s ‘missing distance from the state’ (‘mangelnde Staatsfreiheit’) (BVerfG 2003), which rendered a valid assessment of the party’s constitutionality impossible.3 In the light of the several instances of short-term party success during the third wave of far-right politics, careful observers already considered the possibility of a long-lasting future breakthrough (e.g. Decker 2000: 253). Finally, the fourth wave of far-right politics in the 21st century had crucial consequences in Germany, both on the streets and in legislatures. A prelude to its success, however,

Introduction  9

was to be found in bookshelves: Thilo Sarrazin, a former SPD senator for finance in Berlin, brought anti-immigration views to the forefront of the national debate when his book ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ (‘Germany abolishes itself’) (Sarrazin 2010) was sold more than 1.5 million times 2010. Soon afterwards, discriminatory anti-immigration views captured national attention once more: Almost a year before the ‘refugee crisis’, street protests by PEGIDA made international headlines. On several Monday evenings in the winter of 2014/2015, about 20,000 people took to the streets, protesting against Muslim immigration, the ‘lying press’, and the political establishment more generally (Vorländer et al. 2018, Volk 2020). Most consequential, however, was the electoral breakthrough and establishment of the AfD (Arzheimer 2019, Heinze and Weisskircher 2021). The rise of the AfD completely overshadowed other remaining far-right forces in the electoral arena – only some locally embedded niche products were able to survive as alternatives to the Alternative (e.g. Free Saxons [Freie Sachsen], Pro-Chemnitz). The fate of NPD highlights the new dominance of the AfD: Despite the lack of an electoral threshold, the NPD did not even manage to get a seat in the 2019 European Parliament elections (where only about 0.5 per cent of the vote would have been needed). Already in 2017, another NPD ban had failed (Backes 2019): Perhaps ironically, the Federal Constitutional Court admonished the party for ‘disregarding human dignity’ and being ‘incompatible with the principle of democracy’ but did not ban it as the judges did not see the ‘potential’ for the ‘successful implementation of their anti-constitutional goals’ (BVerfG 2017).4 In other words, during Germany’s fourth wave of far-right party politics, the AfD became, in terms of party politics, the only game in town. Controversial concepts – Or: Lost in translation

What are we referring to when we speak about far-right political players? Which label is the best one, and how to define it? These conceptual questions have haunted scholars of the far right since decades (as is often the case with concepts in the social sciences). Even though von Beyme’s (1988) seminal article starts with discussing ‘controversies over concepts’, the fact is that, more than three decades later, the dust has not yet settled and plenty of terms are regularly used or even newly proposed. Recently, however, the English literature on the topic has most often followed the well-known definition of Cas Mudde (2007). He uses the ‘far right’ as an umbrella term for political players that focus on nativism and authoritarianism as core ideological elements, distinguishing between the pro-democratic, but anti-liberal ‘radical right’ and the anti-democratic ‘extreme right’. Moreover, he emphasizes the role of ‘populism’ as a secondary trait of the ‘populist radical right’ party family.5 While his definitions are nowadays the one most commonly used, a long list of potential alternatives exists. The debate should not be of concern here as they are discussed at length elsewhere.

10  Manès Weisskircher

For our purposes, it is perhaps more relevant to note that labelling issues have been even more problematic in Germany than in the English-speaking sphere, not only because Mudde’s concepts have proven difficult to translate into German,6 but also because the term ‘right-wing’ (‘rechts’) is often equated with the far right. For obvious reasons, in German, the term ‘right-wing’ is more historically tainted than in other European languages, where political players are not so shy about making self-references to la derecha, la destra, or la droite. The same is not true in Germany, where the centre-right usually prefers to refer to itself as ‘conservative’ (at least those who want to avoid the often-tempting label of representing the ‘political centre’). Moreover, a state body – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) which is Germany’s domestic intelligence service – played a major role in influencing the debate. It defines Rechtsextremismus as ‘efforts that are directed against the core of our constitution – the free democratic basic order’, even if they do not rely on violent means of actions. As such, it strongly overlaps with Mudde’s definition of the extreme right as anti-democratic, while both Mudde and the Verfassungsschutz leave room for a radical right that is not opposed to democracy per se. Influenced by the ‘official’ definition, and the absence of an established party on the right of CDU and CSU, many political scientists in Germany have adopted the term extreme right in their analysis, even if their definitions are more nuanced (e.g. Backes and Jesse 1996, Salzborn 2018, Pfahl-Traughber 2019). The contributors to this volume are aware of the importance of clear conceptual distinctions but at the same time do not aim to reinvent the wheel. While the scope provided by Mudde’s concept of the far right is much appreciated, as it highlights the ideological variety of the phenomenon under scrutiny, the contributors use the labels that they feel most appropriate for describing the empirical phenomenon that they study. As many contributions of this volume show, the boundaries among the radical, the extreme, and even other shades of right-wing politics are blurry (Pirro 2023, Volk and Weisskircher 2023), even within ‘one’ collective actor. The history and the present of the AfD serve as an excellent example. The chapters of this volume

This volume is structured along two thematic sections, reflecting the diversity of relevant far-right players during Germany’s fourth wave: The book starts with contributions that focus on (I) the far right outside of legislatures and then follows with chapters that analyse (II) the electoral breakthrough and establishment of the AfD. The first section analyses crucial dimensions of the key non-party players of Germany’s contemporary far right. It starts with a key source of ideological influence for the German far right more broadly: Uwe Backes (2024) studies the role of Germany’s ‘New Right’ circles, highlighting their origins, ideological variety, and (lack of) originality. He focuses on its intellectual hub, the Institut für Staatspolitik

Introduction  11

(Institut for State Policy, IfS), discussing its relationship to both preceding farright ideology and liberal democracy. Moreover, Backes reflects on the influence of these knowledge producers on other far-right players, especially the AfD. Maik Herold and Steven Schäller (2024) then move to street politics and analyse the key example of PEGIDA. They discuss whether the PEGIDA protests should be regarded as a local, Dresden-based, phenomenon, or whether the activists have had influence on the national or even international level. Moreover, this chapter focuses on the influence of PEGIDA mobilization on the development of the AfD. Matthias Hoffmann and Julia Rone (2024) then look at activism that, even though similarly visible, does not take place on the streets, but on the screens: Their contribution studies the diversity of the far-right online sphere in terms of actors, including far-right parties and activist groups, topics, and strategies. They analyse how these actors focus on key issues, even beyond immigration, such as climate change, ‘gender ideology’, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, they also emphasize how state and private responses have substantially altered online activism in Germany. Focusing on a neglected theme in the study of the German far right, Cynthia MillerIdriss and Annett Gräfe-Geusch (2024) investigate how youth culture is at the forefront of a transformation of far-right style more broadly, highlighting the influence of style and symbols in understanding the spread of far-right politics. The authors show how a diversity of styles and symbols is part and parcel of the identity of contemporary youth and analyse the consequences of the mainstreaming of far-right youth culture on its appeal and acceptance. Finally, Pascal König and Sebastian Jäckle (2024) analyse the most extreme form of far-right activism, that is, political violence, since 1990, including the upsurges in the early 1990s and in the mid2010s. They discuss how current developments differ from previous episodes in terms of organizations and targets. Moreover, they show that far-right violence has become politicized in public debate, leading to conflict between the AfD and the other Bundestag parties. While all chapters focus on key dimensions of non-party activism, the authors also place these into the broader context, discussing how they matter within the German far-right sphere more generally. The second section covers the electoral breakthrough of the AfD, the most significant event of the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany. First, Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger (2024) look at the crucial ‘demand-side’ background that explains the rise of the party. They discuss the politicization of immigration in Germany from a historical perspective, showing how the changing salience of the issue, with a peak in the mid-2010s, has contributed to the ups and downs of far-right party politics. Kai Arzheimer (2024) studies the electoral breakthrough of the AfD by highlighting the importance of subnational politics. In doing so, he points to the importance of the eastern branches in terms of ideological direction and explains their disproportionate electoral success in the east with the higher prevalence of anti-immigration attitudes among the broader population. Manès Weisskircher (2024a) then takes a closer look at the movement-party strategy pursued by parts of the AfD. He shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, key

12  Manès Weisskircher

party figures continued their long-term approach of close cooperation with street protestors, which has reinforced not only internal divides, but also the polarization of German party politics at large. David Art (2024) then turns to the responses to Germany’s far right, arguing that the country’s ‘militant democracy’ and mainstream party’s anti-pacting strategies have prevented the electoral breakthrough of a far-right party in the first three waves of far-right politics. Moreover, he discusses that so far, the rise of AfD has not led to a change – and that the election of FDP politician Kemmerich in Thuringia in 2020 has reinforced exclusionary approaches. From a similar perspective, Anna-Sophie Heinze (2024) focuses on more specific legislative responses to the AfD in state parliaments. She argues that while established parties have struggled to find effective responses to the AfD in the legislatures of the Länder, they have also learned some lessons, even of use to the national party organizations. Nevertheless, how to react towards the AfD in legislatures has remained a difficult balancing act. Finally, and relatedly, Frank Decker, Fedor Ruhose, and Philipp Adorf (2024) study the impact of AfD on coalition-formation at the subnational level. They show how AfD discusses opposition and coalition strategies and how the centre-right CDU faces a more difficult position in the coalition game in comparison to Germany’s political left. The rise of the new far-right challenger has made Germany’s coalition politics ever more complex. The conclusion (Weisskircher 2024b) summarizes the key findings of the contributions. Moreover, it discusses to what extent key features of the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany may be harbingers of more general trends of future far-right politics in Europe, i.e., of a potential fifth wave. This applies in particular to the strong diversity of actors and the interconnections between non-electoral and electoral politics. The chapter also reflects on another potential future trend, which is a broadening of the scope of issues the far right focuses on, including those that do not directly relate to the matter of immigration. Therefore, the German case points to research avenues that should improve our understanding of far-right politics in other European countries too. It will require future research to address which types of transformations will mark a future fifth wave in Germany and beyond. All in all, the contributions in this volume hope to contribute to not only the need to bring clarity – but also detail and nuance – to the heated academic and public debate over the far right, ever so important in the influential context of Germany.

Notes 1 Four years later, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) became the only other party ever banned in the Federal Republic. 2 In the 1960s, the common expectation of NPD breakthrough even found its way into the writings of John le Carré, probably the world’s most renowned espionage novelist. In ‘A small town in Germany’ (ironically, the title refers to Bonn, the country’s then capital city), published in 1968, the German government is being challenged by the rise of the fictitious far-right politician Klaus Karfeld.

Introduction  13

3 It is an irony of history that during this pronouncement of the verdict, two former attorneys of the Red Army Faction (RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion) sat on opposite sites: Otto Schily, then SPD minister of the interior, and Horst Mahler, one of the attorneys of NPD. In 1971, Schily was even the attorney of Mahler, who was also an RAF activist and later, after a long period of imprisonment, became a far-right activist. 4 In June 2023, the NPD, still suffering from almost complete irrelevance, even changed its party name to ‘HEIMAT!’. 5 As is well-known, Mudde (2007: 23) defines populism ‘as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’. Importantly, and at times neglected, for Mudde, populism always comes along with a more relevant ‘thick’ ideology such as nativism. 6 This applies less so to rechtsradikal and rechtsextrem, but to ‘far-right’, especially as an adjective.

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Introduction  15

Heinze, A., and Weisskircher, M. (2022) ‘How Political Parties Respond to Pariah Street Protest: The Case of Anti-Corona Mobilisation in Germany’, German Politics, online first. Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2024) ‘Germany’s Anti-Islamic PEGIDA Movement: A Local Phenomenon and Its Broader Impact’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Hoffmann, M., and Rone, J. (2024) ‘Interconnected Realities: The Hybrid Dynamics of FarRight Online and Offline Mobilization’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Hutter, S. (2014) Protesting Culture and Economics in Western Europe: New Cleavages in Left and Right Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jäckle, S., and König, P. (2017) ‘The Dark Side of the German ‘Welcome Culture’: Investigating the Causes behind Attacks on Refugees in 2015’, West European Politics, 40(2), 223–251. Kaiser, B. (2017) ‘Mosaik-Rechte und Jugendbewegung’, Sezession Online, https://sezession.de/57218/mosaik-rechte-und-jugendbewegung (last access: 01.11.2022). Klinger, U., Bennett, L., Knüpfer, C., Martini, F., and Zhang, X. (2022), ‘From the Fringes into Mainstream Politics: Intermediary Networks and Movement-Party Coordination of a Global Anti-Immigration Campaign in Germany’, Information, Communication & Society, online first. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (14.03.2002) ‘Früherer NPD-Chef war Informant des britischen Geheimdienstes’, https://www.ksta.de/frueherer-npd-chef-war-informant-des-britischen-geheimdienstes-14249444 (last access: 01.11.2022). König, P., and Jäckle, S. (2024) ‘The Violence of the Far Right: The Three Decades after German Reunification’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Koopmans, R. (1996) ‘Explaining the Rise of Racist and Extreme Right Violence in Western Europe: Grievances or Opportunities?’, European Journal of Political Research, 30(2), 185–216. Koopmans, R. (1997) ‘Dynamics of Repression and Mobilization: The German Extreme Right in The 1990s’, Mobilization, 2(2), 149–164. Loewenstein, K. (1937a) ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I’, American Political Science Review, 31(3), 417–432. Loewenstein, K. (1937b) ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, II’, American Political Science Review, 31(4), 638–658. Mader, M., and Schoen, H. (2019) ‘The European Refugee Crisis, Party Competition, and Voters’ Responses in Germany’, West European Politics, 42(1), 67–90. Manow, P. (2018) Die politische Ökonomie des Populismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp. McGowan, L. (2003) The Radical Right in Germany: 1870 to the Present, Abingdon: Routledge. Miller-Idriss, C. (2009) Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany, Durham: Duke University Press. Miller-Idriss, C., and Gräfe-Geusch, A. (2024) ‘Fitting in, Standing out: Far-Right Youth Style and Commercialization in Germany’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Minkenberg, M. (1993) ‘The Wall after the Wall: On the Continuing Division of Germany and the Remaking of Political Culture’, Comparative Politics, 26(1), 53–68. Minkenberg, M. (2003) ‘The West European Radical Right as Collective Actor: Modeling the Impact of Cultural and Structural Variables on Party Formation and Movement Mobilization’, Comparative European Politics, 1(2), 149–170.

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Minkenberg, M. (2006) ‘Repression and Reaction: Militant Democracy and the Radical Right in Germany and France’, Patterns of Prejudice, 40(1), 25–44. Minkenberg, M. (2019) ‘Between Party and Movement: Conceptual and Empirical Considerations of the Radical Right’s Organizational Boundaries and Mobilization Processes’, European Societies, 21(4), 463–486. Mohler, A. (1985/2017) ‘Vorwort’ in de Benoist, A. (ed) Kulturrevolution von rechts, Dresden: Jungeuropa Verlag. Mudde, C. (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, C. (2019) The Far-Right Today, Cambridge: Polity. Nachtwey, O., Schäfer, R., and Frei, N. (2020) Politische Soziologie der Corona-Proteste. Grundauswertung, Basel: Universität Basel. Newman, N. (2018) Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf (last access: 01.11.2022). Olsen, J. (2018) ‘The Left Party and the AfD: Populist Competitors in Eastern Germany’, German Politics and Society, 36(1), 70–83. Patton, D. (2020) ‘Party-Political Responses to the Alternative for Germany in Comparative Perspective’, German Politics and Society, 38(1), 77–104. Patzelt, W. (2016) PEGIDA: Warnsignale aus Dresden, Dresden: Thelem. Pfahl-Traughber, A. (2019) Rechtsextremismus in Deutschland, Springer: Wiesbaden. Pickel, S., and Pickel, G. (2023) ‘The Wall in the Mind – Revisited Stable Differences in the Political Cultures of Western and Eastern Germany’, German Politics, 32(1), 20–42. Pilkington, H. (2016) Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pirro, A. (2023) ‘Far Right: The Significance of An Umbrella Concept’, Nations and Nationalism, 29(1), 101–112. Pirro, A., and Castelli Gattinara, P. (2018) ‘Movement Parties of the Far Right: The Organization and Strategies of Nativist Collective Actors’, Mobilization, 23(3), 367–383. Ravndal, J. (2018) ‘Explaining Right-Wing Terrorism and Violence in Western Europe: Grievances, Opportunities and Polarization’, European Journal of Political Research, 57(4), 845–866. Rone, J. (2021) ‘Far Right Alternative News Media As ‘Indignation Mobilisation Mechanisms’: How the Far Right Opposed the Global Compact for Migration, Information, Communication & Society. Salzborn, S. (2018) Rechtsextremismus: Erscheinungsformen und Erklärungsansätze, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Sarrazin, T. (2010) Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen, München: DVA. Schröder, W., and Wessels, B. (2019) Smarte Spalter: Die AfD zwischen Bewegung und Parlament, Bonn: Dietz. Steglich, H. (2010) Rechtsaußenparteien in Deutschland: Bedingungen ihres Erfolges und Scheiterns, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Volk, S. (2020) ‘“Wir sind das Volk!” Representative Claim-Making and Populist Style in the PEGIDA Movement’s Discourse’, German Politics, 29(4), 599–616. Volk, S., and Weisskircher, M. (2023) ‘Far-right PEGIDA: Non-Violent Protest and the Blurred Lines between the Radical and Extreme Right’, in Orofino, E., and Allchorn, W. (eds) The Routledge Handbook on Non-Violent Extremism, Abingdon: Routledge.

Introduction  17

von Beyme, K. (1988) ‘Right-Wing Extremism in Post-War Europe’, West European Politics, 11(2), 1–18. Vorländer, H., Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2015) PEGIDA: Entwicklung, Zusammensetzung und Deutung einer Empörungsbewegung, Wiesbaden: Springer. Vorländer, H., Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2018) PEGIDA and New Right-Wing Populism in Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Wagner, T. (2017) Die Angstmacher: 1968 und die Neuen Rechte, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. Weisskircher, M. (2020) ‘The Strength of Far-Right AfD in Eastern Germany: The EastWest Divide and the Multiple Causes behind ‘Populism’, The Political Quarterly, 91(3), 614–622. Weisskircher, M. (2024a) ‘Far-Right Parties and Divisions over Movement-Party Strategy: The AfD and the Anti-Corona Protests of Querdenken’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Weisskircher, M. (2024b) ‘Conclusion: Towards a Fifth Wave of Far-Right Politics in Germany and beyond?’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Weisskircher, M., and Berntzen, L. (2019) ‘Remaining on the Streets: Anti-Islamic PEGIDA Mobilization and Its Relationship to Far-Right Party Politics’, in Caiani, M., and Císař, O. (eds) Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe, Abingdon: Routledge. Weisskircher, M., Hutter, S., and Borbáth, E. (2022) ‘Protest and Electoral Breakthrough: Challenger Party-Movement Interactions in Germany’, German Politics, online first. Weiß, V. (2018) Die autoritäre Revolte: Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

PART I

The Far Right Outside of Legislatures

1 GERMANY’S NEW RIGHT Between Neo-National Socialism and Liberal Democracy Uwe Backes

Introduction

Quite a few authors link the electoral successes of right-wing populist parties in the majority of European democracies to the increasing resonance of new rightwing theoretical circles (e.g. McAdams and Castrillon 2022). During the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany, such theoretical circles have gained traction, influencing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) as well as social movement activists. In this chapter, based on previous work on the subject (Backes 2018), the label New Right is used for those intellectuals that combine a recognisable distance from the Old Right (i.e., National Socialism and traditional German nationalism) with an anti-liberal attitude directed against basic principles of liberal democracy. The usefulness of this definition is illustrated at the outset by looking at the ambiguity of the concept of the New Right. After that, the chapter outlines the history of the most important intellectual circles and their key periodicals in order to successively capture their connecting guiding ideas and internal differences, providing a complex picture of contemporary New Right ideology. Both continuities and discontinuities become visible: One of the important new developments is the reference to Christianity as a cultural force in the fight against ‘Islamization’. In this way, the New Right joins a ‘defensive front’ that has noticeably gained importance since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The contribution concludes with a discussion of the New Right’s influence on the AfD and the latter’s successful right-wing populist mobilisation since at least 2015. As will be shown, the political weight of such intellectual circles has grown noticeably compared to previous decades, even if the high level of democratic consolidation in Germany and the vitality of the opposing forces make the realisation of their blossoming dreams appear rather improbable. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-3

22  Uwe Backes

An old New Right?

The ‘New Right’ in Germany (and Europe) has been a topic of discussion for already such a long time that doubts concerning the meaningfulness of the term seem to be more than justified. Already Bartsch (1975) analysed the development of New Right circles in Hamburg and West Berlin, whose origins he traced as far back as to the 1950s. Bartsch identified a triple animosity as the New Right’s specific feature: these circles positioned themselves against the Old Right (i.e., German nationalism and National Socialism), the New Left (i.e., internationalism and multiculturalism), and liberalism (i.e., individualism and capitalism). However, already back then the only new aspect about these ‘anti’-attitudes was at best their common occurrence. And even the combination of such attitudes was quite similar to positions already held by right-wing intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. It is no coincidence then that New Right thinkers regularly praise authors of the so-called Conservative Revolution, active in the 1920s and 1930s. The Conservative Revolution was another heterogeneous anti-liberal reservoir – and also here, the label was contested. Its key New Right apologist was Armin Mohler (1920–2003; 1989), German-Swiss publicist and former secretary of Ernst Jünger (1895–1998; see especially Breuer 1995, 2001). To conceptually approach the New Right, it is essential to take the considerable political changes of the past decades into account. What was in the centre of attention in the 1960s may long have become a fringe phenomenon: Today, hardly anyone discusses the New Left, which initially served both as a source of inspiration and as antagonism for the New Right. As a consequence of the fall of ‘real-existing socialism’, anti-communism has lost its significance. And also the Old Right, e.g. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, NSDAP) or Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD), from which New Right thinkers distanced themselves in their early days, may not be identical with some of the ‘established’ far-right actors that today’s New Right thinkers critically discuss. Moreover, ‘Islamisation’ has become their new number one threat after 9/11 (Zúquete 2018), a foe fundamentally different from those of the 1960s. Observers have used the concept of the New Right to describe groups as distinct as supporters of ‘neoliberalism’ or endorsers of biologic racism. Consequently, by far not all groups usually described as New Right accept such a label (Stein 2005). Unclear usage without a proper definition, however, provokes misunderstanding (Pfahl-Traughber 1998). Schönekäs (1990: 253) distinguished three subgroups of Germany’s New Right: ‘national revolutionaries’, ‘social conservatives’, and ‘conservative revolutionaries’. For ‘national revolutionaries’, the ‘social issue’ was crucial, which is why they were strongly oriented to the political left. The ‘social conservatives’ (and ‘solidarists’) moved ecological issues (the protection of life in a healthy environment) to the fore. The ‘conservative revolutionaries’ did not have any particular topical focus as distinctive feature but had stronger links to ‘established politics’, in particular the national-conservative wing of the Christlich

Germany’s New Right  23

Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany, CDU) and Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union, CSU), associations of expellees, and student fraternities. How can the centre of gravity of the New Right, marked by ideological and organisational heterogeneity, then be determined? If one considers Schönekäs’ last subgroup only, the ‘conservative revolutionaries’, their worldview could be easily reconstructed by analysing the Criticón magazine, published by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (1927–2009) from 1970 to 1998. Mohler frequently contributed. Over time, however, a change of the editorial staff shifted the programmatic profile towards economic liberalism, which alienated wide parts of the readership and resulted in the disappearance of the magazine. Programmatically, Criticón featured a spectrum of positions ranging from national-conservative to ultra-nationalist, overlapping with the Coburg-based Nation Europa magazine, for decades considered ‘the’ integrative publication organ of the ‘national camp’ to the right of CDU/CSU and Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP) (Pfahl-Traughber 2000). Its founder, Arthur Ehrhardt (1896–1971; member of the Waffen-SS), was a frequent supporter of young rightwing intellectuals. Even though Nation Europa belonged to the environment of NPD, Deutsche Volksunion (German People’s Union, DVU), and Die Republikaner (The Republicans, REP), it always tried to stay out of conflicts over party politics. The successor publication Zuerst: Deutsches Nachrichtenmagazin (First: German News Magazine; founded in 2009) (Vieregge 2013), for several years edited by Manuel Ochsenreiter (1976–2021), initially stayed on this course, providing the right wing of the AfD with a forum. In this function, Zuerst has competed with Compact (a magazine published since 2010), whose bustling figure, Jürgen Elsässer (b. 1957), has transformed from a left-wing extremist ‘anti-German’ into a nationalist super-German (Lang 2016). The intellectual hub of the current New Right, however, is the Institut für Staatspolitik. (Institute of State Politics, IfS), founded in 2000 by Götz Kubitschek (b. 1970), Karlheinz Weißmann (b. 1959), and others (Pfahl-Traughber 2017). The IfS not only hosts conferences (‘academies’, ‘salons’) but also has its own publishing house (Antaios), publication series, handbooks, and a journal (Sezession). According to its self-description, the ‘institute’ works ‘on sharpening political and meta-political issues in the context of independent educational work’ (Institut für Staatspolitik 2020). Its collaborators reflect the IfS’s significance. Among them are several AfD politicians, Martin Sellner (leading figure of the Identitäre Bewegung [Identitarian Movement, IB] in Austria and Germany; Schäller 2019), and Felix Menzel (editor of the Blaue Narzisse [Blue Daffodil], a Chemnitz-based youth magazine published since 2004) (Grabow 2016). With the rise and radicalisation of the AfD, the IfS has become increasingly influential. The party’s Flügel (Wing) representative Björn Höcke (b. 1972) has maintained close ties to the IfS (Lang 2018).1 Considering the influence of Kubitschek’s and Weißmann’s works, the IfS publications are crucial for tracing down the worldview of today’s New Right in Germany.

24  Uwe Backes

Common features of the contemporary New Right in Germany

Germany’s contemporary New Right thinkers express a fundamental critique of the country’s political system, based on an anti-liberal and nationalist point of view. Instead of supporting the Basic Law that allowed West Germany’s return to the circle of Western European constitutional states in 1949 and which established democracy also in eastern Germany (the former German Democratic Republic) in 1990, they lament the loss of past greatness and prestige. New Right thinkers oppose the critical public debate over National Socialism, the ‘coping with the past’, which they claim has been forced upon Germany’s population and serves to reduce German history to the period from 1933 to 1945. Not the old Federal Republic, that is West Germany until 1990, but Prussia serves as the New Right’s role model. What developed under Frederick William I (the ‘Soldier King’) and flourished highly after him is said to have been a state ‘worth fighting for’, the ‘polis of modern age’ that ‘successfully balanced community and individual’, resulting in a ‘symbiosis of Athenian and Spartan elements’, ‘marvellously balancing public policy and the unfolding of the individual’s possibilities’ (Kubitschek 2016b: 198, 2007). The King’s son Frederick II (King of Prussia 1740–1786, ‘the Great’) created ‘the perfect state and a myth of will’, he tiled the building of the state with the ‘rule of law’, he ‘told the individual his place’ and got the best out of him: the individual ‘is forced to do everything that is possible to achieve all that can be achieved’ (Kubitschek 2016b: 202). For the New Right, this magnificent image of past greatness stands in stark contrast to the miserable image of the present. Compared to Prussia’s glory, ‘our age […] is of course a poor age, and this poorness becomes really obvious only when Prussia is once again described and defended’ (Kubitschek 2016b: 199). According to this self-proclaimed Prussian, the comparison does not reveal anything about contemporary’s Germany which might be worth praising but rather seems to indicate the need for an end of the current political system: Now, if for once we think of the social-therapeutic party state and the average German whiner; if we let our political leadership parade in front of our mind, and if we make ourselves aware of how big the pile of tax money is, which, in the time needed for this lecture, is blown both at home and abroad to continue the decomposition of the German substance; if furthermore we make ourselves aware that this state does not educate any longer but silences, that it no longer builds its own future but funds the murder of unborn children several hundred thousand times to then scrape together replacement for the thus destroyed consumer from everywhere in the world; thus if we are forced to watch the destruction of even the substance, highly praised by Machiavelli and shaped by the Prussian rulers: does it then make any sense at all, being a Prussian type, a statist supporter of the state, working for stabilisation? Kubitschek (2016b: 207)

Germany’s New Right  25

The man who writes in such a contemptuous way was discharged as reserve officer of the Bundeswehr during an ongoing military exercise in 2001, precisely because of his journalistic activities (Adolphi et al. 2001), which might partly explain his resentment. He ‘cannot forgive’ this state, he writes, ‘for disregarding my inclination for service, my inclination for fulfilling my duty, my inclination to respect the political leadership’ (Kubitschek 2016b: 203). Like Kubitschek’s image of the Federal Republic, a result of subjective impressions, also his image of Prussia is not taken from historical scholarship. Instead, he relies on the writings of HansDieter Sander (1928–2017), a political sectarian, who had converted from leftwing to right-wing extremism. In his Staatsbriefe (State Letters) journal (founded in 1990), Sander evoked the restauration of the idea of the Empire of Staufer Emperor Frederick II (Emperor of the Roman-German Empire 1212–1250). Along with other sectarians from the right-wing fringes, Sander is listed as mastermind in a volume of Staatspolitisches Handbuch (Handbook of State Politics), edited by IfS manager Erik Lehnert (b. 1975) and Weißmann. These ‘masterminds’ are praised next to authors also to be found in relevant reference books of political science – from Hannah Arendt to Eric Voegelin. These two may not be suspected of what one Handbuch author bluntly states about Sander, who committed himself to the ‘constant undermining of the liberal system’ (Lichtmesz 2017: 195). At the heart of the New Right’s criticism of liberalism is the party system – which they demonise in line with ancient German tradition. The undifferentiated criticism of the party system’s allegedly omnipresent ‘oligarchic tendencies’ draws from authoritarian elite theoreticians such as Robert Michels and Carl Schmitt who fought the Weimar Republic and/or sympathised with Italian Fascism (Lehnert 2017). The suggested alternatives are systems where experts and elites are detached from majority rule (Meyer 2017). According to New Right thinkers, these are necessary to stop the decline of a society whose political class was incapable of redirecting the course towards a return to proven order principles. Instead, elites stuck to the ‘integration with the “West” as an ideological element’, even though its days were over, and watched ‘Germany developing the features of an ordinary European nation state’ (Weißmann 2000: 246, 2009: 156 f.). The ‘West German worldview’, which had developed from ‘the metaphysics of guilt and the now common black legend of national history’, is portrayed as triumphant because the ‘modernisers’ of the CDU were marching in this spirit, not doing anything to stop the hybrid plans of the left-wing ‘optimists of progress’: ‘The forced atomisation, the destruction of all spontaneous order by way of legal rules, the disregard of tradition and cultural ties as the result of a purposefully initiated decomposition of values, and the discrediting of all quiritarian virtues and of all institutions’ (Weißmann 2000: 246 f.). Discussing nationalism, Weißmann (2000: 247; quoting nationalism researcher Ernest Gellner without reference) stresses ‘man’s need for unambiguity’ and the need to obey to the ‘imperative of homogeneity’. Nationalism of this kind sees people, state, and nation as necessary unity, and the ‘people’ as an ethno-cultural community whose genetic substance is, more or less explicitly, understood as leading

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to a specific identity. Stanford University’s Human Genome Project on the genetic variance of indigenous people is said to have cut the ground from any attempt ‘to deny the existence of ethnic identity’ (Weißmann 2000: 278, 2016: 156 f.) – an interpretation unlikely to be shared by the project’s scientists. New Right thinkers argue that national identity does not overwhelmingly dependent on cultural factors – even though this has been sufficiently demonstrated by the research of ‘imagined communities’ and the winding roads towards nation building (Anderson 1983). Instead, Weißmann’s way of arguing is normatively in line with the concept of ‘ethnopluralism’ as introduced, under French influence, by the young national revolutionary Henning Eichberg (1942–2017, later a sociologist of sports in Denmark and engaged in rather left-wing organisations) (Eichberg 1973, 1978). His concept was independently developed and propagated by Alain de Benoist, one of the masterminds of the French ‘Nouvelle droite’ and an individual in close exchange with Mohler (Bar-On 2012, 2017). Today, New Right thinkers, activists of the Identitarians, the NPD, and parts of the AfD draw from this concept: ‘Ethnopluralism’ replaces the hierarchy of ‘races’ (with ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races), propagated by classical biological racists, with the parallel existence of ethnicities, of equal rank but mutually incompatible, able to secure their cultural identities and creative power only as mostly homogeneous, and separate, entities. Authors of the New Right emphasise the anti-imperialist implications of the concept of ‘ethnopluralism’: Western ‘development thought’, they claim, tends to enforce its own values and order principles on other nations, compelling them to ‘acculturation’ and, in the extreme case, causing their ‘death’ through the loss of the ‘individuality and nature of an ethnic group’ (Lichtmesz 2018: 7). As it is necessary to confront Western imperialism in the interest of the protection of foreign nations, ‘also the European nations have the right to preserve their nature and to fend off interventions into their existence’ (Lichtmesz 2018: 8). In this context, Martin Lichtmesz (real name: Martin Semlitsch, b. 1976), one of the most lucid minds of the Viennese Identitarians and author of the ‘Sezession’ magazine (Kellershohn 2015), quotes French author Renaud Camus calling ‘the settlement of Europe by North and Black Africans a kind of “occupation” and “colonialism”’ (Lichtmesz 2018: 8). The ‘masses, which these days are flooding historically retired Europe, are no “ethno-pluralists” and are definitely ready for conquest, missionizing, and “colonisation”’ (Lichtmesz 2018: 9). For New Right authors, ethno-cultural homogeneity is a precondition for ‘true democracy’. They follow Alain de Benoist who understands democracy as the rule of the people in the sense of an ‘organic community’ ‘which has been historically formed within one or several clearly defined political entities (city states, nations, empires etc.). Where there is no nation but just a variety of individual social atoms, there can thus be no democracy’ (de Benoist 2000: 123). According to this understanding, can Switzerland or the United States then be considered democracies? And what about Germany, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, with all their cultural diversity?

Germany’s New Right  27

In the 1970s and 1980s, the New Right kept equidistance to the ‘melting pot’ of the United States and the Soviet Union. This corresponded to their double animosity towards communism and capitalism. In the following decades, however, their sympathies shifted towards the east. In terms of foreign policy, some New Right thinkers follow Alexander Dugin’s vision of a ‘Eurasia’ covering the territory between Brest in France and Vladivostok (Paulwitz 2014). Their flirt with Donald Trump did not last long. But its concept of a Russian-dominated countervailing power to the ‘West’ has been controversial (Lichtmesz 2022) – not just since the Russian attack on Ukraine. The anti-liberalism of the New Right also rejects the international financial and economic system (Kaiser 2018, 2020). Interestingly, even at the peak of ‘Reaganomics’ and ‘Thatcherism’, the New Right kept distance from capitalism, which, in their opinion, opens the borders for labour migrants and leads to the destruction of ‘organic communities’. The weakening of the AfD’s market-liberal wing in favour of ‘social-patriotic’ concepts – most of all in the eastern branches – gives testimony to the growing influence of the New Right. Fault lines of the contemporary New Right in Germany

As an insider authority (Autorenkollektiv unter der Leitung von Erik Lehnert 2017: 22) has it, the ‘reader of Junge Freiheit, the reader of Sezession, the Burschenschaftler [member of a student fraternity], the Identitarian activist, the “sleeper” in the Junge Union [the CDU youth organisation], the tough football fan with solid convictions, the silent neo-pagan, the FAZ2 reader writing letters to the editor, the evangelical Christian, the tradition-loving Catholic, the AfD cosmopolitan, the disillusioned teacher at a problem school, the evening stroller in Dresden, the GEZ rebel,3 the female organic farmer, the Day-X-DIY-man or the IfS meta-politician’ form a ‘colourful gang’ that not seldomly suffers from ‘distanceritis’, regularly distancing themselves from each other and making life difficult for themselves. Thus, the New Right is certainly not homogenous and encompasses both rather ‘moderate’ and extreme positions. Already its central concept of ethnopluralism allows for different interpretations. Alain de Benoist regards the co-existence of different ethnicities in one nation-state as legitimate and vehemently rejects accusation of him supporting any separation of ethnicities (‘apartheid’) (interview with de Benoist in Stein 2005: 159–178). For the New Right, the concept of ethnic difference comes in at least two variants: the more moderate version, supported by de Benoist and his followers, amounts to a kind of communitarianism which ‘distinguishes nationality from citizenship and postulates the right of each ethnic or religious community to live on national territory according to their own legal norms’. The more radical variant follows ‘the model of a global apartheid […] according to which on the territory of one nation state only one nation is entitled to live, nation being understood as a community of destiny defined by blood, language, culture, and perhaps religion, with ancestry being crucial’ (Camus 2003: 255 f.).

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In this sense, most representatives of Germany’s New Right pursue the goal of an ethnically (almost) homogeneous nation-state. Nevertheless, with Benoist, they share the rejection of biological racism of the classical kind. An intellectual fault line becomes obvious if look at how the ‘death of the nation’ (‘Volkstod’) campaign, starting out from NS-oriented groups (2012–2015), compares to the ‘Great Exchange’ as denounced by the Identitarians when referring to French author Renaud Camus. This propaganda concept proclaims a loss of culture and identity, allegedly purposefully induced by way of mass immigration. The ‘death of the nation’ campaign was based on biological racism: the German nation, the story went, would die if ‘foreign domination’ was not stopped. The similarities to Nazi ideology are obvious. The Identitarians, however, explicitly distance themselves from National Socialism and anti-Semitism. They most of all mobilise against ‘totalitarian’ ‘Islamisation’ which, they say, bereaves the European nations of their culture. The formal distance from racism (i.e., through the campaign slogan: ‘100% Identitarian, 0% racism’) concerns the hierarchisation of nations. Still, the Identitarians also link identity and homogeneity. Also Martin Sellner, who rejects nationalism as universalist ideology (ignoring the change towards integral, anti-universalist nationalism in the second half of the 19th century), propagates an ‘ethno-cultural uniqueness’ which, he claims, ‘necessarily results from delimiting from others, as unique and authentic life worlds’ (Sellner 2017b). This imperative of ethnic purity may be interpreted in a more or less pragmatic way. The NPD’s ‘Ausländerrückführungsprogramm’ (‘programme for the repatriation of foreigners’) was based on a restrictive interpretation: even ‘passport Germans’, which is German citizens of ‘un-German’ origin, were supposed to leave Germany (Kailitz 2007, Bundesverfassungsgericht 2017: 694–697). In an interview with the expert Thomas Wagner, Kubitschek and his wife and fellow campaigner Ellen Kositza (b. 1973) argue in a more conciliatory way: ‘the blending of nations’, they say, ‘has always been happening at the fringes’. Thus, an ‘exchange of blood’ can happen if the dose is correct. What one must take care of is a ‘certain degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity’; this does not at all mean ‘hermetic isolation’ in the sense of ‘racial purity’, says Martin Sellner (2017a: 184). Relating to the case of the United States, however, with a declining white population share, New Right thinkers refer to nothing less than ‘white genocide’ (Lichtmesz 2017: 38), following the ‘race-realistic’ Alt-Right movement. For the Identitarians, homogenising constructions of identity serve most of all to oppose ‘totalitarian Islam’. In their crusade rhetoric, they refer to the religious symbols of the Reconquista. Today, German’s New Right oscillates between neopaganism and Christian fundamentalism of the various denominations. Since 9/11, there have been attempts to bridge this gap in the fight against ‘Islamisation’. Compared to the early New Right groups, the change is obvious: the German New Right circles in the mid-1970s had little interest in religion. And if so, they took a critical stance towards Christianity. This was particularly the case for Mohler. In a

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conversation with political scientist Claus Leggewie, he expressed his strong rejection of Christianity in the following way: From an early age I resisted against Christianity, and by the way, on the day I attained full age I left the Protestant religious community. For me, Christianity is an enemy, and I may claim to have stated already as a member of the ‘Conservative Revolution’: any Christianity which takes itself seriously can only be left-wing. But these days, after Marxist universalism has come to its end and the labour movement is dead, the only left-wing impetus comes from Christianity – today, we are being served Marxism together with the Christian muck. Leggewie (1989: 200) Mohler’s appeal was most of all due to his witty and snappy polemics. However, he never systematically worked out his ideas as he had a fundamental dislike of clearly formulated thoughts. Accordingly, Mohler’s work does not provide any thorough discussion of Christianity. His French counterpart de Benoist combines a fundamental criticism of Christianity with a case for paganism. However, de Benoist’s anti-Christian neo-paganism has undergone a certain degree of change. At a young age, his reading of Nietzsche drove him away from his family’s Catholicism. Later, however, his discovery of Heidegger made him critically reread Nietzsche – after being attracted to a kind of neo-Darwinist biologism in the meantime (Taguieff 1994: 73–79, Camus 2019). De Benoist’s neo-paganism is different from polytheism as propagated by groups like the ‘Armanen Orden’ (Hundseder 1998, von Schnurbein 2016). For de Benoist, the Gods are not spiritual beings; instead, the divine runs through nature and cosmos and finds expression in a variety of ways (Wiedemann 2007: 207). For him, neo-paganism is no return to the (pre-Christian) past, but a kind of ‘reaching back’ (de Benoist 1982: 207): Rituals and cult-based religious practices are insignificant. What is critical to him is the rejection of Christianity as one of the driving forces of ‘egalitarianism’, together with liberalism and socialism. This is where de Benoist is in line with Mohler. The anti-universalist and antiegalitarian approach explains the ‘electrifying effect’ (Stein 2005: 142) of de Benoist’s works among far-right thinkers in the early 1980s. By calling for a ‘rightwing cultural revolution’, de Benoist (1985) offered a strategy for getting the antiliberal right out of the political defensive. However, in Germany, only parts of the New Right were ready to direct such a ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ offensively against Christianity. Weißmann remembers: What irritated me right from the beginning were key aspects – the positive assessment of rationalism, the fixation on the Indo-European, the animosity towards Christianity, the enthusiasm for ‘bio-policy’. What fascinated me instead was the project of establishing a counter-ideology to stand up against the left. quoted in Kubitschek (2006: 37)

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However, Dieter Stein (b. 1959), founder and chief editor of Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom), exaggerates when writing that the ‘right-wing conservative scene in Germany, in particular the Criticón magazine’ had been ‘strongly influenced by Christianity’, which, he states, explains ‘reservations towards treatises’ (Stein 2005: 133) from the French Nouvelle droite. Even though he did not make secrets of his anti-religious positions, the neo-pagan Mohler was a regular author for Criticón. Among them, however, were also conservatives such as Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (1939–2011) who, through his ‘Initiative’ paperback series published in the renowned Herder-Verlag in Freiburg in the 1970s, appealed to antiliberal Catholic conservatives disappointed by mainstream Christian Democrats. After 9/11, the ideas of the ‘Christian Right’ became more attractive, also beyond its US-American home base. On the old continent, the New Right’s pressing question was obvious: ‘Where in Europe is a faith that could take on Islamism when it comes to self-confidence and self-assertion?’ (Lichtmesz 2015). What was more obvious than fighting the war against ‘Islamisation’ with weapons from the arsenal of the crusaders? Suddenly, political groups which previously had hardly bothered about Christian inspiration called for ‘reconquista’ to save the ‘Christian’ or even ‘Jewish occident’ (Zúquete 2018). Even those who had previously rejected Christianity as the gateway to individualism, egalitarianism, and cosmopolitism now clearly softened their critical tone. Given the new importance of anti-Islamic mobilisation, New Right thinkers tried to leave the trenches of past battles behind, now building bridges between neo-paganism and Christianity. Lichtmesz (2020) speaks of the need for a ‘party truce’ to close the ranks and confront the true threat. The author himself made one of the rare elaborate contributions to overcome the religious differences within the New Right. The IfS’ Antaios published his book ‘Kann nur ein Gott uns retten?’ (‘Can only a God save us?’), resembling Heidegger not only by its title. Lichtmesz (2014: 352) declares Christianity a ‘cultural good’ that is worth of protection. Similar to Europe’s Greek, Roman, and Germanic tradition, Christianity was not merely to be carried as ‘field pack’ but also should be revitalised. Even though ‘anti-Christian conservatism’, he claimed, adored ‘origins and tradition’, it strangely enough dismissed the religion of its ‘ancestors’ in favour of a ‘rather speculatively reconstructed faith of the pagan ancestors’ (Lichtmesz 2014: 351). According to Lichtmesz (2014: 352), such critics make Christianity the ‘scapegoat for Europe’s decadence […] – although precisely in the Europe of decadence, there are hardly any true Christians left’. Lichtmesz’ selective interpretation of Christianity makes building bridges to the New Right’s critics of religion easier: The love thy neighbour commandment is inappropriate, he claims, when emergencies endanger one’s own existence. In ‘Christian, more faithful times than ours’, he says, one did well to reach back to ‘the war-like foundation of the Old Testament’ when, given grave dangers, there was no other way than ‘taking the sword’, ‘facing invaders’, indeed ‘submitting and missionizing other nations’ (Lichtmesz 2014: 185).

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Lichmesz demonstrates how migration can justify such an emergency by referring to the French right-wing extremist author Jean Raspail’s dystopia ‘The Camp of the Saints’. In this novel, newly translated and edited by Lichtmesz himself (Raspail 2015), Raspail sketches a dreadful painting of a catastrophe, of the fall of the occident caused by millions of ‘poor devils whose only weapon was their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, burdened by starving brown and black children, ready to invade our territory, the advance guard of masses who exert hard pressure on any part of a tired and saturated West’ (Lichtmesz 2014: 168). Raspail’s work as well as its continuation by Camus’ ‘Great Exchange’, the conspiracy tale of an intentional population exchange by cosmopolitan European elites (Camus 2011), is highly popular among New Right thinkers, among Identitarian activists, and parts of the AfD. Even though Lichtmesz rejects the ‘diabolic’ way of denigrating the Nazarene in Raispail’s ‘dung beetle’ parable, he shares his worldview of apocalypse. And when Lichtmesz musealises the ‘cultural good’ of Christianity, he seems to place more value on icons, cathedrals, and golden monstrance than on the core of the Christian message. Influencing his less intelligent and less educated fellow campaigners, Lichtmesz propagates (perhaps non-intentionally) the exploitation of Christianity for political purposes that are completely incongruent with the spirit of this religion (Schelkshorn 2017). Lichtmesz’ link to the New Rights’ critics of Christianity is his fundamental criticism of the commandment of loving thy neighbour, which he denounces as contributing to the birth of ‘hyper-morality’ (Lichtmesz 2014: 161), welcoming ‘alien invaders’ without considering the consequences for one’s own. In contrast to Christian universalism, which considers all humans as God’s children, regardless of social status, gender, or origin, ethnopluralism emphasises belonging to an ethnicity as an insurmountable qualitative difference which must be respected, protected, and maintained. Even de Benoist, who speaks out against any ‘collective imperative’, believes that every ‘mixed marriage’ faces a value conflict: it is impossible, he states, ‘to support racial mixture and racial purity at the same time […] as the former’s immediate result is the destruction of the latter’ (de Benoist 2014: 226). The influence of the New Right on AfD

The New Right relation to the NS-oriented NPD was mostly marked by distance, even at the time of the party’s greatest electoral successes in the eastern federal states (entering parliament in Saxony, 2004–2014, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2005–2015). Initially, this was also true in the case of the AfD (Weißmann 2015). Over time, however, the New Right gained influence, first in the wake of the party’s internal conflict in the summer of 2015, when the free-market liberal economists around Hamburg economics professor Bernd Lucke (b. 1962) left and the Flügel around Björn Höcke gained traction (see Arzheimer 2024 in this volume). Höcke’s

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‘Erfurt Resolution’, propagating a ‘resistance movement against the further undermining of Germany’s sovereignty and identity’ (Der Flügel 2015), was partially written by Kubitschek (Amann 2017: 148). In the same year, at the peak of the ‘refugee crisis’, Höcke gave a much-noticed speech at the IfS, which observers considered racist (Patzelt 2016): Höcke justified the need of border closure by referring to a ‘reproductive joy’ (‘breeding type’) of ‘the Africans’ which, he claimed, was irreconcilable with the ‘reproduction strategy’ of ‘the Europeans’. Höcke also draws from arguments found in the Sezession. At a prominent speech in Ballhaus Watzke in Dresden in January 2017, he referred to an article by historian Frank Lisson. Lisson (2016) had sharply denounced the ‘breach of law’ by Germany’s government in 2015. According to him, ‘fundamental opposition’ was the need of the hour. Following Lisson, Höcke distinguished between two types of fundamental opposition, ‘topical’ and ‘structural’. ‘Topical opposition’, which Höcke claimed for himself, aimed at ‘protecting this state […] against the decrepit political elites which only abuse it to abandon it’ (Höcke 2017). Consequently, he stated, his fundamental opposition is not ‘structural’ because it aimed at preserving ‘the state’. However, Höcke did not clarify which kind of state he was talking about. As criticism of mass immigration was at the heart of his speech, it is an obvious conclusion that the rejection of structural opposition did not imply a support for constitutionality but rather for the unity of state, nation, and the (ethnically homogeneous) people as propagated by the New Right. In this sense, also one of Höcke’s fellow campaigners, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Islamic scholar, and AfD MP in Saxony-Anhalt, advocates the concept of ethnopluralism, which, according to Tillschneider, only describes the ‘fact that mankind is structured into nations, combining with this the judgement that these nations, each with their typical cultures, are worth preserving’: ‘[W]e work for the preservation of that ethno-cultural entity which calls itself the German people’ (Tillschneider 2017). It is not surprising then that for a certain period of time, Tillschneider had an MP office in the ‘House of the Identitarian Movement’ in Halle (2017–2019), and that he supported Philip Stein’s (b. 1991) campaign association ‘One Per Cent for Our Country’, who runs the Dresden-based Jungeuropa publishing house and contributes to the Sezession (Fuchs and Middelhoff 2019: 150–153). In spring 2017, the AfD Flügel was estimated to include about one third of the party members, with strongholds in the east, in the ‘Patriotische Plattform’, and in the ‘Junge Alternative’ youth organisation (Kamann 2017). Its influence continued to grow and was not reduced after its formal ‘dissolution’ in response to observation by the domestic intelligence service, which qualified the ‘Flügel’ as ‘certainly a right-wing extremist movement’ that opposes the liberal-democratic basic order (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz 2020). Especially in some eastern German Länder, AfD party structures and New Right circles have formed a political symbiosis: AfD MPs have invited New Right representatives to events and

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have hired staff members from this circle (Fuchs and Middelhoff 2019: 54–58, 150–153). In August 2021, the German television station ZDF reported that the managing director of the IfS, Erik Lehnert, works for the AfD parliamentary group in Brandenburg (Klaus 2021). When the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the state of Saxony-Anhalt declared the IfS a ‘secure right-wing extremist effort’, the AfD federal executive board did not distance itself. By then, too many leading party representatives had already cooperated with the IfS in one form or another (RND 2021). Conclusion: Between National Socialism and liberal democracy

The variety of positions put forward by New Right thinkers makes it difficult to clearly decide whether ‘the’ New Right is in line with the fundamental norms of democratic constitutional states. However, focusing on their intellectual centre of gravity provides a clearer picture: the most influential New Right authors express a fundamental criticism of the political system of the Federal Republic which leaves hardly any leeway for solutions based on political reform. IfS activists and Sezession contributors preferably refer to authors such as Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, or Carl Schmitt, who, through their publications, contributed to the fall of the Weimar Republic and, at least indirectly, supported the rise of National Socialism – even if most of them kept distance from the Nazi movement or later became victims themselves. Positive references to Count Stauffenberg’s resistance group, for example by stating sympathy for Stauffenberg’s ‘idea of a people’s community’ ‘where everybody would have and fill his place according to his talents and character’ (Kubitschek 2017: 169), indicate a distance to National Socialism and its crimes. However, they are no proof of loyalty to a democratic and liberal constitution. In Sezession articles, resistance is sometimes legitimated in a way typical for extremisms of all kinds: The construction of emergency cases justifying exceptional measures. Even when following the New Right’s more ‘moderate’ thinkers, their imperative of ethnic purity threatens to exclude anybody not ready or able to submit to it. It is neither in line with the idea of individual human rights nor with most currents of Christianity. Those who want to protect the German nation from harm (in the sense of the Basic Law) are well advised not to put their concepts into political practice. Two decades ago, at a time when some far-right magazines were discontinued, while others suffered from declining circulation, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution referred to the ‘situation of right-wing extremist intellectuals’ as ‘desolate’ (Bundesministerium des Innern 2001: 97). Meanwhile, the picture has changed – also because of the rise of the digital sphere (see Hoffmann and Rone 2024, in this volume). Kubitschek triumphantly described the new setting in the following way: ‘PEGIDA, AfD, Identitarians, the whole media and meta-political network – all this sent shock waves, and because no shock

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lasts forever, the people may perhaps think that it is over. They don’t have a clue’ (Kubitschek 2016a). Given the high degree of democratic consolidation in Germany, any high hopes by Kubitschek and his followers may ultimately be disappointed. Still, a considerable increase in the influence of New Right ‘meta-politics’ on populist radical right mobilisation on the streets and for elections cannot be denied. Notes 1 Weißmann, without a doubt the most important intellectual of this circle, a Mohler disciple and biographer, left the Institute in 2014, after a dispute with Kubitschek (Weiss 2017: 87–89). Together with a companion, he founded the political magazine ‘Cato’ in 2017, whose editorial staff resides at the ‘Bibliothek des Konservatismus’ in Berlin-Charlottenburg, an institution of the ‘Förderstiftung konservative Bildung und Forschung’, founded by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing in 2000. Dieter Stein was also involved in its foundation: He is the chief editor of the weekly ‘Junge Freiheit’ which started as a student project in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1986, close to the Republikaner (Braun and Vogt 2007), and source of quite a number of prominent New Right authors. Recently, the magazine supported the comparatively moderate elements of the AfD. 2 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is a renowned German newspaper. 3 The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (Fee Collection Center, GEZ) collects the obligatory fees for Germany´s public service broadcasting.

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Kaiser, B. (2018) ‘Rechte Kapitalismuskritik in Deutschland’, Sezession, 82, 12–19. Kaiser, B. (2020) Solidarischer Patriotismus. Die soziale Frage von rechts, Schnellroda: Antaios. Kamann, M. (2017) ‘In der AfD wächst ein zartes Pflänzlein der Mäßigung’, Die Welt, 23.07.2017. Kellershohn, H. (2015) ‘Die jungkonservative Neue Rechte zwischen Realpolitik und politischem Existenzialismus’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 63(9), 721–740. Klaus, J. (2021) Wie die AfD rechte Aktivisten finanziert, https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/ politik/afd-geld-rechte-aktivisten-100.html (last access: 15.11.2022). Kubitschek, G. (2006) Im Gespräch mit Karlheinz Weißmann: Unsere Zeit kommt, Schnellroda: Antaios. Kubitschek, G. (2007) ‘Preußen! Und nun?’, Junge Freiheit, 23.02.2007. Kubitschek, G. (2016a) ‘Schleusenzeit’, Sezession, 75, 1. Kubitschek, G. (2016b) ‘Der Wahlpreuße’, in Kubitschek, G. (ed) Die Spurbreite des schmalen Grats 2000–2016, Schnellroda: Antaios, pp. 198–210. Kubitschek, G. (2017) ‘1944’, in Lehnert, E., and Weißmann, K. (eds) Staatspolitisches Handbuch, Vol. 5, Deutsche Daten, Schnellroda: Antaios, pp. 168–170. Lang, J.P. (2016) ‘Biographisches Porträt: Jürgen Elsässer’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., Jesse, E., and Thieme, T. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Vol. 18, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 225–240. Lang, J.P. (2018) ‘Biographisches Porträt: Björn Höcke’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., Jesse, E., and Thieme, T. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Vol. 18, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 191–207. Leggewie, C. (1989) Der Geist steht rechts. Ausflüge in die Krise der Union, Berlin: Rotbuch. Lehnert, E. (2017) ‘Parteienherrschaft – und kein Ende?’, Sezession, 80, 18–21. Lichtmesz, M. (2014) Kann nur ein Gott uns retten? Glauben – hoffen – Standhalten, Schnellroda: Antaios. Lichtmesz, M. (2015) ‘Sind Religionen machbar?’, Sezession Online, https://sezession. de/57158/sind-religionen-machbarij (last access: 01.11.2021). Lichtmesz, M. (2017) ‘Sander, Hans-Dietrich’, in Lehnert, E., and Weißmann, K. (eds) Staatspolitisches Handbuch, Vordenker, Schnellroda: Antaios, pp. 194–196. Lichtmesz, M. (2018) ‘Volklichkeit, Ethnopluralismus, Eichberg’, Sezession, 85, 5–9. Lichtmesz, M. (2020) ‘Guillaume Fayes Kritik an der Nouvelle Droite’, Sezession Online, https://sezession.de/61973/guillaume-fayes-kritik-an-der-nouvelle-droite (last access: 01.11.2021). Lichtmesz, M. (2022) Dugins ‘Das Große Erwachen gegen den Great Reset’, Sezession Online (March 2022), https://sezession.de/65592/dugins-das-grosse-erwachen-gegenden-great-reset-5-5 (last access: 15.11.2022). Lisson, F. (2016) ‘Über die ethische Pflicht zur Fundamentalopposition’, Sezession, 75, 10–13. McAdams, J., and Castrillon, A. (2022) Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, London: Routledge. Meyer, L. (2017) ‘Eliten, Experten, Mandarine – die Zukunft der Demokratie’, Sezession, 78, 44–47. Mohler, A. (1989) Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Patzelt, W. (2016) ‘Das ‘Höcke-Gutachten’. Oder: Wie erkennt man Rassismus bzw. Extremismus?’,https://wjpatzelt.de/2016/01/03/das-hoecke-gutachten-oder-wie-erkennt-manrassismus-bzw-extremismus/ (last access: 01.11.2021). Paulwitz, M. (2014) ‘Autorenporträt Alexander Dugin’, Sezession, 61, 4–7. Pfahl-Traughber, A. (1998) Konservative Revolution und Neue Rechte. Rechtsextremistische Intellektuelle gegen den demokratischen Verfassungsstaat, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Pfahl-Traughber, A. (2000) ‘Zeitschriftenporträt: Nation Europa’, in Backes, U., and Jesse, E. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Vol. 12, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 305–322. Pfahl-Traughber, A. (2017) ‘Zeitschriftenporträt: Sezession’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., and Jesse, E. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Vol. 29, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 216–230. Raspail, J. (2015) Das Heerlager der Heiligen, Schnellroda: Antaios. RND (2021) AfD-Vorstand stört Nähe zu rechtsextremem Institut für Staatspolitik nicht (15.10.2021), https://www.rnd.de/politik/afd-bundesvorstand-stoert-naehe-zu-rechtsextremem-institut-fuer-staatspolitik-nicht-6HXVAZCCLBAC5IXQLU4E4XUPOU.html (last access: 15.11.2022). Schäller, S. (2019) ‘Biographisches Porträt: Martin Sellner’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., Jesse, E., and Thieme, T. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Vol. 31, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 193–209. Schelkshorn, H. (2017) ‘Wider die Instrumentalisierung des Christentums. Zur Unvereinbarkeit von neorechter Ideologie und christlicher Moral’, in Lesch, W. (ed) Christentum und Populismus. Klare Fronten?, Freiburg/Basel/Vienna: Herder, pp. 26–37. Schönekäs, K. (1990) ‘Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, in Greß, F., and Jaschke, H.-G. (eds) Neue Rechte und Rechtsextremismus in Europa. Bundesrepublik, Frankreich, Großbritannien, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 218–347. Sellner, M. (2017a) Identitär! Geschichte eines Aufbruchs, Schnellroda: Antaios. Sellner, M. (2017b) ‘Ethnozentrismus, Ethnopluralismus, Universalismus’, Sezession Online, https://sezession.de/57017/ethnozentrismus-ethnopluralismus-universalismus (last access: 01.11.2021). Stein, D. (2005) Phantom ‘Neue Rechte’. Die Geschichte eines politischen Begriffs und sein Missbrauch durch den Verfassungsschutz, Berlin: Junge Freiheit Verlag. Taguieff, P. (1994) Sur la Nouvelle droite. Jalons d’une analyse critique, Paris: Descartes. Tillschneider, H. (2017) ‘Die Kernfrage’, https://hans-thomas-tillschneider.de/die-kernfrage/ (last access: 01.11.2021). Vieregge, E. (2013) ‘Zeitschriftenporträt: ZUERST!’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., and Jesse, E. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Vol. 25, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 211–228. von Schnurbein, S. (2016) Norse Revival. Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism, Leiden/Boston: Brill. Weiss, V. (2017) Die autoritäre Revolte. Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes, Stuttgart: Campe. Weißmann, K. (2000) Alles, was recht(s) ist. Ideen, Köpfe und Perspektiven der politischen Rechten, Graz/Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker. Weißmann, K. (2009) ‘Die Nation denken’, in Lehnert, E., and Weissmann, K. (eds) Staatspolitisches Handbuch, Vol. 1, Leitbegriffe, Schnellroda: Antaios, pp. 155–157. Weißmann, K. (2015) Interview: ‘Sonst endet die AfD als “Lega Ost”, Junge Freiheit, 21.12.2015.

38  Uwe Backes

Weißmann, K. (2016) ‘Volk’, in Lehnert, E., and Weissmann, K. (eds) Staatspolitisches Handbuch, Vol. 1: Leitbegriffe, Schnellroda: Antaios, pp. 155–157. Wiedemann, F. (2007) Rassenmutter und Rebellin. Hexenbilder in Romantik, völkischer Bewegung, Neuheidentum und Feminismus, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Zúquete, J. (2018) The Identitarians. The Movement Against Globalism and Islam in Europe, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

2 GERMANY’S ANTI-ISLAMIC PEGIDA MOVEMENT A Local Phenomenon and Its Broader Impact Maik Herold and Steven Schäller

Introduction

When they suddenly started to fill the streets and squares of several German cities in autumn and winter 2014, the marches of the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident, PEGIDA) puzzled observers. The flag-waving crowd, demonstrating in the darkness and chanting rude slogans about the presumed dangers of mass immigration and allegedly naïve left-wing policies towards Islam, quickly provoked responses from politicians, journalists, and counterdemonstrators. In retrospect, the pictures of these early rallies, and the intensive media coverage, symbolised the beginning of right-wing populism as a politically relevant force during the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany, catching up with developments that other Western democracies had already seen before. Even the name of this protest group, PEGIDA, referred to a notion of cultural polarisation: It interpreted ‘the own’ as ‘occidental’ and ‘patriotic’, mobilising this image against an idea of ‘the foreign’ as ‘non-western’, referring to Middle Eastern and African immigrants explicitly as well as to the liberal advocates of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in politics, society, and the media implicitly. Consequently, and in line with other contemporary right-wing parties and protest groups in Europe, PEGIDA’s agenda focused on the rejection of ‘uncontrolled’ immigration – especially further immigration of Muslims, who, against the backdrop of terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere, were linked to religious fanatism and violent behaviour. PEGIDA combined its anti-immigration and anti-Islam stances with harsh criticism of the political and media elites as well as representative democracy in general. Leading activists and demonstrators merged nativist and xenophobic attitudes with libertarian-like demands for personal freedom and DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-4

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vague fears of ‘the people’ becoming – once again – deprived of political selfdetermination, undermined by an ideologically blinded and corrupt elite in Berlin.1 Using the key slogan of the ‘Peaceful Revolution’ in East Germany in 1989 – ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ (We are the people!) – PEGIDA activists portrayed themselves as the heart of a German and European uprising of indignant citizen, the ‘largest active citizens’ movement in Europe’.2 For a long time, the weekly protests with their hostile, sometimes openly aggressive mood towards journalists on the ground, left a disturbing impression. Unsurprisingly then, the tenor of domestic German media coverage was very negative. The crowds ‘marching’ in the evening darkness with their placards, banners, and populist slogans were seen as a danger to Germany’s democracy and the country’s reputation. In fact, PEGIDA represented a novelty in the history of the Federal Republic. Never before had there been a right-wing protest movement that was repeatedly able to bring thousands or even tens of thousands of supporters onto the streets on a weekly basis. Consequently, PEGIDA’s demonstrations and rallies attracted a great deal of national and international attention. Images and video clips of masses of people calling for chancellor Angela Merkel’s resignation by chanting ‘Merkel muss weg’ (‘Merkel must go’), vilifying politicians as ‘Volksverräter’ (‘traitors to the people’), branding journalists as ‘Systemlinge’ (sycophants twisted by the ‘system’), and their employers as ‘Lügenpresse’ (lying press) went viral, also beyond Germany. But how does PEGIDA matter for understanding the rise of far-right politics beyond its local context of origin, i.e., the city of Dresden? What were the regional, national, and international dimensions of PEGIDA’s mobilisation efforts? How did PEGIDA reflect and influence the growing strength of right-wing populism in Germany? These questions will be addressed in the following. For this purpose, we outline the context of the emergence of PEGIDA (1) and describe the ideological setting and organisational environment in Germany which PEGIDA was able to build on (2). This is followed by a short analysis of PEGIDA’s national (3) and international networking efforts (4), before the group’s rather complicated relationship with the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) is analysed (5). We show that PEGIDA’s international networking efforts were hardly successful. However, on the national level, the protest group contributed to a shift and polarisation of the political landscape, from which the AfD still benefits today. PEGIDA’s emergence in the picturesque city of Dresden

The starting point and main location of PEGIDA was Dresden, capital of the federal state of Saxony, a region in Germany’s east. From the very beginning, organisers skilfully staged the rallies in the city’s baroque Old Town (Altstadt) in front of famous sightseeing landmarks, like the Frauenkirche or the Semper Opera. PEGIDA started as a small group of friends and acquaintances all coming from Dresden and

Germany’s anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement  41

the surrounding area. With a few exceptions, these people had never been politically active before. Their biographies were mostly characterised by an unstable, partly precarious professional life: Many were self-employed small entrepreneurs in the service industry. Some were part of the fanbase of local sports clubs, while others had some connections to Dresden’s party scene. These constituted social networks which later helped them to mobilise support for their early rallies. The initiator of the group, Lutz Bachmann, a trained cook and self-employed advertising entrepreneur, had taken an active part in a relief network after the Elbe floods in August 2013 and had received the Saxon Flood Relief Order for his commitment.3 On 11 October 2014, he founded a private Facebook group, where members shared their dissatisfaction with political developments in Germany. These online discussions initially focused on clashes between groups of immigrants with different ethnical and religious backgrounds in several German cities.4 They also referred to a recent demonstration in Dresden by supporters of the (banned) Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose participants had called for arms supply to the organisation’s outposts in Syria and northern Iraq.5 At the same time, the success of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq in the summer and autumn of 2014 contributed to a growing negative perception of Islam among parts of the population. It was especially the public executions of political opponents, Christians, and Western journalists by IS militants, filmed and spread in social networks, which fuelled outrage. In this context, the accommodation of (mostly Muslim) asylum-seekers became an important, and controversial, topic in several Saxon regions already in autumn 2014, almost a year before the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015. When the authorities announced plans to set up new accommodation facilities, local opposition quickly arose, voiced in social media groups, and often resulted in the emergence of small protest initiatives. The criticism of those who met in these initiatives and who described themselves as ‘worried’ and ‘concerned’ citizens (‘besorgte Bürger’) initially targeted an alleged ‘authoritarian behaviour’ of the administration. They complained about state officials’ lack of political strategy concerning the accommodation and integration of asylum-seekers and demanded greater involvement of the local population in public decision-making processes on immigration and integration (Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten 26.11.2014, Sächsische Zeitung 07.08.2014). In the context of these international political developments, national debates, and local conflicts, the members of Lutz Bachmann’s Facebook group eventually decided to take their own dissatisfaction to the streets. Their chosen label ‘Patriotic Europeans’ was meant to create the image of an initiative backed by broader parts of the society, pretending to reach well beyond traditional nativist and small-minded local patriotism. Already the first public call for a demonstration in the centre of Dresden on 20 October 2014, which the PEGIDA organisers shared among their friends and acquaintances on Facebook, mobilised about 300–350 people. In the following weeks, the number of participants rapidly increased. In December 2014 and early January 2015, every Monday evening saw tens of thousands gathering in

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Dresden’s picturesque old town. Then, at the height of mobilisation and national media attention in mid-January, a rift over strategy led to a break-up of PEGIDA’s organising team. The departing members, who called for a more moderate profile, soon disappeared from public attention, whereas the remaining members abandoned a couple of rather moderate demands from early position papers and reinforced their criticism of German immigration policy, radical Islam, and disagreeable politicians.6 On stage, defamatory remarks soon radicalised, while in online spaces calls for physical violence became more frequent. This new approach could not prevent, or perhaps even contributed to, a rapid decline of the number of weekly demonstrators to 2,000–3,000. In the spring and summer of 2015, PEGIDA was largely regarded to be on the road to irrelevance. However, the ‘refugee crisis’ intensifying in August 2015 breathed new life into the protests. When the movement celebrated its first anniversary on 19 October 2015, once again more than 20,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Dresden. In the meantime, PEGIDA had turned into a distinctive anti-immigration and anti-Islamic protest group. PEGIDA’s ideological and organisational context in Germany

PEGIDA’s remarkable mobilisation effort benefited from political opportunities in Germany that had laid the ground for a protest movement able to find sympathisers far beyond the traditional right-wing extremist milieu. Already throughout the 1990s, a significant share of the population felt alienated from politics and society, and especially so in eastern Germany. In the state of Saxony, which is by far the most populous of the New Länder, this development also resulted in decreasing political participation. The 2014 state election turnout reached the historic low of only 49.1 per cent. Economic crises – such as the labour market crisis in the early 2000s and the financial crisis in 2008/2009 – had contributed to this development. At the beginning of the 2010s, especially in the years before the emergence of PEGIDA, it became obvious that a growing part of the society – including people who regarded themselves as losers of reunification and westernisation of the former communist parts of Germany – had become prone to anti-elite ressentiments and anti-system attitudes. Also, even though no major radical right-wing party or political group was able to succeed in the 1990s and 2000s in Germany,7 a right-wing counter-public had slowly but steadily developed in magazines and internet blogs. Moreover, already before the emergence of PEGIDA, some right-wing extremist protest groups propagating Islamophobic and xenophobic stances had already tried to mobilise on Germany’s streets, without finding much support among the population.8 In addition to that, a circle of intellectuals and activists usually labelled the New Right had already gained traction and had started to connect right-wing extremist positions and narratives with populist anti-elite resentments (see Backes 2024 in this volume).

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These New Rightists saw themselves as spearheading the fight against the socalled 1968 generation and their left-alternative socio-political programme, which emphasised principles such as individualism, emancipation, and international solidarity, aiming for the expansion of democratic participation as well as a postnational integration of Germany in Europe. From the New Right’s point of view, the policies that followed these ideas had already started to corrode Germany’s cultural and national identity. While oscillating among libertarian, conservative, nativist, and ethnopluralist positions in its criticism of these developments, the New Right has not relied on a fixed organisational structure but rather developed a loose network relying on many decentralised hubs (Kellershohn 2015, 2016). One of the key figures of this New Right network in Germany is the publisher and political activist Götz Kubitschek who saw the PEGIDA protests as an opportunity to communicate New Right ideas to a broader public: ‘They had the dynamism and masses and we knew the path to take, we knew the adversary – we could give it shape’ (The Atlantic 22.06.2017). Kubitschek repeatedly appeared as a speaker at PEGIDA in Dresden.9 Alongside Götz Kubitschek, the Identitarian Movement (Identitäre Bewegung, IB) is another important actor of the New Right which has shaped ideological developments and with whom PEGIDA has cooperated (Zúquete 2018). In a very general sense, the Identitarian Movement claims to promote the protection of homeland, culture, and identity, while using these terms to semantically recode older nativist concepts. Among typical ‘Identitarian’ demands are the desire for a small-scale national economy, the end of the so-called Great Exchange of global ethnicities and cultures, and the idea of a world order oriented towards the principles of so-called ethnopluralism (Schäller 2020, see Backes 2024 in this volume). In Germany, the organisation is observed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution which has publicly denounced it of showing ‘indications of rightwing extremist aspirations’ (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2017: 64). The Identitarian’s cooperation with PEGIDA became first obvious when Martin Sellner, the leader of the Identitarian Movement in Austria, appeared at the ‘Fortress Europe action day’ in Dresden on February 6, 2016. Ever since then, he has repeatedly given speeches at PEGIDA events in Dresden.10 Since 2016, also the so-called Reichsbürger Movement has attracted the attention of political observers in Germany. Reichsbürger (‘citizens of the Reich’, i.e., the former German Empire) deny the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany, reject its institutions, and see themselves as subjects of a still existing German Reich. For a long time, they were mainly perceived as troublemakers who kept courts and offices in the country busy with unnecessary enquiries. However, two shootings between the police and convinced Reichsbürger in the summer of 2016, resulting in the death of a police officer, changed the political assessment of their threat (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 19.10.2016): Since November 2016, the intelligence services have been monitoring the Reichsbürger scene. Due to their passion for collecting and possessing weapons, they represent a potential

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anti-constitutional danger.11 The Reichsbürger’s rejection of representatives and institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany has also been shared, in a weakened form, by PEGIDA activists. In addition, some PEGIDA supporters also showed ideological proximity to Reichsbürger ideology through posters that referred to Germany as ‘BRD GmbH’, a common Reichsbürger comparison of the Federal Republic to an (illegitimate) state that, according to their view, rather resembles an economic corporation. PEGIDA’s activists and followers also endorsed numerous ‘alternative’ media outlets and massively shared their articles on social media (see Hoffmann and Rone 2024 in this volume), strongly increasing the visibility of these publications. For instance, they regularly promoted the Islamophobic internet blog Politically Incorrect News and gave away subscriptions to the monthly magazine Compact to its own supporters. The publisher of Compact, Jürgen Elsässer, in turn organised discussion rounds with PEGIDA activists (Lang 2016 as well as Backes 2024 in this volume). PEGIDA’s offshoots across Germany

Already by mid-November 2014, the massive growth of PEGIDA in Dresden generated an echo that was no longer limited to regional media coverage. Instead, the Dresden demonstrators dominated the front pages and op-eds of newspapers as well as the evening talk shows in Germany. International media also paid attention to the rallies.12 This wide resonance soon enabled PEGIDA’s founders to develop ambitions that went far beyond its regional context of origin. Already in the winter of 2014/15, similar protests were initiated in other major German cities. In mid-November 2014, a group in Würzburg went to the streets. In December 2015, similar rallies followed in Kassel, Bonn, Munich, and Düsseldorf, and, after the turn of the year, in Hanover, Leipzig, Kiel, Saarbrücken, Braunschweig, and other German cities. Not all these offshoots, however, had a cooperative relationship with their prototype in Dresden. Only some of them became ‘officially’ recognised by PEGIDA in Dresden, including, LEGIDA in Leipzig and KAGIDA in Kassel. Elsewhere, independent GIDA initiatives usually were founded or controlled by people from pre-existing radical right-wing groups. Their appearance and their attempted emulation of PEGIDA’s formula of success, including their rallies’ procedural structure, their strategy and slogans, inflicted considerable damage to the image of a broad ‘middle-class’ citizens’ movement that was carefully cultivated by the organisers in Dresden. This became apparent, for instance, with the BOGIDA protests in the city of Bonn, which were initiated by a regionally known radical right-wing activist, or with MVGIDA in Schwerin13, where not only speakers from the far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) party but also parts of its state parliamentary group openly participated in the demonstrations. SÜGIDA in Suhl, Thuringia, and THÜGIDA, which mobilised

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throughout the whole state of Thuringia, were also run by activists of the local neoNazi scene. Whereas in these examples it remained unclear whether there had been any contact with the Dresden organisers, in other cases, it was well-known that activists from Dresden cooperated with their counterparts in other German cities, despite their obvious right-wing extremist background.14 The numerous PEGIDA offshoots mobilised much less participants than PEGIDA in Dresden. Typically, only a few hundred people gathered in cities outside of Saxony. Often, after disappointing kick-off events or because of differences among the local organisers, the demonstrations were soon discontinued. The most successful PEGIDA offshoots were two other organisations in Saxony – LEGIDA in Leipzig and PEGIDA Chemnitz-Erzgebirge. But even their mobilisation was marginal compared to Dresden: After their foundation in spring and summer 2015, Leipzig regularly saw only about 500–1,000 demonstrators and Chemnitz only between 300 and 500 – and the rallies’ popularity in both cities soon declined even more.15 A significant exception from the notoriously unsuccessful offshoots is the protest movement Zukunft Heimat (Future Homeland) based in southern Brandenburg, led by Hans-Christoph Berndt, who later became AfD leader in the Brandenburg state legislature (Minkenberg und Sündermann 2021). Thematically, this group is largely oriented towards PEGIDA, with significant personal exchange. Berndt has already appeared several times as a guest speaker at PEGIDA in Dresden. Conversely, representatives from Dresden have also been guests in Cottbus. In contrast to the numerous offshoots of PEGIDA, Future Homeland has remained active for much longer – even though the political ambitions of Berndt on the one hand and the COVID-19 pandemic on the other led to a decline of street activism. PEGIDA’s network at the international level

Right from the start, PEGIDA presented itself as a protest initiative with not only national but also international ambitions. For ‘Patriotic Europeans’ could, after all, be expected to be found and founded in all states of the continent. Saving ‘occidental communities’ from ‘cultural alienation’ caused by ‘unregulated Muslim mass immigration’ did not only seem to represent a desirable goal for German ‘Patriots’. Moreover, PEGIDA’s increasingly strong rejection of Islam and Muslims along with its explicit self-positioning as an anti-immigration movement turned out to boost its international networking attempts. When embracing typical xenophobic and nativist positions after the reorganisation of its management team, PEGIDA was indeed met with acceptance and even admiration among far-right political activists beyond Germany`s borders, such as Tommy Robinson in the UK.16 Some of them tried to copy PEGIDA’s model of success. Accordingly, in the spring of 2015, many international groups sharing the name emerged, for example in Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. In Australia and Great Britain, pre-existing Islamophobic and xenophobic groups

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temporarily mobilised as PEGIDA. Even demonstrators from ‘Reclaim Australia’ carried a PEGIDA banner during protests in Sydney on 4 April 2015. These international networking efforts also had a noticeable impact on the rallies in Dresden, where international guests now joined the stage regularly. The most famous of these speakers was Geert Wilders, the founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom, who spoke at a PEGIDA rally in Dresden in April 2015 (Berntzen and Weisskircher 2016: 559–563, Vorländer et al. 2018: 5). As an attempt to consolidate the cooperation with its international partners, PEGIDA eventually founded the pan-European platform ‘Fortress Europe’ in Prague on 23 January 2016 (Volk 2019, Nissen 2022). Within this alliance, PEGIDA offshoots from Austria, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands as well as the Estonian Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond (Conservative People’s Party of Estonia) and Italian Lega Nord tried to find an institutional basis for their common work. Other parties and movement organisations with even more obvious far-right tendencies were also part of Fortress Europe: The Czech party Úsvit – Národní Koalice (Dawn – National Coalition), the Czech movement Blok Proti Islámu (Bloc against Islam), and the Polish movement Ruch Narodowy (National Movement) (Spanka and Kahrs 2014). A founding document, the so-called Prague Declaration, included familiar topoi of European radical right-wing ideology: Refugees were described as a ‘migration weapon’ directed against the peoples of Europe. Islam was referred to as a religion of ‘foreign conquerors’ that had to be fought off to protect the existence of Europe. These frames reflected the ideological concept of ‘ethnopluralism’, which is also characteristic of the Identitarian Movement (Bouron 2016, Strobl and Bruns 2016, see also Backes 2024 in this volume). However, ‘Fortress Europe’ failed to become a platform for the desired internationalisation of PEGIDA. Internal quarrels and disagreements about strategy and goals led to the alliance’s disappearing into irrelevance soon after its foundation. PEGIDA activists proved unable to expand international networking beyond the circle of clandestine and insignificant splinter groups of the right-wing fringe. More well-known parties and social movement groups kept distance, maintaining partial and brief contacts at most. Apparently, they did not see PEGIDA as a serious partner.17 In addition, PEGIDA’s networking efforts were increasingly in competition with those of the AfD. The latter became part of an institutionalised forum for cooperation in the European Parliament with its membership in the Europe of Nations and Freedom group that included several prominent European populist radical right parties.18 Precisely because PEGIDA did not have these forms of institutionalised cooperation at its disposal, the group could only maintain contacts with people and organisations from abroad through the invitation of guest speakers. This was done by hosting speakers from the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Czech Blok Proti Islámu, and the Italian Lega Nord. Beyond party politics, there were numerous speakers from groups such as the Austrian Identitarian Movement, Identity Ireland, and PEGIDA offshoots from Denmark and Great Britain.19 Attempts by

Germany’s anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement  47

Bachmann to win other prominent representatives of the European far right – such as Nigel Farage from the British UK Independence Party or Marine Le Pen from the French Front National – as speakers in Dresden failed. Instead, PEGIDA’s ideology further intensified and radicalised. Tatjana Festerling, PEGIDA’s mayoral candidate in Dresden’s 2015 elections with a growing influence on the group’s inner circle, played a decisive role here. Her speeches and actions left little doubt about her intention to make PEGIDA the spearhead of a militant movement to ‘save the West’. In the summer of 2016, she even appeared at the Bulgarian-Turkish border wearing military camouflage clothing and presented herself, together with the paramilitary group ‘Bulgarian Military Veterans Union “Vasil Levski”’, as a fighter to ‘track down illegal intruders and (to) hand them over to the border police’.20 PEGIDA and the AfD – a difficult relationship

While PEGIDA’s strategy of attempted internationalisation finally came to a recognisable dead end, they also increasingly sought proximity to the AfD. Apart from PEGIDA, the AfD was the key player during the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany. The party could look back on a development not unlike that of PEGIDA. Initially starting as a diffuse protest formation with numerous, partly contradictory political demands and a strong focus on criticising German financial policy within the Eurozone, a personnel reshuffle ensured a sharp antiimmigration profile from 2015 onwards (Arzheimer 2019). Here as well, the ‘refugee crisis’ of summer 2015 provided the opportunity for a shift towards a clear programmatic profile as Islamophobic protest group, without traditional far-right actors at its forefront. Nevertheless, despite these parallel developments, the mutual relationship between PEGIDA and AfD was long characterised by tension, mistrust, and mutual accusations (Weisskircher and Berntzen 2019, Herold and Schäller 2020). Right from the start of PEGIDA, the question of how to approach their protests was controversially discussed within the AfD. In the party’s many local chapters, attitudes towards PEGIDA were often positive and some even sought unofficial cooperation. Informal contacts with the party helped the initially inexperienced PEGIDA organisers in the preparation and implementation of the rallies – for example by supplying a sales van that could be converted into a stage. The van was provided by a district executive committee member of the AfD in Meißen, a town close to Dresden. At the top of the federal party, however, many were sceptical of PEGIDA, suggesting that public support of the protests would harm the party’s reputation. HansOlaf Henkel, for instance, former president of the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (Federation of German Industries, BDI) and then AfD MEP, soon criticised the protests for their ‘xenophobic or even racist flavour’. At the same time, however, representatives of AfD’s radical right wing publicly demanded support

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of the protestors, putting pressure on more ‘moderate’ voices within the party’s leadership. Alexander Gauland, at the time deputy spokesperson of the AfD and leader of its Brandenburg branch, called the AfD a ‘natural ally of this movement’ (Welt 11.12.2014). Following a visit at a PEGIDA demonstration in Dresden, Gauland denied that the demonstrators were right-wing extremists but rather parts of a democratic ‘grassroots movement’. In addition, he regarded PEGIDA’s first position paper as ‘in part very reasonable’ (Der Spiegel 19.12.2014). Such expressions of approval reached their peak with the proclamation of the AfD as the ‘PEGIDA party’ by Markus Pretzell, then AfD’s state chair in North Rhine-Westphalia (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06.07.2015). Against this background, even the party’s spokesperson, Bernd Lucke, warned in December 2014 that a ‘knee-jerk’ rejection of PEGIDA would be premature, imprudent, and a ‘pathetic display of incapacity’ if one had not previously ‘dealt with the demands of the demonstrators’ (Handelsblatt 11.12.2014). Later in 2015, this dispute about how to respond to PEGIDA became part of a bitter and public struggle inside the AfD over the party’s leadership and future ideological direction (see Weisskircher 2024 in this volume). The party congress in July 2015 eventually saw the defeat of Bernd Lucke and the election of Frauke Petry, AfD’s chairwoman in the state of Saxony.21 This was regarded as victory of a radical ‘national conservative’ current, which tended to sympathise with the protest group. A wave of resignations from the defeated opposite side was the result. Party founder Bernd Lucke left, claiming that he no longer wanted to be the ‘figurehead’ of an organisation pursuing political goals that he would deeply reject. According to him, he had realised ‘too late’ that a high number of individuals were pushing into the AfD just to transform it into a party of ‘enraged citizens’ (Lucke 2015). However, this change at the top of the AfD did not immediately lead to a change in the party’s relationship with PEGIDA, for there were still enough politicians in the federal party that preferred distance. Moreover, despite being from Saxony and representing the AfD’s ‘national conservative’ wing, Petry herself had a difficult relationship with PEGIDA organisers in Dresden, characterised by rivalry and mistrust. In May 2016, the party’s federal executive even officially banned cooperation with PEGIDA.22 AfD efforts to distance themselves from PEGIDA were not only motivated by the poor image of the protest group but also related to a mutual perception of competition. In July 2016, Bachmann even announced his intention to found his own PEGIDA party (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 20.07.2016).23 According to him, the AfD was nothing more than a ‘failed protest party’ whose representatives had first allowed themselves to be elected to parliament by trustful citizens, only to engage in ‘internal fights for posts, factional disputes and self-sufficiency’.24 Despite these mutual attempts of demarcation by PEGIDA and AfD leaders, both organisations have regularly worked together at the grassroot level. In May 2016, for example, leading figures of PEGIDA Dresden appeared at rallies of AfD

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Thuringia in Erfurt. Shortly afterwards, a representative of AfD’s radical right wing spoke on a PEGIDA stage in Dresden – ignoring the ban by the party’s federal executive board. One year later, a first joint rally of PEGIDA and AfD took place in Dresden. The party leadership around Frauke Petry was not able to stop the successive undermining of the previously agreed ‘ban on cooperation’ with PEGIDA (Sächsische Zeitung 11.05.2017), once again reflecting intense disputes within the party about its profile. PEGIDA activists also regularly commented on the power struggles within the AfD, publicly supporting the radical wing, which over time became dominant, especially in the party’s eastern German branches. Eventually, immediately after the 2017 Bundestag election, when Petry reached a seat, she stated that she did not want to belong to the AfD parliamentary group in the newly elected Bundestag. Soon, she also left the party. PEGIDA, in turn, was ‘rewarded’ for its support of AfD’s ‘national conservative’ candidates during the campaign. In the months following the Bundestag election, some of the AfD’s most prominent representatives gave speeches at PEGIDA in Dresden. On 26 March 2018, Andreas Kalbitz, then AfD state leader in Brandenburg, visited the protests, followed by André Poggenburg, then AfD parliamentary group leader in Saxony-Anhalt, on 7 May 2018. Björn Höcke, the prominent and particularly radical right-wing AfD state leader in Thuringia, finally appeared on 14 May 2018 in front of around 2,000 followers. On 1 September 2018, after the murder of a German by a Syrian asylum-seeker and far-right riots in Chemnitz, PEGIDA and several eastern German AfD branches jointly mobilised for a ‘silent protest’ in the third largest Saxon city: PEGIDA founders Lutz Bachmann and Siegfried Däbritz made appearances with the AfD regional leaders of Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony, publicly ‘closing the ranks’ between the PEGIDA organisers and parts of the AfD. In the aftermath of this event, Bachmann rejected the subsequent criticism from more moderate AfD politicians who once again emphasised Bachmann’s criminal past. By hinting at the upcoming state elections in eastern Germany in 2019, he self-confidently announced that it is not PEGIDA that is dependent on the AfD and its personnel, but rather the party is dependent on the mobilisation power of the protest movement: ‘we don’t need the AfD, the AfD needs us’ (Der Spiegel 05.09.2018). While this might have been an overstatement, also in the following years, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, many AfD politicians spoke at PEGIDA events, trying to benefit from the image of the ‘citizens’ movement’. Conclusion

Right from the beginning, PEGIDA saw itself as the nucleus of a larger German and European movement. And indeed, soon after the protest initiative staged its first successful rallies, many offshoots emerged in German cities and even in other European countries. Still, the protest group essentially remained a regional phenomenon of Dresden and Saxony. Although PEGIDA’s attempts of

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organisational diffusion and international networking did not prove to be sustainable, the marches and its organisers had a significant influence on Europe’s far-right political scene and played an important role in the development of rightwing populism in Germany. For, as the protests proved on a weekly basis, successful and enduring mobilisation on the streets, typical for left-wing groups, now also seemed to be viable on the right side of the political spectrum. In this regard, PEGIDA served as a role model. After 2014 numerous regional protests, initiatives tried to imitate PEGIDA’s concept, hoping to achieve similar popularity and impact.25 New Right circles and alternative media outlets also felt attracted by the success of the protest group. In turn, PEGIDA’s rhetoric soon was clearly influenced by ‘New Right’ ideas, adopting concepts such as ‘ethnopluralism’, ‘multiculturalisation’, or ‘Umvolkung’ (a German term that expresses the idea of ‘Great Reset’) and corresponding conspiracy theories. This made PEGIDA a vehicle for spreading these ideas, contributing to their growing acceptance among parts of German society. PEGIDA, however, has shown not only how nativist attitudes and xenophobic emotions could be mobilised successfully (Herold 2018), but also how a disgusted, indignant, and scandalising response by the representatives of politics, media, and civil society organisations further fuelled mobilisation, creating an ongoing spiral of mutual outrage, escalation, and polarisation. In the end, this bore the risk of playing into the hands of right-wing populist actors. In this sense, the response to PEGIDA by the ‘establishment’ can indeed be regarded as one of the keys to its success. For it actually fit into the anti-elite sentiments of populist argumentations, seemingly proving its Manichean worldview about a conspiration by ‘evil’ elites against the ‘good’ citizen on the streets (Mudde 2004). The political momentum created by PEGIDA was utilised by the right-wing AfD, which has emerged as a new major party in German politics, and especially in the country’s eastern parts. In 2023, more than eight years after its emergence, PEGIDA still mobilised for protest events in Dresden, even though with much less support and visibility than during its early years. Decreased mobilisation can not only be attributed to the fatigue of PEGIDA supporters. Over the last years, there were also new crisis phenomena which put other topics on the political agenda and, in turn, led to the rise of new protest actors. The most prominent was the so-called Querdenken (lateral thinking) movement, a loose organisation of protest groups against restrictive policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Dresden, PEGIDA and Querdenken competed for support. As a result, the importance of PEGIDA as a regional protest actor decreased even further, although the organisers were able to resist a complete demise into irrelevance via creative and enduring activism (Volk 2021, 2022, Brieger et al. 2022, Volk and Weisskircher 2023). The new ‘refugee crisis’ starting in spring 2022 as a consequence of Russia’s war against Ukraine did not boost PEGIDA either. In eastern Germany, quite similar to neighbouring countries

Germany’s anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement  51

in Central and Eastern Europe, Ukrainian refugees do not trigger the same xenophobic ressentiments in the population as immigrants from the Middle East and Africa did in 2014 and 2015 (Herold et al. 2022). However, in autumn 2022, with the rise of energy prices and inflation more generally, anti-war protest took place in many eastern German cities. Monday evenings were the chosen dates, the protests had significant support from far-right actors. This may point to the lasting impact of PEGIDA on the protest landscape, even if its label is not being used and even if anti-immigration claims were not among the most important demands of the protestors. Notes 1 The first analysis of PEGIDA was presented by the authors of this chapter on 12 January 2015 (Vorländer et al. 2015). Further studies followed, including Daphi et al. (2015), Geiges et al. (2015), Patzelt and Klose (2016), and Reuband (2017). Syntheses can be found in Vorländer et al. (2016, 2017, 2018). 2 See https://www.pegida.de. 3 After research by journalists, details about Bachmann’s dubious past came to light: Bachmann had been sentenced to prison in 1998 for several offences, including burglary and assault, which he initially had tried to avoid by fleeing to South Africa. After being threatened with deportation there, he served the sentence in Germany. He then worked as a sausage seller and in two advertising companies (Zeit Magazin 2015: 21–22). 4 In Celle, there was a ‘mass brawl’ between Kurdish Yazidis and Chechen Muslims on 6 October 2014 (Cellesche Zeitung 08.10.2014). In the Hamburg district of St. Georg, a similar confrontation occurred between Kurds and Salafists on 8 October 2014 (Der Spiegel 08.10.2014). 5 Lutz Bachmann circulated film footage of this demonstration on social media. 6 In its early position papers, PEGIDA had actually called for granting asylum to ‘war refugees’, an increased funding for the police, introducing national referendums in Germany, and even ensuring ‘sexual self-determination’. See Vorländer et al. (2018: 12 ff). 7 Before the rise of the AfD, since the 1960s, no far-right party has been able to win seats in the Bundestag or take a persistent hold in one of the state parliaments. However, in Saxony, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) won 9.2 per cent of votes in the 2004 state election, gaining 12 seats in the Saxon Landtag, and staying there until 2014. 8 These included the so-called PRO-movement, which was particularly active in North Rhine-Westphalia and demonstrated against a supposed Islamisation of the Bundesland (Sager and Peters 2008). Another example was the so-called Hooligans gegen Salafisten (Hooligans against Salafists, HoGeSa) initiative, which first agitated against Salafism online and then started to call for street protests around the same time as PEGIDA (Gensing 2015). 9 Kubitschek also participates in the One Percent initiative, which aims to win over 1 per cent of the German population to form a ‘patriotic citizens’ network’ in the style of a grassroots movement. 10 See Schäller (2020). While Identitarian representatives had been regularly present as demonstrators from spring 2015 onwards, they were also recruited as speakers since spring 2016. 11 The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution estimates the strength of the Reichsbürger scene at around 19,000 people (Federal Ministry of the Interior 2020: 102–103).

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12 See, for instance, early reports about PEGIDA in the New York Times (07.12.2014) and the Washington Post (16.12.2014). 13 ‘MV’ stood for the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. 14 This, for example, was true for the cases of BAGIDA in Munich and LEGIDA in Leipzig. See Süddeutsche Zeitung (07.03.2015), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (22.01.2015), Nordkurier (21.01.2015), and Thüringer Allgemeine (15.01.2015). 15 See Vorländer et al. (2018: 7). The organisers of the second largest PEGIDA offshoot in Leipzig finally announced the end of their street activities at its second anniversary on 1 January 2017. 16 In the case of Tommy Robinson, once established ties led to regular invitations as a speaker in Dresden – also at PEGIDA’s seventh birthday in 2021, for example. 17 For example, Lutz Bachmann and Siegfried Däbritz attended the New Year’s meeting of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ) in Wels on 16 January 2016, justifying their participation with the aim of ‘international networking’. At the same time, however, the FPÖ denied that Bachmann and Däbritz were official guests of the party (Der Tagesspiegel 20.01.2016). 18 See McDonnell and Werner (2019: 127ff). The cooperation of these parties was also evident outside the European Parliament, for example at a high-profile meeting in Koblenz in January 2017 (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 23.01.2017). 19 Vincenzo Sofo spoke for Lega Nord, Marek Černoch for Blok Proti Islámu, Filip Dewinter and Anke van Dermeersch for Vlaams Belang. Identity Ireland was represented by Peter O'Loughlin, and Tommy Robinson, Paul Weston and Ann Marie Waters spoke for PEGIDA UK. PEGIDA Denmark was represented by Tania Groth. Gavin Boby, lawyer and representative of the Law and Freedom Foundation, also spoke at PEGIDA in Dresden (Vorländer et al. 2018: 67). 20 Festerling documented her trip to the Bulgarian border on her Facebook page, describing herself as a ‘freedom fighter’ in support of the European ‘border patrol’ by tracking down the work of the Turkish ‘people smuggler mafia’. See https://www.facebook.com/tatjana. festerling/media_set?set=a.1112401432159545&type=1&l=277a381b58 (last access: 01.11.2021). 21 Petry herself, however, had a complicated relationship with PEGIDA’s organizers in Dresden, full of tensions and mutual mistrust. 22 See the summary of the various resolutions of the Federal Executive Committee of the AfD on the party’s relationship to PEGIDA and the Identitarian Movement at: https:// cdn.afd.tools/sites/75/2017/05/15144844/2017-05-15_afd-bundesverband_zusammenfassung-beschlusslage_gida-ib.pdf (03.06.2022). 23 Immediately, Uwe Wurlitzer, the then spokesperson of the AfD Saxony, described a possible PEGIDA party as a ‘political competitor’ (AfD Sachsen Aktuell 2016). 24 See the transcript of Lutz Bachmann’s speech on 11.05.2015. 25 For example, in 2015 and 2016, the initiative ‘We are Germany – only together are we strong’ organised demonstrations with up to 5,000 participants in the small Saxon towns of Plauen and Bautzen.

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Handelsblatt (11.12.2014) ‘Die AfD teilt viele Pegida-Forderungen’, https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/bernd-lucke-die-afd-teilt-viele-pegida-forderungen/11107094. html?ticket=ST-3876417-TxKaV2NHZ9Ogj46ECF7Z-ap6 (last access: 01.11.2021). Herold, M. (2018) ‘Fremdenfeindlichkeit im rechtspopulistischen Protest: Das Beispiel PEGIDA’, Totalitarism and Democracy, 15(1), 13–25. Herold, M., Joachim, J., and Otteni, C. (2022). ‘Attitudes towards war and migration in Europe. Results of a survey in ten European countries’, in Mercator Forum Migration and Democracy: Europe and Refugee Migration from Ukraine, Dresden. Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2020) ‘Zwischen Konvergenz, Konkurrenz und Kooperation: PEGIDA und die AfD’, in Backes, U., and Kailitz, S. (eds) Sachsen – eine Hochburg des Rechtsextremismus? Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hoffmann, M., and Rone, J. (2024) ‘Interconnected Realities: The Hybrid Dynamics of Far-right Online and Offline Mobilization’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Kellershohn, H. (2015) ‘Das Institut für Staatspolitik und das jungkonservative Hegemonieprojekt’, in Braun, S., Geisler, A., and Gerster, M. (eds) Strategien der extremen Rechten, Wiesbaden: Springer. Kellershohn, H. (2016) ‘Risse im Gebälk. Flügelkämpfe in der jungkonservativen Neuen Rechten und der AfD’, in Häusler, A. (ed) Die Alternative für Deutschland, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Lang, J.P. (2016) ‘Biographisches Portrait: Jürgen Elsässer’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., Jesse, E., and Thieme, T. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Lucke, B. (2015) ‘Austrittserklärung aus derAlternative für Deutschland’, https://www.spiegel. de/politik/deutschland/bernd-lucke-erklaerung-zu-austritt-aus-der-afd-a-1042734.html (last access: 01.11.2021). McDonnell, D., and Werner, A. (2019) International Populism: The Radical Right in the European Parliament, London: Hurst & Company. Minkenberg, M., and Sündermann, T. (2021) ‘Das Verhältnis von AfD und rechtsradikalen Bewegungen in Brandenburg. Der Fall Zukunft Heimat in Cottbus’, in Botsch, G., and Schulze, C. (eds), Rechtsparteien in Brandenburg. Zwischen Wahlalternative und Neonazismus, 1990–2020, Berlin: BeBra Wissenschaft. Mudde, C. (2004) ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. New York Times (07.12.2014) ‘In German City Rich with History and Tragedy, Tide Rises Against Immigration’, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/world/in-german-city-richwith-history-and-tragedy-tide-rises-against-immigration.html (last access: 01.11.2021). Nissen, A. (2022) Europeanisation of the Contemporary Far Right: Generation Identity and Fortress Europe, Abingdon: Routledge. Nordkurier (21.01.2015) ‘Schulterschluss zwischen Islamkritikern und NPD’, 5. Patzelt, W.J., and Klose, J. (2016) Pegida. Warnsignale aus Dresden, Dresden: Thelem Verlag. Reuband, K.-H. (2017) ‘Die Dynamik des Pegida Protests. Der Einfluss von Ereignissen und bewegungsspezifischer Mobilisierung auf Teilnehmerzahlen und Teilnehmerzusammensetzung’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Deutsches und Internationales Parteienrecht und Parteienforschung, 23(1), 112–130. Sager, T., and Peters, J. (2008) ‘Die PRO-Aktivitäten im Kontext der extremen Rechten’ in Häusler, A. (ed), Rechtspopulismus als "Bürgerbewegung": Kampagnen gegen Islam und Moscheebau und kommunale Gegenstrategien, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 115–128.

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Sächsische Zeitung (07.08.2014) ‘Zimmer frei’, www.saechsische.de/plus/zimmerfrei-2900141.html (last access: 01.11.2021). Sächsische Zeitung (11.05.2017) ‘Zankapfel Pegida’, p. 6. Schäller, S. (2020) ‘Biographisches Portrait: Martin Sellner’, in Backes, U., Gallus, A., Jesse, E., and Thieme, T. (eds) Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Spanka, E., and Kahrs, A. (2014) ‘Die Bewegung marschiert. Ruch Narodowy und Polens extreme Rechte’, Osteuropa, 64(1), 129–140. Strobl, N., and Bruns, J. (2016) ‘Preparing for (Intellectual) Civil War’, in Fielitz, M., and Laloire, L. (eds) Trouble on the Far Right, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Süddeutsche Zeitung (07.03.2015) ‘Ideologischer Brückenschlag’, https://www. sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/fuerstenfeldbruck/fuerstenfeldbruck-ideologischer-brueckenschlag-1.2381701 (last access: 01.11.2021). The Atlantic (22.06.2017) ‘A New, New Right Rises in Germany’, https://www.theatlantic. com/international/archive/2017/06/a-new-right-rises-in-germany/529971 (last access: 01.11.2021). Thüringer Allgemeine (15.01.2015) ‘Experte: Sügida war rechtsextreme Demonstration’, p. 10. Volk, S. (2019) ‘Speaking for ‘the European People’? How the Transnational Alliance Fortress Europe Constructs a Populist Counter-Narrative to European Integration’, Politique Européenne, 66(4), 120–149. Volk, S. (2021) ‘Die Rechtspopulistische PEGIDA in der COVID-19-Pandemie’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 34(2), 235–248. Volk, S. (2022) ‘Explaining PEGIDA’s ‘Strange Survival’: An Ethnographic Approach to Far-Right Protest Rituals’, Political Research Exchange, 4(1), 2136036. Volk, S., and Weisskircher, M. (2023) ‘Defending democracy against the “Corona dictatorship”? Far-right PEGIDA during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Social Movement Studies, online first. Vorländer, H., Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2015) Wer geht zu PEGIDA und warum?: Eine empirische Untersuchung von PEGIDA-Demonstranten in Dresden, Dresden: TU Dresden. Vorländer, H., Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2016) PEGIDA: Entwicklung, Zusammensetzung und Deutung einer Empörungsbewegung, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Vorländer, H., Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2017) ‘Entfremdung, Empörung, Ethnozentrismus. Was PEGIDA über den sich formierenden Rechtspopulismus verrät’, in Jörke, D., and Nachtwey, O. (eds) Das Volk gegen die (liberale) Demokratie. Leviathan Sonderband 32, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Vorländer, H., Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2018) PEGIDA and New Right-Wing Populism in Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Washington Post (16.12.2014) ‘What’s Behind the Astonishing Rise of an Anti-Islam Movement in Germany?’, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/16/ whats-behind-the-astonishing-rise-of-an-anti-islam-movement-in-germany/?utm_ term=.5ee19cab8fef (last access: 01.11.2021). Weisskircher, M. (2024) ‘Far-Right Parties and Divisions over Movement-party Strategy: The AfD and the Anti-Corona Protests of Querdenken’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge.

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Weisskircher, M., and Berntzen, L.E. (2019) ‘Remaining on the Streets. Anti-Islamic PEGIDA Mobilization and its Relationship to Far-Right Party Politics’, in Caiani, M., and Císař, O. (eds) Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe, London: Routledge. Welt (11.12.2014) ‘AfD sieht sich als natürlichen Pegida-Verbündeten’, https://www. welt.de/politik/deutschland/article135274592/AfD-sieht-sich-als-natuerlichen-PegidaVerbuendeten.html (last access: 01.11.2021). Zeit Magazin (2015) ‘Busen, Bier und Islamismus’, 15, 16–25. Zúquete, J.P. (2018) The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe, Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press.

3 INTERCONNECTED REALITIES The Hybrid Dynamics of Far-Right Online and Offline Mobilisation Matthias Hoffmann and Julia Rone

Introduction

While the far right in Western Europe and, more specifically, Germany traditionally focused on electoral politics and subcultural activities, the political left used to dominate the protest arena (Hutter 2014). However, the recent rise of far-right street politics and the (re-)emergence of hybrid organisations like ‘movement parties’ (Kitschelt 2006) challenged this assumption (Pirro and Castelli Gattinara 2018, Castelli Gattinara and Pirro 2019, Hoffmann et al. 2022). This ‘diversification’ in organisation and action strategies could also be observed in the broadening of issues emphasised by the far right, who shifted from a mono-thematic insistence on immigration to the inclusion of topics like climate change, gender politics, or – in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – civil liberties. The fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany has coincided with the rise of various online outlets, including global digital media platforms, as key infrastructure for communication, organisation, and outreach. This chapter thus investigates the role of the Internet and digital media for far-right mobilisation in Germany. In addressing this question, we aim to avoid simplistic techno-determinist explanations that attribute the growth in activity and impact of the far right to the rise of Internet use, or specific social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. Algorithms and social media platform affordances undoubtedly have influenced the type of content posted by far-right actors and even contributed to their radicalisation (Schwemmer 2018, Ribeiro et al. 2020). Still, the far right’s reach and popularity cannot be explained simply with online content production and distribution or with social networks’ recommendation algorithms – even if they play an essential role in radicalising both content production and the viewers. Instead, we explore far-right digital media and mobilisation practices as embedded in complex DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-5

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media and political ecosystems (Mattoni 2012). Thus, we argue that the success of far-right digital communications is related to broader political developments during the fourth wave of far-right politics, including the electoral success of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) (see Arzheimer 2024 in this volume). Previously, both political opponents and mainstream media were able to ignore or downplay radical positions voiced by far-right politicians. However, parliamentary representation on different levels (state, federal, and European) opened doors to receive mainstream media coverage and attention. The AfD regularly uses this influence to voice its concerns. It is important to understand that far-right threats to liberal democracy are born out of a complex nexus of different actors, strategies, and communication tools: Street protests are organised via digital media; alternative news websites and think tanks lend legitimacy to crude anti-scientific theories; and far-right politicians act as the parliamentary wing and mainstream media spokespersons of a broader network of the German far right (see Weisskircher 2024 in this volume). Digital media is thus not the one-size-fits-all explanation for the rise of the German far right. Still, it is a crucial and dynamic aspect of far-right mobilisation strategy that deserves scholars’ attention. In this chapter, we will first explore the key actors of the German far right online, highlighting their organisational characteristics that range from the highly formal to grassroots-like properties. We then explore the issues that have received the most attention by the German far right online and how these topics have been framed. We discuss immigration, climate change, a critique of ‘gender ideology’, and the COVID-19 pandemic as particularly prominent far-right issues. Finally, we analyse how increasing platform regulation and policing by private and public actors push the German far right towards platforms, such as gab, VK, Telegram, or towards the Dark Net, where activists may radicalise even further. All in all, this will illuminate the multifaceted way digital media is used by a variety of German far-right organisations to forge their complex interactions with each other, with technology, with German mainstream media, and not least with global digital corporations. The far right online: A nexus of parties, movements, communities, and alternative media

We start this section with an important caveat: Like probably most inquiries into far-right actors and their activities, we cannot give all relevant players a full and comprehensive account. This limitation is mainly due to two reasons, both of very different natures. First, there is much debate on the terminology of radicalism, extremism, populism, or even ‘extreme populism’ (Rydgren 2005) on the political right (Priester 2017, Pfahl-Traughber 2019). This debate is by no means a purely academic one, as the question of whether or not an organisation or party qualifies as ‘extreme’, either as a whole or in significant parts, does have a significant impact on both surveillance and prosecution of (far-right) actors.1 The debate on the AfD and its youth-organisation Junge Alternative (JA, Young Alternative) clearly illustrates

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this.2 For this chapter, we prefer to rely on the (admittedly vague) umbrella-term of a German ‘far right’ that tries to include the activities of actors from both within and without the spectrum of parliamentary representation, as well as with and without (openly expressed) opposition to Germany’s ‘freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung’ (free democratic basic order). Thus, we may naturally overlook some organisations, especially since our second reason lies in the interest in these actors’ digital activity. This opens our investigation to a vast and ever-changing field of obscure websites, Facebook groups, and trending Twitter hashtags. We highlight the online diversity of Germany’s far right, their different organisational characteristics, as well as the different functions online activism has for them. The AfD online: Treading the fine line of what is (just) acceptable and legal

Probably the most visible change in the political landscape of Germany has been the AfD’s unprecedented rise and its shift towards the radical right (Kroh and Fetz 2016, Arzheimer 2019). The rise of the AfD was also marked by an effective use of digital media. The AfD did not seem to feel that the Internet is ‘Neuland’3 but embraced the opportunities of digital communication platforms early on. If we take the crude measure of Facebook ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ as an indicator for a party’s digital activity and visibility, the AfD soon outnumbered any other German political party. In a comparative analysis, Serrano et al. (2018) compared German parties across platforms. One key result was that the AfD was the most active in terms of Facebook posts and Tweets. This discrepancy when compared to other parties is even more prominent when it comes to user engagement in the form of comments, shares, likes, and mentions. Thus, not only does the AfD strategically opt to ‘feed’ digital platforms, but it is also highly effective in generating user engagement. This is a crucial difference to other (more extreme) German far-right parties, like Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way), Die Rechte (The Right), or the Nationaldemokratische Partei (National Democratic Party, NPD). While these groups continue to play a role in mobilising for contentious political action, they seem to rely on highly localised strongholds, lack access to parliamentary and discursive opportunities, and are in continual conflict with big platforms’ community standards.4 The AfD, to the contrary, managed to balance along the lines of what is (just) acceptable or even legal. Analyses of AfD-related Facebook pages have shown that party communicators on these pages tend to share more intellectual conservative, right-wing outlets, while party supporters share more controversial alternative media websites and YouTube channels (Bachl 2016). These diverse types of content coexist next to each other. Furthermore, in cases such as the mobilisation against the Global Compact for Migration (GCM), the AfD has uptaken and adopted content coming from more extremist groups such as the Identitäre Bewegung (Identitarian Movement, IB), in a sense ‘laundering’ it and pushing it to mainstream media (Knüpfer et al. 2022). Thus, the AfD has positioned itself as a key player in German far-right

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digital networks giving tribunes to disgruntled supporters online and pushing extreme messages to the mainstream. Furthermore, the party has operated across multiple platforms, seamlessly combining online and offline mobilisation. While exhibiting significant electoral success, the AfD has also embraced far-right movements and contentious action repertoires and thus emphasised its movement characteristics, with the borders between the party and social movement activists remaining porous (Minkenberg 2019). Authors have even argued that the success of the far right has to no small extent spelt the decline of protest movements (Hutter 2014), with party members increasingly picking up causes that had been previously the domain of protest movements. Nevertheless, we will show that in mobilisation on a variety of issues, electoral and protest players have not only competed but have also been able to set aside their differences and unite in common campaigns. PEGIDA, HoGeSa, and other movement groups

A paradigmatic case of the complex relations between far-right parties and movements in Germany has been the conflictual cooperation between the AfD and PEGIDA – a social movement organisation that appeared in eastern Germany in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis to oppose a perceived ‘Islamisation of Europe’ (see Herold and Schäller 2024 in this volume). PEGIDA quickly spread beyond Dresden to western German cities and other European countries, yet the level of its popularity and its longevity in the city of Dresden remained unmatched (Berntzen and Weisskircher 2016). Notably, PEGIDA’s roots lie in a closed Facebook group that turned into a public page in October 2014. In the context of a highly fragmented network of far-right pages on German Facebook (Klein and Muis 2019), PEGIDA emerged as the most prominent actor, even if the network did not clearly revolve around it (Klein and Muis 2019: 549). Certainly, a key reason for PEGIDA’s longlasting influence and attraction lies in the highly performative and aesthetic strategies the group adopted in the physical space of the city of Dresden itself (Volk 2022). Still, the group’s digital origins as well as its ability to generate continuing (and, at times, massive) protest participation and media attention are clear proof of the importance of digital media for its mobilisation. It is indicative that the founder of PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, was associated with one of the most popular channels of the German far right on Telegram (Urman and Katz 2020: 9) – pointing also to the versatility of PEGIDA and their readiness to experiment with new media in the face of increasing de-platforming on the online space, but also under pandemicrelated restrictions for offline protest (Volk 2021). Like PEGIDA, Hooligans gegen Salafisten (Hooligans against Salafism, HoGeSa) provided another example in which online presence played a crucial role in mobilisation for street protest in the mid-2010s. In this case, it must be noted that the organisational foundations were very different from PEGIDA, as HoGeSa hooligans already possessed the organisational experience and repertoire

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to stage protest events, like in Cologne in 2014. Discussing the difference between PEGIDA and HoGeSa in terms of ‘logics of action’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2013), we can conclude that in some instances, digital communication might even substitute organisational processes for collective action, i.e., in consensus mobilisation, while in others, it might merely facilitate these processes for actors who already possess organisational resources. The Identitarian Movement: Far-right subculture and activism

However, these different ‘logics of action’ are not always clearly distinguishable from each other. In the highly mediatised activism of the IB, boundaries between the on- and the offline become almost meaningless in hybrid forms of action. Both disruptive protest events and more civil forms of activism, like cultural events, are instantaneously captured on camera and accompanied through coverage on the organisation’s digital media channels.5 A youthful aesthetic style and playful remixes of popular culture in their digital image production, along with a practice of ‘branding’ their content with their logo, makes their digital channels instantly recognisable through an almost ‘corporate’ identity (Guenther et al. 2020). Although the IB claims to be a ‘youth movement’, social movement scholars remain critical of the movement characteristics of IB (Hentges et al. 2014) but do note the strong affinity of these actors to digital media used both to strengthen an in-group sense of belonging and to project the desired image for those outside the group (Castelli Gattinara and Bouron 2020). Despite, or because of, their relatively small numbers, the IB has natively embraced digital communication and memetic visual internet culture. In doing so, its activists have been highly active in promoting its offline activity and pursuing digital campaigns to undermine progressive discourses and to reach transnational audiences (Fielitz and Thurston 2019, McSwiney et al. 2021, Knüpfer et al. 2022). Radical fringe networks: Anti-asylum seeker groups on Facebook

In contrast to highly visible protestors like PEGIDA, which receive attention from traditional media, and to the tech-savvy self-marketing of the IB, there are numerous other, often overlooked, far-right groups that rely heavily on digital communication. We exemplify this with a look at anti-asylum protests to provide further insights into the complex role of digital media in (digital) protest movements. Even before the long summer of migration, several anti-asylum-seeker groups created Facebook pages to gain visibility for their cause. In these cases, digital media affordances were used to exchange news stories and first-hand experiences about shelters for refugees and asylum-seekers that became more and more frequent in 2015 and 2016. At times, anti-asylum-shelter groups made up a significant share of the overall German far-right sphere of Facebook pages (Klein and Muis 2019). Additionally, Facebook was employed by these groups as a tool of mobilisation

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for street protests, which peaked in 2015 and 2016, especially in Saxony and Brandenburg. While many of these pages attempted to convey an air of grassroots activism, several analyses have highlighted a strong user overlap with far-right political parties (Schelter and Kunegis 2017, Hoffmann 2020). Hence, anti-asylum pages can neither be seen as a protest movement emerging solely via the Internet nor as a mere party campaign in disguise. Instead, we can argue that linkages in these protest groups’ networks are facilitated by proximity to formal organisations, i.e., parties. Alternative news media

Beyond political parties and street activists, a new type of far-right actor that emerged in the German digital sphere has been alternative news media. Indeed, in the last decade, Germany has seen an unprecedented rise of alternative farright media, such as PI News, Journalistenwatch, Philosophia Perennis, and Compact. In one of the most original and comprehensive cross-national comparative studies of far-right news media, Heft et al. (2020) hypothesise that key features of Germany’s established media system – characterised by low levels of polarisation and a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around far-right opinions and players – contribute to the high supply and demand of far-right alternative media online. Simply put, when their opinions can neither be published nor read in mainstream media, both journalists and citizens increasingly turn to ‘alternative media’. Crucially, many of these outlets in Germany are relatively new phenomena. While PI News already exists since 2002, Journalistenwatch was established in 2012, and Philosophia Perennis first appeared in 2011 but only began to increase its popularity in 2016. Compact was first published in print in 2010 but started an online version in 2014. Alternative media matter because they provide content that can be shared on multiple platforms provoking discussion and mobilising readers’ indignation. Beyond producing content, far-right alternative media (Holt et al. 2019) play a crucial role in political mobilisation: These media maintain close connections with activists from different protest groups such as the IB and PEGIDA. They often offer a platform to AfD politicians’ views. Thus, not only do these outlets provide an alternative to mainstream media (perceived as biased and corrupt), but they also increasingly put pressure on mainstream media to pick up some of their topics and issues. This allows feeding a narrative of a ‘corrupt’ nexus of mainstream media and politics that withhold a perceived truth from ‘ordinary citizens’. A clear example of this could be found in the 2018 campaign against the GCM coordinated among the IB, the AfD, PEGIDA, and alternative media platforms (Rone 2022). Journalists from PI News not only published critical analyses and (dis)information on the GCM but also promoted protests against it and even appeared as speakers at such events (Rone 2022).

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The role of alternative media for connecting different far-right communities has also been scrutinised in research on YouTube, highlighting the growing importance of video content (Rauchfleisch and Kaiser 2020). Among the most prominent farright alternative YouTube channels in Germany are alternative media organisations such as Compact TV, and Ken.FM (Rauchfleisch and Kaiser 2020), but also individual ‘influencer’ accounts that have become more and more popular, also thanks to YouTube’s affordances allowing the monetisation of popular content (Belltower. News 16.10.2020). To sum up, our overview of far-right actors in the German digital space reveals an evolving network of diverse types of actors engaging in various forms of situational cooperation and seamlessly traversing the boundaries between the online and the offline, but also between the protest and the electoral arena. We may think of countless instances that document a complex interplay of far-right actors facilitated through digital communication: Telegram groups (partly led by celebrities), for example, play a key role not only in spreading misinformation on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines but also in the organisation and mobilisation of street protests. These protests denounced the very mainstream media that covered their actions but hailed the alternative far-right news outlets that chimed in on their conspiracy theories. The AfD, on the other hand, lend legitimacy and electoral representation to all this. Thus, rather than having a neat separation between institutional and non-institutional actors with ‘digital media’ providing an alternative space for the latter, we instead witness both institutional and non-institutional actors navigating a complex media ecosystem and using digital media to amplify their salience in mainstream media but also to achieve electoral influence and to organise street protests. Key topics and narratives Immigration – The warhorse of far-right mobilisation

In what follows, we outline some of the key topics and narratives that have been particularly prominent in far-right discourse online. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the key (online) issue for Germany’s far right has been immigration. This is due, first of all, to demand-side factors. The German media landscape is influenced by the public broadcasting system, which is committed to a vision of democracy and openness in society and initially contained far-right views by a ‘cordon sanitaire’. Thus, alternative online media and social platforms emerged as key venues, where people sceptical of immigration could express their views and read articles reinforcing these views. Activists increasingly accused mainstream media of being ‘Lügenpresse’ (lying press), with controversies such as the coverage of the 2015/2016 New Year Cologne sexual assaults adding fuel to the flames. In this situation, criticism of immigration policies and of immigrants themselves became a leading topic. An analysis of networks of far-right pages on Facebook (Klein and Muis 2019)

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revealed that the three biggest clusters ‘consist of anti-Islam and anti-immigrant pages of movements and online communities’ (Klein and Muis 2019: 549). Beyond the usual suspects of AfD, PEGIDA, or the IB, the authors noted the prominence of online communities – above all local anti-asylum seekers pages, which made up 26 per cent of the network as well as anti-immigration security watch groups, many of which appeared in the aftermath of the Cologne assaults (Klein and Muis 2019). In-depth studies of these groups emphasised that the most prominent topic discussed by users of such groups is sexual violence by immigrants (Hoffmann 2020). The image of immigrants as sexual predators that threaten ‘our’ white women is a crucial element in the playbook of far-right framing of immigration. Indeed, when the IB launched its anti-immigration ‘120 decibels’ campaign, they attempted to gain transnational attention by undermining progressive discourses like ‘MeToo’ with a reframing of the problem definition as inherently immigrationrelated (Knüpfer et al. 2022). Furthermore, groups posting anti-immigration content on social media platforms such as Facebook often saw themselves encouraged to post more and more on the topic to drive user engagement and not lose their popularity. As research on PEGIDA has shown, over time, the group increased its content online, but this did not automatically lead to more interactions and user engagement. It seems that rather than the amount of content per se, the topics on which PEGIDA published turned out to be the more important driver of engagement: Posts on Islamization and attacks by foreigners were far more likely to produce user engagement on Facebook, and accordingly, activists increasingly posted on these topics and radicalised their online discourse (Schwemmer 2018). Such observations bring forward the key question of platform affordances and of Facebook’s business model in which content ‘sparking conversation’ performs better in the recommendation algorithms, receives more visibility, and spreads better online. Processes of radicalisation and amplification of views critical of migration could also be witnessed on YouTube. After the boom of online discussions around the 2015/2016 New Year attacks in Cologne, far-right politicians’, movement activists’, and alternative media’s online questioning of Germany’s ‘welcome culture’ (Trauner and Turton 2017) reached another high point during the mobilisation against the GCM. From the top 100 YouTube videos on this international treaty in Germany, 75 per cent were produced by right-wing populists, conspiracy theorists, and far-right extremists, 9 per cent were produced by German mainstream media, 8 per cent by Russian state media, and 3 per cent by Conservative and Libertarian sources (Guhl 2019). Far-right videos were also among the most viewed ones and thus anyone searching for information on the GCM on YouTube was likely to encounter these particular videos first. Ultimately, far-right actors strongly dominated discussions on the GCM for months (Guhl 2019). By the time mainstream media picked up the topic, its primary goal was to ‘debunk’ the myths around the GCM, thus effectively responding to far-right framing online.

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The mobilisation against the GCM reveals the complex interplay between algorithmic mechanisms of radicalisation, on the one hand, and agency of far-right players, on the other. Agency matters in far-right agenda-setting processes, and there is both strong demand and supply of anti-immigration content online also outside of social network platforms. Content analyses of media such as Journalistenwatch or PI News have also revealed a dominance of the topic of immigration, which in some cases constitutes up to one third of all posts (Rone 2020). Furthermore, immigration is often framed by these alternative media in highly biased, polarising, and anger-provoking ways, with an excessive focus on crime (Rone 2022). This tendency holds across platforms and across different types of media online. All in all, research on anti-migration mobilisation needs to pay more attention to the interplay between the affordances of digital media and the agency of far-right actors, rather than focusing on one or the other. Climate change – Countering youth movements and the scientific consensus

At the same time, the far right is no longer exclusively focusing on migration as an issue and has started to diversify the topics of its online interventions. When attention generated by the so-called refugee crisis subsided, actors focused on new topics to polarise public opinion and drive indignation. The unfolding of Fridays for Future as a global movement led to climate change emerging as a new ‘hot topic’ of the German far right. This was rhetorically expressed by a critique of ‘eco-dictatorship’, ‘climate hysteria’, or ‘deindustrialisation’ – emotional terms that reach people ‘at gut level’, as commented by Schaller (in Gardiner 2019). Far-right climate scepticism is fuelled by (pseudo-)scientific reports by the Europäisches Institut für Klima und Energie (European Institute for Climate and Energy, EIKE) – a think tank that denies anthropogenic climate change. EIKE is closely entwined with the AfD (Fiedler 2019), who used their parliamentary status to host a ‘climate symposium’ in the German Bundestag in 2019. This event featured notable climate-sceptics affiliated with the right-wing think tank Heartland Institute and the Science and Public Policy Institute. Thus, in parts of the German far right, we can identify a clear strategy of undermining the scientific consensus through contrasting (pseudo-)scientific findings. Related online debates ignited around a highly personalised criticism of Greta Thunberg and the climate strikes of young people in Germany and beyond. Ongoing research of online debates on climate points towards a more personalised and aggressive communication among mid-level AfD politicians and the far-right Twitter-sphere than among the top-ranks. Again, in these debates, the role of alternative media as sources of information is crucial (Knüpfer and Hoffmann 2023). Still, climate-scepticism is by no means limited to the German far right, and German climate-sceptics often have transnational connections, as studies of hyperlinking patterns have shown (Kaiser 2020). What is more, while some ‘traditional’ climate-sceptics focus only on climate, others clearly connect with far-right

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websites in separate communities, with conspiracy theories potentially serving as the bridge between those groups (Kaiser 2020). The climate-sceptical blogosphere in Germany, in particular, has been found to be ‘quite lively, with actors from all different kinds of societal fields contributing to the discussion (e.g. science, civil society, journalism, and economy)’ (Kaiser 2020: 375). Thus, the blogosphere has provided the opportunity to form a counter-public, in which not only the mainstream discourse on climate change is challenged but also the general consensus in the mainstream press (Kaiser 2020, see also Forchtner 2019). Indeed, when it comes to climate change, sceptics have formed an ‘alliance of antagonism’ with groups, such as far-right websites, conspiracy theorists, and men’s rights groups (Kaiser and Puschmann 2017), often in the context of conspiracies about the ‘liberal world order’. Anti-gender/Antifeminism beyond traditional ‘family values’

An opposition to core values of liberalism is evident in the German far right’s antifeminist stance. A ‘traditional’ role of women and an emphasis on family is nothing new in right-wing ideology. A family of (white) man, woman, and children is seen as a crucial weapon in the struggle against a presumed ‘Volkstod’ (‘death of the people’), and we can, for example, find ample evidence for seemingly family-friendly policies in their electoral programs – next to calls for severe or capital punishment for child-abusers. In this light, it is not surprising that liberal policies for marriage, abortion rights, and progressive discourse on gender equity and equality are perceived as threats to the ‘idyllic’ far-right image of family life. However, antifeminism of the far right is more complicated than a mere insistence on tradition and family. Sauer (2019) points to a catholic origin of the term ‘Gender-Ideology’ that has since been adopted by far-right actors and culminated in a constant usage of ‘Genderwahn’ (‘gender mania’), ‘Gender-Gaga’ (‘gender nonsense’), or ‘Gender-Irrsinn’ (‘gender madness’), whenever the topic is on the political agenda. Similar to a perceived ‘climate-hysteria’, we can observe a delegitimisation strategy that consists of targeting progressive discourses with pseudo-scientific arguments and ridiculing a leftist-green mainstream as creating unnecessary problems. As Lang (2017: 70) argues, actors like AfD or PEGIDA actively seek to construct a ‘counter-discourse’, in which traditionalist values of sexuality and family become integral parts of liberal democracy which is in turn under threat by a ‘language police’ and authoritarian ‘dreamy Marxist egalitarianism’ (Die Rechte 2019). With online campaigns like ‘Kandel is everywhere’ (Berg 2019) or the IB’s ‘120 decibels’ (Knüpfer et al. 2022), the far right attempted to ‘hijack’ progressive feminist discourses to gain issue ownership and reframe problem definitions from an anti-immigration perspective. In their typical stylised aesthetics, the IB launched the ‘120db’ campaign with a YouTube video in which women describe their experience with sexualised violence and the threat posed by

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foreign men. On the day of the video’s upload, alternative media websites reported on the new patriotic women’s movement. Again, a carefully planned and executed media campaign was dressed to look like a spontaneous and progressive social movement mobilisation – typical of the IB playbook. The IB’s instrumental stance on feminist issues is well in line with the ‘pseudoemancipatory coating’ (Berg 2019: 87) of the AfD’s stance on gender issues. However, other actors of the digital far right make no attempts to hide their openly expressed misogyny, like the manosphere’s online blog and forum culture (Jasser and Hammer 2022). Considering the proliferation of online communities of Incels (involuntary celibates), Pickup artists, men going their own way, and the coded blue or red pill cultural references of the manosphere (see Rothermel 2020 and Lin 2017 for in-depth accounts),6 it is essential to note an increase in size and toxicity (Ribeiro et al. 2020) of far-right antifeminism online. Connections of manosphere websites to the gunmen of Isla Vista (2014) and the van attack in Toronto (2018), as well as an appearance of manosphere blogs like ‘Genderama’ or ‘Danisch’ on the German-speaking Internet, can be considered early warning signs for a radicalisation of antifeminism. The COVID-19 pandemic – Civil liberties and conspiracy theories

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when opportunities for street protest were significantly restricted, many traditional and newly emerging far-right actors actively mobilised online. Ideologically, the German far right reacted to COVID-related restrictions with a newfound love for civil liberties and constitutional rights. They defended especially the freedom of assembly that was limited under infection-prevention rules (Lehmann and Zehnter 2022, Volk and Weisskircher 2023). A great variety of far-right actors used digital platforms such as Telegram for (dis)information dissemination, coordination, and mobilisation (Rau et al. 2022). Even PEGIDA, for example, temporarily changed its protest repertoire and started to stage digital protest events on YouTube (Volk 2021). The wider availability of vaccines in the course of 2021 was greeted by farright news websites and the AfD with their ‘typical’ mixture of populist science-scepticism and by more radical Telegram influencers like Attila Hildmann with open conspiracy theories. Research on the far right and their response to COVID on digital media points to a mix of fearmongering and a nationalist antiimmigration reframing and polarisation of public debate (Darius and Stephany 2020, McNeil-Willson 2020, Vieten 2020). To a varying degree, groups, such as QAnon, Identitarian Movement, and Querdenken, rely on conspiracy, opposition towards elites, and at times even support for violent action (Schulze et al. 2022). Thus, it seems like the pandemic was discursively ‘weaponized’ in much the same fashion as the other topics we discussed here, by the ‘usual suspects’ of a broad network of far-right parties, media outlets, civil society organisations, and influential individuals.

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De-platforming as a response strategy?

Probably more than ever, we can speak of the far right as a complex blend of actor types and activities, catalysed by their embrace of digital communications channels that enable hybrid dynamics of online and offline mobilisation. However, digital communication channels are not ‘neutral’ infrastructures. Some of the most used digital platforms are designed and maintained by private companies such as Meta’s Facebook or Alphabet’s YouTube to generate profit. In the context of limited access to mainstream media coverage, German far-right actors have heavily relied on public or private pages/groups on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Hence, private companies have been instrumental in spreading far-right messages, even though they are just one factor among many others. The murders in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, or Hanau (to name only a few), and also the US Capitol riots, have illustrated a pressing need to address social media platforms’ responsibility in Germany and beyond. Thus, we want to conclude our chapter with a brief discussion on the regulation of digital public spheres, the current trend of de-platforming the right, and its implications for far-right mobilisation. Like the arena of party politics (see Art 2024, Decker et al. 2024, Heinze 2024 in this volume), the question of how to respond to the far right is also pressing when considering the digital sphere. In the wake of the so-called refugee crisis and the wave of hate crimes following the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, the German government decided to curb hate speech online by introducing a new law in 2017 – the Network enforcement act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz). Social media companies found themselves obliged to remove hate speech from their platforms, facing fines of up to 50 million euros for non-compliance. Furthermore, responding to public pressure, Facebook ‘purged’ many accounts of prominent far-right celebrities in the US and beyond (Rogers 2020). When Twitter removed Donald Trump’s profile in January 2021, after the Capitol riots, the hashtags #AfDTwitterBanNow and #AfDRausAusTwitter (AfD out) began trending on German Twitter with comments such as ‘We don’t want any brown soup. Not here, not in our parliaments’ (Deutsche Welle, 12.01.2021). Thus, after years of a ‘Wild West’ mentality on social media platforms with little or no regulation, the German far right thus found itself in the middle of a complex and nuanced process called ‘de-platforming’. Social media companies have often been criticised for ‘shadowbanning’, i.e., demoting but not removing content, so that content from certain accounts is ranked very low in other users’ feeds. Due to the notorious opaqueness of private companies’ algorithms, far-right activists could never be completely sure of the presence or absence of ‘shadow-banning’ strategies. Nevertheless, platforms have more recently begun to entirely remove far-right social media profiles, which in some cases has been followed by a migration to an alternative fringe platform, e.g., from Facebook to VK or Telegram, or from Twitter to gab. To what extent Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter might change this pattern remains to be seen.

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While any observer interested in the quality of public discourse can support regulatory instruments, there are both pros and cons to this strategy. On the plus side, researchers have pointed out that (prominent) far-right actors face ‘a significant impact on their visibility, the maintenance of their fan bases and the flow of their income streams’ (Rogers 2020: 214). From the perspective of hybrid mobilisation, we may add that de-platforming can severely impact an organisation’s potential for ‘consensus mobilisation’ (Klandermans 2013). In other words, algorithmically driven or ‘chance’ exposure of ‘average’ users to far-right content is limited when platforms actively police content. This regulation, thus, also lowers the far-right’s chances of recruiting new followers. On the other hand, and against the hopes of curing mainstream social media of toxic content, stand concerns about threats to free speech as well as concerns of driving users to ‘darker corners of the internet’ (Chandrasekharan et al. 2017, Rogers 2020, Urman and Katz 2020). From a mobilisation perspective, we might expect more radical and violent discourse to facilitate ‘action mobilisation’, i.e., the transformation of consensus into contentious action (Klandermans 2013). When German far-rightists faced more and more regulation by big companies like Facebook and Twitter, Telegram proved to be a viable alternative.7 Its technological affordances drew the attention of far-right ‘celebrities’ like Attila Hildmann, Xavier Naidoo, or de-platformed right-wing organisations like the IB. Early research on far-right networks on Telegram suggested that due to the simultaneous migration to the platform of several far-right actors, they managed to recreate their connections and prominence in the network, problematising the effects of de-platforming at the network level (Urman and Katz 2020). Still, as soon as fringe platforms become popular, public attention can lead to the enforcement of new waves of restrictions. For example, Telegram was forced to remove some of the most extreme channels, and another prominent right-wing app, Parler, was removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. If this trend continues, we might see a constant shift of far-right activity from platform to platform, or even further towards the deeper layers of the Internet, the so-called Dark Net. The debate on de-platforming is particularly interesting in light of some of the key developments we have outlined in this chapter: The far-right alternative news media infrastructure (including not only social network pages and groups, but also blogs, websites, and increasingly also private messaging) means that even when they are removed from corporate social networks, far-right actors have ways to share information beyond mainstream and even fringe social media corporations. Furthermore, the electoral breakthrough of the AfD in Germany has brought farright positions to mainstream news coverage. While German mainstream media could avoid commenting on scandalous YouTube videos and protests by PEGIDA, for example, tweets and parliamentary interventions on immigration by AfD politicians have been more difficult to ignore since they come from elected representatives. It is telling that an internal party strategy of the AfD for the 2017 election campaign ‘explicitly encouraged members not to shy away from ‘carefully planned

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provocations’ as a means of generating headlines and getting voters’ attention’ (Deutsche Welle 02.01.2018). While de-platforming far-right groups from Facebook and Twitter does significantly decrease their reach, it does not remove their content from alternative news media altogether, nor does it remove the responsibility of mainstream media reporting on elected politicians’ views. Thus, there is no simple regulatory ‘tech’ solution to tackle the challenges of increasing societal polarisation in Germany and beyond. Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have emphasised the complex hybrid nature of the far right during its fourth wave in Germany. It encompasses a number of diverse actors, including political parties, especially the AfD, movements, subcultural players, and alternative media. These various actors have actively used digital media, both corporate platforms and online news media websites, blogs, and different messenger services, to discuss and mobilise on the topic of immigration, but not only. Clearly, the German far right has diversified its topics and has also increasingly focused on climate change, gender-related issues, the COVID-19 pandemic, and most recently, Russia’s war against Ukraine. Because far-right mobilisation takes place in a complex media ecosystem and is driven by a variety of players, while necessary and efficient, de-platforming alone cannot stop the proliferation of hate speech, in particular, nor the rise of the German far right, more generally. While the chapter has focused above all on the uses of digital media by the far right in Germany, it is also important to emphasise that the German far right is part of a growing transnational movement. The presence of active links between German and US right-wing alternative news websites (Heft et al. 2020, Kaiser 2020) is just one aspect of building transnational connections. More research needs to be done on how digital media use fosters, shapes or hampers the transnationalisation of the German far right, in comparison not only with both older forms of media but also with face-to-face meetings, international (offline) events like rock-concerts or joint paramilitary operations (such as German activists patrolling the Bulgarian borders with local paramilitary organisations), and networking activities by far-right politicians within the European Parliament. Finally, targeted comparisons between the ways in which the far right, the far left, and centrist actors in Germany use digital media would allow us to outline more clearly which aspects of digital media usage are specific to the far right only, and which are more widespread than what we would expect. Notes 1 This is precisely why Minkenberg (2011) argues that ‘extremism’ is a term more useful for intelligence agencies than social scientists. 2 Strikingly, the German domestic intelligence service strongly based its evaluation on the AfD on the Facebook pages of party officials.

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3 Still in 2013, Chancellor Angela Merkel famously called the Internet ‘uncharted territory’. 4 In early 2023, the NPD’s Twitter account is blocked, while the Dritter Weg’s homepage points visitors to their Telegram channel and the Russian platform VK, while Die Rechte offers to send information material by (analogue) mail. 5 After bans from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, Identitarian activity seems to shift toward public Telegram groups. 6 This refers to the movie The Matrix where taking the red pill promised an understanding of a difficult but revealing truth. 7 Foremost a messaging app, Telegram allows public channels with up to 200,000 members and unlimited pictures or videos and vows to protect privacy (Telegram 2023).

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Pirro, A., and Castelli Gattinara, P. (2018) ‘Movement Parties of the Far Right: The Organization and Strategies of Nativist Collective Actors’, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 23(3), 367–383. Priester, K. (2017) ‘Rechtspopulismus – ein umstrittenes theoretisches und politisches Phänomen’, in Virchow, F., Langebach, M., and Häusler, A. (eds) Handbuch Rechtsextremismus, Wiesbaden: Springer. Rauchfleisch, A., and Kaiser, J. (2020) ‘The German Far-right on YouTube: An Analysis of User Overlap and User Comments’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 64(3), 373–396. Rau, J., Kero, S., Hofmann, V., Dinar, C., and Heldt, A. (2022) ‘Rechtsextreme OnlineKommunikation in Krisenzeiten: Herausforderungen und Interventionsmöglichkeiten aus Sicht der Rechtsextremismus- und Platform-Governance-Forschung’, Arbeitspapiere des Hans-Bredow-Instituts, 62, Hamburg: Verlag Hans-Bredow-Institut. Rechte, D. (2019) Brühl: Stoppt den Genderwahn! Retrieved from https://die-rechte.net/ lv-nordrhein-westfalen/kv-rhein-erft/bruehl-stoppt-den-genderwahn/ Ribeiro, M. H., Ottoni, R., West, R., Almeida, V. A. F., and Wagner Meira, W. M. (2020) Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube. Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* ’20), January 27–30, Barcelona, Spain, 131–141. New York, NY: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372879 Rogers, R. (2020) ‘Deplatforming: Following Extreme Internet Celebrities to Telegram and Alternative Social Media’, European Journal of Communication, 35(3), 213–229. Rone, J. (2020) ‘The Sources and Topics of Radical Right Media and the Rise of Hyperpartisan News’, https://www.cais.nrw/wp-94fa4-content/uploads/CAIS_Report/Rone-2018Radical-Right-Media-CAIS-Report.pdf (last access: 01.11.2021). Rone, J. (2022) ‘Far Right Alternative News Media as ‘Indignation Mobilization Mechanisms’: How the Far Right Opposed the Global Compact for Migration’, Information, Communication & Society, 25(9), 1333–1350. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691 18X.2020.1864001 Rothermel, A. -K. (2020) ‘Die Manosphere. Die Rolle von digitalen Gemeinschaften und regressiven Bewegungsdynamiken für on- und offline Antifeminismus’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 32(2), 491–505. Rydgren, J. (2005) ‘Is Extreme Right-Wing Populism Contagious? Explaining the Emergence of a New Party Family’, European Journal of Political Research, 44(3), 413–437. Sauer, B. (2019) ‘Anti-feministische Mobilisierung in Europa. Kampf um eine neue politische Hegemonie?’, Zeitschrift Für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 13(3), 339–352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-019-00430-8 Schelter, S., and Kunegis, J. (2017) ‘“Dark Germany”: Temporal Characteristics and Connectivity Patterns in Online Far-Right Protests against Refugee Housing’, WebSci 2017 – Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Web Science Conference, 415–416. Schulze, H., Hohner, J., Greipl, S., Girgnhuber, M., Desta, I., and Rieger, D. (2022) ‘Far-Right Conspiracy Groups on Fringe Platforms: A Longitudinal Analysis of Radicalization Dynamics on Telegram’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 28(4), 1103–1126. Schwemmer, C. (2018) ‘Social Media Strategies of Right-Wing Movements – The Radicalization of Pegida’, https://osf.io/nd7f9/download/?version=1&displayName=pegida_paper_socarxiv-2018-03-03T19%3A59%3A30.788Z.pdf (last access: 01.11.2021). Serrano, J., Shahrazaye, M., Papakyriakopoulos, O., and Hegelich, S. (2018) ‘The rise of Germany’s AfD: A social media analysis’, SMSociety ‘19: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society, 214–223.

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Telegram. (2023) FAQ. Retrieved from https://telegram.org/faq Trauner, F., and Turton, J. (2017) ‘“Welcome Culture”: The Emergence and Transformation of a Public debate on Migration’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 46(1), 33–42. Urman, A., and Katz, S. (2020) ‘What They do in the Shadows: Examining the Far-Right Networks on Telegram’, Information, Communication & Society, 25(7), 904–923. Vieten, U. (2020) ‘The “New Normal” and “Pandemic Populism”: The COVID-19 Crisis and Anti-Hygienic Mobilisation of the Far-Right’, Social Sciences, 9(9), 165. Volk, S. (2021) ‘Die Rechtspopulistische PEGIDA in der COVID-19-Pandemie’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 34(2), 235–248. Volk, S. (2022) ‘Explaining PEGIDA’s ‘Strange Survival’: An Ethnographic Approach Tofar-Right Protest Rituals’, Political Research Exchange, 4(1). Volk, S., and Weisskircher, M. (2023) ‘Defending Democracy Against the ‘Corona-Dictatorship’? Far-Right PEGIDA During the Covid-19 Pandemic’, Social Movement Studies, online first. Weisskircher, M. (2024) ‘Far-Right Parties and Divisions over Movement-party Strategy: The AfD and the Anti-Corona Protests of Querdenken’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge.

4 FITTING IN, STANDING OUT Far-Right Youth Style and Commercialization in Germany Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Annett Gräfe-Geusch

Introduction

During its fourth wave, the far right has risen in Germany, as evidenced both by the electoral breakthrough of Alternative fūr Deutschland (AfD; see also Arzheimer 2024 in this volume) as well as the increasing presence of non-party right-wing extremists—especially in regions like Saxony, where their numbers are now as high as they were in 1993 (Der Spiegel 03.11.2020). But while right-wing extremists and political parties are closely monitored in Germany, less is known about youth in and around the margins of far-right subcultures, even though such scenes can be gateways to further radicalization, extremist mobilization, and engagement in violence (Simi and Futrell 2010; see also König and Jäckle 2024 in this volume). The German case of youth engagement is especially intriguing because the German far right was at the forefront of a radical transformation in European far-right style in the early part of the 21st century, as the previously uniform ‘skinhead’ style of shaved heads, black combat boots, camouflage pants, and bomber jackets has been replaced with a wide variety of commercial mainstream style clothing styles, often through the use of brands which are deliberately coded with extremist symbols and references (Miller-Idriss 2018). We know surprisingly little about how youth in and around far-right subcultures consume such clothing, whether they understand it, what it means to them, and how they interpret their coded messages, symbols, and signals. In the following chapter, we examine how the complexity of style works for youth in and around the far right in Germany, focusing in particular on how style helps young people navigate two significant emotional impulses of adolescence: fitting in, and standing out. That is how they seek to establish belonging to communities, mainstream society, and their peer networks and how they may try to set DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-6

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themselves apart from them. As youth navigate adolescence and the transition to adulthood, we argue, they play with style as a way of exploring what it means to be a part of a group and a community, and what it means to be noticed for being different. Empirically, these findings have implications for the appeal of the new, mainstream far-right subcultural brands and styles and their potential to contribute to the recruitment and radicalization of far-right youth. Theoretically, we trace implications for work on youth identities, especially in terms of the meaning of fashion and the complexity of style for young people’s lives and identities. Data and methods

This chapter emerged from a larger, long-term research study of the commercialization of far-right youth culture in Germany (Miller-Idriss 2018) that combined image analysis of a digital archive of far-right subcultural style and symbols with qualitative research in two Berlin vocational schools, including interviews with students, teachers, and principals. In this chapter, we draw primarily on the analysis of 491 interviews with students collected for the project, although the broader research project also informs our analysis of this subset of the data. Semi-structured interviews lasting 30–90 minutes each took place in 2013–20142 at two vocational schools for construction trades in Berlin and aimed to understand whether young people—who were aged 16–28 at the time of their interview, with an average age of 20.7—own or wear any of the banned clothing, how they define their own sense of style and its meaning to them, how they feel about school bans of symbols or clothing brands, and how they interpret a series of images depicting far-right symbols in clothing. Construction trade vocational schools were chosen primarily because these are sites where educators were actively thinking about how to engage youth who were involved in multiple dimensions of anti-democratic, xenophobic, and extremist behavior. The first author also knew from her previous research that construction trade vocational schools saw relatively high shares of far-right youth participation and would thus allow access to a group of youth who were already or at high risk for far-right and extremist involvement or who spent their life around youth who were part of that scene. For a fuller explanation of the project methodology, see the methods appendix in Miller-Idriss (2018). Youth style, subcultures, and identity

Subcultures have long garnered the attention of academics interested in youth across a variety of contexts, certainly not only in research on the far right: scholars have focused on school achievement, school cultures and oppositional resistance (Willis 1981), gangs and urban youth deployment of symbols and signs (Goldstein and Kadlubov 1998), and perhaps most notably, youth style and its varied meanings during the transition to adulthood (Hebdige 1979, Hall et al. 1980, Muggleton 2000, Nayak 2005). We have opted to use the term ‘subcultures’ rather than

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the more recent term ‘scene’ in this chapter, because most scholarly definitions of ‘scene’ require the spaces to be political and linked to social movement action (see Leach and Haunss 2009: 258), while subcultures may lack political purpose. While far-right youth in Germany do have ideological positions consistent with far-right political movements and parties, they are often very loosely connected—or disconnected—from political engagement, spending more time in parties, festivals, concerts, and soccer matches. Across the past few decades of scholarship on this topic, subcultures have consistently been positioned in opposition to ‘the mainstream,’ and scholars have spent considerable effort studying the varying ways in which youth subcultures create meaning and provide spaces for belonging, resistance, and emotional expression (Pilkington 2010, 2016). Items of consumption play an important role in the creation and maintenance of subcultures, and scholars have shown that as a ‘constitutive act’ (Lamont and Molnár 2001, Lee and LiPuma 2002, Todd 2004, Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 192) they have the power to create communities (MacInnis et al. 2009) and build identities rather than just reinforce them. Scholars have also convincingly argued that subcultures cannot be understood as unified or monolithic, and that this holds true both for any political or ideological views within the group as well as for youth style. Colin Campbell (1996), for example, argues that there can be multiple meanings attached to wearing the same item of clothing, noting that sometimes a piece of clothing means nothing and sometimes it is quite meaningful. But in the case of far-right youth in Germany, educators and social workers have historically relied on the purportedly clear meaning of particular symbols, markers, and signals of extremist membership and belonging as a means of understanding who among the youth they work with is actually ‘far-right.’ In other words, the kind of multivocality that Campbell attributes to subcultures in general has not been applied to the case of German far-right youth. A common educational strategy—for example, school bans of right-wing extremist symbols, brands, and codes—operates on the assumption that symbols that appear to reflect far-right meanings actually represent far-right ideology. To what extent is this the case? How do youth who wear far-right clothing brands understand their meaning? How do youth on the periphery of the far-right (GräfeGeusch and Miller-Idriss 2020) understand or consume such clothing? These are the central questions which animated our analysis of the interview data. In this chapter, we extend Campbell’s theoretical contribution with empirical data showing how the complexity of style works in practice for youth in and around one particular subculture: far-right youth in Germany. We make two primary sets of arguments. First, we make a general claim about the value of style for youth, showing that subcultural style acts as a mechanism that helps youth process two emotional impulses of adolescence: fitting in, and standing out. Second, we find strong data supporting Campbell’s claim about multivocality in youth discussions of far-right youth clothing and styles, as youth repeatedly insist that it is impossible to interpret the meaning of any particular symbol, code, clothing, or style in the

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absence of other contextual clues. While many of the coded symbols are deliberately ambivalent in order to avoid the attention of authorities, youth also appropriate, co-opt, and manipulate symbols and codes in order to play with their meaning, provoke observers, or create their own references and interpretations. Some clarification of terms is important. We define ‘youth’ as encompassing the period of life from early adolescence through the mid- to late-20s. This is a phase during which young people’s individual and collective identities are developing and changing, when they begin to develop more independent political attitudes and ideological beliefs, and often find peer and friendship groups to be at least as—if not more—important to their daily lives than their familial relationships (see Miller-Idriss 2018, 2020). We use the term ‘far-right’ to denote a spectrum of beliefs, including some combination of xenophobic, anti-democratic, authoritarian, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-government, fascist, homophobic, ethno-nationalist, or racist values, beliefs, actions, and goals (Mudde 2000, Rydgren 2007, Miller-Idriss 2020). It is, however, important to note that far-right youth identity is not clearly bounded or monolithic (Miller-Idriss 2017). Scholars have long understood youth identities and youth subcultures to be fluid, complex, and contradictory, with boundaries that are porous rather than fixed; they are not static or sealed units but adapt and change as youth enter and exit various groups (see, e.g., Hall et al. 1980, Muggleton 2000, Nayak 2003). Identification with far-right subcultures is no different. However, even if they are experimental or contradictory, identities and actions can be dangerous and harmful, particularly when they originate in subcultures where violence against others is valorized, celebrated, or encouraged (Beier 2016). The importance of style to youth’s sense of self

One of the clearest findings from our interviews with youth is simply how important their own sense of style is to them, independent from the issue of far-right youth style. Almost all of the youth we spoke with described clothing and style as ‘very important’ to them, repeatedly talking about style as an expression of their personality and character and as a way of expressing who they are. In a typical response, Rainer,3 18, notes that style is important ‘because it describes the character’ and later says ‘clothes make the man’ as he describes how important it is to ‘adapt [your clothing] according’ to one’s ‘educational level’ and to be aware of how clothing makes you appear to others. Similarly, Tobias, 21, explains that style is ‘very important because it… because it simply represents me, because I can show myself though it, I can express myself through it, how I feel, what I’m doing, maybe what kind of a person I am. So it’s very, very important to me.’ Steffen, 24, explains that he defines himself through his clothes, noting that he would never wear something in which he did not feel comfortable only because it is dictated by etiquette. While research as well as popular culture has long associated style and fashion with women,

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it is clear that for these young men—all of whom are training in construction trades and degrees—their own style is deeply embedded in their sense of self and identity (see Swain 2002, 2003, Blee 2003, Pilkington 2016). In some cases, youth directly referenced their occupational identities as they related to the importance of style for their sense of self, particularly in the face of what they perceive to be societal dismissal, class prejudice, and discrimination of working-class and manual labor jobs. Hayri, 21, notes that his style is very important to him because style shows who you are, and then explains that if he dressed as a construction worker every day, people would talk with him differently. ‘When I go out on the weekend and people talk to me, they would never think that I work in construction, because I’m dressed totally differently and I think that’s totally normal, because I don’t always have to look like a construction worker, so that everyone can see that I am a construction worker.’ Justus, 21, talked at length about feeling like people look down on him on public transportation for being dressed like a construction worker as he travels home after work, even though he earns a better living than many others. This finding is consistent with literature on the ways in which fashion and style help to establish symbolic class boundaries among youth, even when those boundaries are not clearly articulated in verbal terms (Hollingworth and Williams 2009). Peer groups and brands

Individual style is not only personally important to these youth but is also deeply connected to peer groups and perceptions of self within a group. Sometimes youth want to differentiate themselves, sometimes they want to blend in, but they always have peer groups as reference points. Youth discussed a wide variety of overlapping and intersecting youth subcultural styles and talked at length about how various peer groups are associated with subcultural scenes. In these conversations, they not only referenced large subcultural groups like bikers and rockers, skaters, rappers, hip-hop youth, immigrant and Muslim youth, punks, far-right and far-left youth but also casually and constantly referenced nearly endless permutations of smaller subcultures within those larger groups, including farright skinheads, soccer Hooligans, ‘ultras’ and soccer fans, ‘normal skinheads/ left-wing skinheads,’ hipsters, ‘pumpers’ (gym-guys who work out a lot), sporty youth, rocker-gangs, goth youth, the rock-a-Billy scene, dance crews, rowdies, ravers, techno-punk or ‘emo-techno’ youth, metal scene youth, the Oi! punker scene, the ‘indies,’ the ‘prolls’ (working-class style youth), and village kids versus city kids. Youth clearly saw such subcultures and subcultural styles as inextricable from peer groups, particularly during early-to-mid adolescence, which many of our interviewees noted was particularly formative vis-à-vis their own style. Most youth described their style as evolving over time in conjunction with their peer groups, often playing with various subcultures or styles over time. Peers regularly advise

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each other and comment on each other’s style, go shopping together, and generally mutually influence clothing and style choices. As Markus, 21, explains, ‘I listen to hip hop myself and so my friends have that style, I have that style, and yeah.’ Benjamin, 22, pointed out that style can also drive friendships apart, noting that one of his best friends from elementary school has a goth style now, and ‘as a result I wouldn’t count him at the moment among my best friends.’ Several other youth also referenced the strong normative effect of peer groups and peer pressure in early adolescence as well as their experiences with bullying. Some youth are simply hyper-aware of how others perceive them and what they wear, such as Markus, 21, who freely admits he pays far more attention to how others react to his clothing than what others are wearing: ‘because of the fact that I’m on an ego-trip, I look at what I wear, and look to see if the others are watching me and if they like it and not, and not what the others are wearing…’ Notably, style also factors into how youth get to know other people. For example, when they are in settings with other young people who they do not know, they explain that style can make someone approachable, as youth are attracted to others who have a similar kind of style. Cihan, 23, for example, talked at length about how what a hypothetical person he might meet is wearing helps him understand if it is the kind of guy he’d get along with. He would be more likely to approach someone he did not know if they were dressed in a sporty style than if they were wearing more of a hipster style, he explains because he knows those are youth who would be ‘easy-going and cool.’ Several youth mentioned the connection between the evolution of their style in adolescence and their experiences with peers in shared music scenes, noting that clothing style was closely connected to music tastes, describing their friends’ or classmates’ styles as ‘Rock’ or ‘Metalszene’ or ‘Hiphop’ style. Brands play a role for many youth, who frequently referenced particular brands as they talked about how certain products and brands can help youth feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves—that they are part of a group (Jamison 2006). This is particularly true when brands are associated with subcultures and micro-subcultures—youth in our interviews referenced how brands and coded messages or iconography on brands can play a role in this regard not only for the far right but also for other subcultures, such as the far left or the eco-movement. Lukas, 22, put this most clearly when he explained the appeal of far-right clothing and clothing brands for youth: he argues that youth might wear such clothing ‘in order to provoke and maybe… maybe not necessarily to find but rather to recognize [others], maybe. It doesn’t always have to [find] the best friends… just that the other thinks, ah, ok, maybe I’m not so alone after all or I’m not the only one who doesn’t exactly identify with mainstream society, or who somehow doesn’t really find it all so good….’ In the following sections, we look more specifically at how subcultural style acts as a mechanism that helps youth process the emotional impulses of fitting in and standing out.

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Fitting in: The desire to be ‘normal’

Adolescence and young adulthood are phases when many youth are hyper-conscious of other youth’s opinions of them and when peer group teasing, bullying, shaming, and ridicule help enforce normative boundaries around subcultural style and behavior. Some youth navigate this difficult phase by deliberately choosing their clothing and style in order to blend into the mainstream. Over half (57%) of our respondents report dressing deliberately in order to fit in with others. Holger, 25, says he likes his style because it looks respectable and does not call attention to himself, and he feels comfortable in it. Ulrich, 17, describes his style as simply ‘dressing like the others’ and explains he prefers to look like the majority because it reduces the chance of causing any stress. Benjamin, 22, explains that clothes can not only make you feel better but can also help you blend in and not be noticed. ‘Sometimes it’s the case that you want to blend into the masses… if you’re out and about you don’t always want to be stared at, but rather sometimes just blend in….’ Gabriel, 25, sees style as what others use to categorize and understand who he is and explains that it is important that he dresses in a way that shows he knows where he is supposed to fit in, and that he is also appropriately dressed for social environments or administrative offices. It is important to look a certain way, he explains, ‘so that you’re not misinterpreted… that you’re not pigeonholed.’ In a similar way, Karl, 18, acknowledges that he puts a ‘lot of value on looking respectable’ and not standing out in a negative way but rather wants to just look ‘totally normal.’ Felix, 19, explains that he tends to dress like everybody else, choosing ‘average’ clothes that are fashionable and nothing unusual. Finn, 18, explains that his style is deliberately normal or ordinary (unauffällig): ‘Nothing where someone would say, he sticks out from the crowd with his fashion.’ Again and again, youth described their style as ‘normal.’ Oliver, 23, describes his style as a little bit sporty, a little individual, but mostly ‘oriented to the mainstream.’ Jan, 17, describes his style as standard—something anyone could wear, nothing strange or unusual: ‘one doesn’t have to run around like… I don’t know, these ravers, so that one is immediately recognized…. I would never in my life put on, like, neon clothes.’ Similarly, Bernd, 22, explains he likes camouflage colors because they are dull and do not stand out. He later explains that he tries to be neutral and does not want to send any particular message with his clothing: ‘like I said, I’m not such a fashion-conscious person who is really trying to make a statement or send a message [with my style].’ He then connects style specifically to political attitudes, noting that he doesn’t belong to a [political] party and so he wouldn’t wear the ‘provocative, ripped pants and chains’ of the left-wing or the ‘bomber jackets’ of the far right: ‘I actually try as much as possible to stay neutral.’ While dressing ‘normally’ is mostly described as a strategy to not be noticed or not stand out from the mainstream, youth sometimes noted that blending in can also be a strategy to enact belonging to a group or subculture. Gabriel, 25, notes, for example, that when several people wear the same t-shirt, it is a sign of ‘groupism’

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in ‘rocker-gang scenes or whatever kind of far-right scenes, so that you really symbolize this belonging to this brotherhood or however it’s called.’ Later he describes t-shirts as a ‘visual message’ (visuelle Botschaft) intended for outsiders. While these handfuls of young people described their efforts to blend in, we also found that many of the youth we interviewed deliberately chose their clothing for the opposite effect: to be noticed. Standing out: Wanting to be noticed

Nineteen of the youth (39%) described being different from others around them as very important to them—they intentionally aim to stand out from the crowd through their style. As Paul, 24, explains, ‘I’m my own person, I don’t want to run around [looking like] all the others here.’ Max, 21, likes his style because not everyone has it—it is important to him that not everyone dresses like him because ‘that’s how I differentiate myself from the others.’ Heike, 22, explains having a unique style helps her define who she is: ‘yes, then I can also say: that’s who I am. I differentiate myself from the others through that.’ Timo, 22, describes his style as his ‘own. I have my own style. I don’t go with the main current. I’m a person who is happy to swim against the current…. I’ve always worn the opposite [of what’s in].’ Fabian, 17, explains that his favorite color is neon green ‘because it’s different and stands out. Because hardly anybody wears it.’ He explains it is important to him to come across as an individual. Ingo, 18, describes a clear shift from the eighth grade on, when he wanted to stand out from the others, explaining that growing up in Berlin brought a certain kind of peer pressure around clothing and being in style. Tobias, 21, describes a similar evolution as he moved from being someone who did not want to stand out to someone who wants to stand out, explaining that wearing bright colors is a better reflection of his personality. Some youth directly linked their desire to be different to an explicit rejection of mainstream society or what is popular. Mahmut, 21, says his own style is very important because one’s style says a lot about one’s character—‘more than if one follows, like I used to, trends like mass hysteria and everyone has the same things on. An individual style shows rather something of creativity… more of, I don’t know, more uniqueness, one separates oneself, one doesn’t want to belong to the masses, but one wants to be with the masses, that how it seems to me.’ Christoph, 21, explains that being different from other youth is important: ‘It’s really important, because I don’t want to have to adapt to other people… yea, I wear my things the way I want to and don’t have to have the brand names like everybody else, I don’t need anything like that.’ Georg, 21, says being different from others is important to him and his friends, in the context of specific brands they choose: ‘But my friends wear [this brand] also, because first of all they like it and second of all, they don’t want to be like everybody else. That’s always the …main principle and that was always the case… I can’t stand it if somebody is wearing the same things as I have on… it makes me crazy.’

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For some youth, clothing is more than just standing out from the crowd—it is also a way to intentionally provoke observers and mainstream society more generally. As shown above, Georg, 21, explains that he always tried to distinguish himself from others. He then links this attitude to his specific choice of brands, explaining that he looks for brands that not everyone wears and that also are occasionally rejected by society because of their association with specific groups. His style is important to him, he argues, because he wants to set himself apart from others. He deliberately chooses clothing whose iconography intends to provoke and offend mainstream society, who abhors many of the motifs of the clothing brands he favors. ‘These days,’ he argues, ‘you either go the way of society or the way of provocation….’ Positioning far-right style and codes as multivocal

Whether they wanted to blend in or stand out, the young people we interviewed felt strongly that style was critical to their own sense of self and reflected their personality and character. But we discovered, to our surprise, that they resisted attributing the same meanings to other youth’s clothing choices. Most notably, they tempered their claims about the relationship among style, personality, and character in discussions of whether and how particular kinds of clothing styles reflected engagement in or commitment to far-right subcultures. In other words, while these youths argue that their own sense of style is a clear reflection of their selfhood, perceived position in society, and cultural preferences, they are reluctant to assume that others feel the same way. Thus, youth who wear clothing associated with farright youth subcultures, they repeatedly asserted, were not necessarily right-wing. In regarding others, youth asserted that style does not always or necessarily reflect inner character and subcultural associations. There were exceptions: a few youth argued that far-right clothing choices were clearly intentional expressions of anti-foreigner sentiment, xenophobia, or racism. Mahmut,4 21, for example, argues that people choose to wear clothing coded with far-right symbols because they want to express their (right-wing) character. But most youth consistently expressed reluctance to judge people based on their clothing or to link people’s ideology with their style. Daniel, 20, offers a typical response during a discussion about clothing from the far-right brand Ansgar Aryan that he clearly identifies as being right-wing. But he then tempers his discussion when talking about the brand’s consumers: ‘Pff. Well, I’m a little bit against always pinning something like that onto clothing. To say that a world view or something, however you call it, is worn on the… one doesn’t always convey one’s own [beliefs] on the outside through one’s clothing… although that’s what I do myself [laughs]. Well, it is a little bit uniform-style, that’s true. But I wouldn’t draw any conclusions if he wears clothing like that.’ Similarly, as Heike, 22, simply explains while looking at an image of a person wearing an Anti-Antifa t-shirt, ‘Anti-Antifa [reading]…from its appearance, I’d say it’s some sort of club. At least from the

Fitting in, standing out  85 TABLE 4.1  Youth association with the far-right scene.

Self Part of the far-right subculture Volunteered views consistent with the far-right ideology Owns/wears clothing associated with far-right

Family/Friends

Classmates/Neighbors/ Acquaintances

Total as unique individuals

2

7

17

21

9

N/A

N/A

 9

25

25

30

43

Note: This table is based on all 51 interviews and is adapted from a table published in Miller-Idriss (2018: 45).

shirt, what’s on it. All [of them] are tattooed and have shaved heads, but I wouldn’t. just from the appearance, I wouldn’t automatically think racism. … Not necessarily. One shouldn’t judge from the outside [laughs].’ Later, she explains that someone not only might wear far-right clothing in order to express himself but might also just be wearing it for fun or to get attention. ‘Or he might just be wearing it to see who is paying attention … or who thinks like that….’ Nearly all of the youth interviewed know, grew up with, or have encountered at school or work far-right youth and right-wing subcultures (see Table 4.1). To some extent, the reluctance of the youth we interviewed to interpret symbols as having clear far-right connotations is influenced by these relationships, as they describe such youth as ‘not so bad,’ ‘not bad guys,’ or noting that ‘they look like that but aren’t violent,’ for example. But their insistence on the multivocality of the symbols is also because the codes and symbols are deliberately difficult to interpret, using lesser known references to Nazi era Germany or far-right ideological positions, which can make it difficult for outsiders to understand their meaning and create plausible deniability in their deployment. Other symbols may be much clearer but are then appropriated by youth and combined with symbols and codes in ways that change their meaning entirely and potentially disrupt the symbols’ far-right connotations. And in some cases, mainstream brands are appropriated and imbued with new meanings and significations due to the coincidental ways in which their logos or labels can be interpreted in ways appealing to the far-right (Miller-Idriss 2018). In other words, the subtlety and complexity of the clothing and symbols themselves contribute to the multivocality and the difficulty of definitive interpretations in the absence of other contextual clues. Youth used a variety of rationales as they articulated their reluctance to interpret ideological or subcultural positions based on style. For some youth, the fact that brands like Thor Steinar appeal to a broader market than only far-right customers contributes to the perceived multivocality of the symbols the clothing deploys. Tim, 22, for example, explains that ‘many Nazis wear Thor Steinar, but I also know

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a lot [of people] who aren’t Nazis and wear it anyway …because the Germanic symbols are on it, well, Nordic symbols, so… well in all honesty I find it [the connection of the brand to far-right extremists] all much too exaggerated.’ Daniel, 20, argued that some of the symbols embedded in far-right scenes are also beloved by other subcultures; his own insistence that consumers of far-right clothing cannot be automatically assumed to be right-wing is grounded in a keen sense of injustice in how his own subculture (the metal music scene) is often mistakenly linked to the far right because of the two scenes’ shared penchant for Nordic and Germanic symbols. According to Daniel, anti-fascist groups have even successfully shut down the concerts of bands he likes because they assume they are far-right. Clothing, he argues, does not necessarily show your worldview, even though he freely admits that he deliberately uses his own clothing to show his. Mahmut, 21, suggests that some far-right symbols are so subtle, they could be worn by mistake by unaware consumers: ‘it’s hard to know if the producers …use the symbols intentionally so that they immediately connect to Nazis or whatever. It depends on the intention. And [the intention] of the people who wear the things in order to make a point. It could be that a nice guy …wears a… Consdaple jacket and doesn’t know at all… what he’s actually saying with that. Just wants to wear a jacket that he liked, but is immediately linked to Nazis….’ Max, 21, made a similar argument in relation to youth who might wear the clothing only because their friends do. Insider knowledge is often required to accurately detect and understand these codes. As a result, there are cases where youth wear the products because they have a general sense that the products are anti-establishment, portray ‘toughness’ or a readiness to be violent, or simply because they like the products, without actually understanding the ways in which the brands are marketed to or used by the far right. Therefore, some youth argue, you cannot judge everyone simply by looking at what they wear. Indeed, the youth we interviewed often did not understand or catch the subtle coding in some of the far-right references. But even when they did, they noted that other youth may not be aware of the codes. Daniel, 20, for example, correctly identified an image of a fox along with the phrase ‘Desert Fox’ as referencing the nickname of Erwin Rommel, who commanded the Nazi party’s troops in North Africa. But he noted that it would not immediately be obvious that this is the t-shirt’s intended message and explained that he interpreted it this way because he knows this particular brand’s reputation. ‘Well, if I saw someone with a t-shirt like this, I wouldn’t automatically assume [a far-right] background.’ Other youth discussed the use of double-entendres in the clothing’s coded symbols, noting that references had ‘dual meanings’ that made it difficult to know for sure why the consumer was wearing them. ‘Several youth argued that far-right clothing and symbols could only be understood to be far-right if there were accompanying contextual clues that signaled far-right extremism, aggression, or a ‘willingness to be violent.’ Tattoos and shaved heads were common contextual identifiers, along with an exaggerated display of musculature, aggressive expressions,

Fitting in, standing out  87

and the co-presence of other youth wearing the same or similar items of clothing (uniform style). Finally, some youth rejected the connection between far-right clothing and ideology based on their own experience with far-right symbols, clothing, or brands. An extreme example of this is Lukas, 22, who used to wear Thor Steinar sweatshirts in combination with a Mohawk, thus combining stereotypical symbols of the right and left with each other in a deliberate attempt to provoke society and challenge mainstream assumptions. In a lengthy discussion, he explains that producers of certain clothing brands deliberately sell clothing that is intended to provoke but may not necessarily mean for the products to appeal to the far right: ‘I imagine I’m the owner, ok, I’m trying to provoke with something a little bit, and then suddenly… the wrong crowd shows up and suddenly only Nazis are buying my product. So then it gets banned….’ Much like Daniel, Lukas thus rebels against judging others or entire brands and categorizing them as markers of belonging to a certain subgroup. His own experience of rebelling against and provoking with set stereotypes also leads Lukas to not judge others based on the clothing or symbols they wear, even if these symbols are clear in their meaning: Pff… well, in the end it takes more than just a t-shirt…because I don’t know, he could have a huge swastika on his back, y’know and I still wouldn’t say he’s a complete Nazi, because I know exactly, ok, when I was younger I also tried to provoke like crazy and this guy is for sure not doing it because he celebrates that, because people who are really extreme right are also usually extreme rightwing in a way where they don’t want to show it [on the outside], because then it’s not really good what they are doing. Navigating adolescence: Style and youth subculture

Our findings suggest two important points for scholars of the German far right and of youth subcultures more generally. First, we find unequivocal support for the notion that style is important and is used as a primary orientation point for identifying, classifying, and categorizing other youth. Style is a primary means through which youth express a sense of identity and demarcate the boundaries of where they fit into groups and how they can stand out. Other scholars have shown that decisions about what kinds of products to purchase and what meanings are attached to them have been shown to reflect and reinforce identities as green consumers (Todd 2004), as African Americans (Lamont and Molnár 2001), and as other ethnic identities (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). In this light, consumption itself can take on a centrality to one’s sense of purpose (Campbell 2004) and can be ‘constitutive acts in themselves’ (Lee and LiPuma 2002: 192). This is no less true for nationalist or extremist consumers (Miller-Idriss 2018). The findings presented here extend this prior scholarship by showing how consumption helps shape adolescent identities. As youth navigate adolescence and the

88  Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Annett Gräfe-Geusch

transition to adulthood, they play with style as a way of exploring what it means to be a part of a group and a community, and what it means to be noticed for being different. Subcultural style is one mechanism that enables this process. Brands which market rebellion, resistance, and being different from the crowd (MillerIdriss 2018) may have particular appeal to youth who use style as a way of expressing their unique selves. When those brands are simultaneously laced with racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, or nationalistic codes and symbols, they may help youth develop and strengthen far-right identities as a way of resisting mainstream society, breaking taboos, or standing out from the mainstream. These findings have implications for the appeal of the new, mainstream far-right subcultural brands and styles and their potential to contribute to the recruitment and radicalization of far-right youth. Second, we found strong support for Colin Campbell’s assertion that subcultural symbols and style are multivocal and difficult to assign singular meaning. Despite the fact that youth in our interviews asserted an unequivocal link between their own style and clothing choices and their personality or ‘character,’ they expressed deep reluctance to make this connection when regarding others. Even youth wearing symbols as clear as a swastika, as one interviewee pointed out, could not be assumed to hold far-right views, because he might only be doing it to provoke mainstream society. Moreover, our interviewees showed that youth subcultural style is mediated by intimate knowledge of members of the group. This finding has important theoretical implications because it suggests that the multivocality of symbols in subcultural style that Campbell detailed is tempered by familiarity with a scene (or lack thereof). Conclusion

The study of youth subculture, often neglected in the study of the far right, offers important insights. The reluctance of youth to clearly identify far-right symbols and clothing and attribute belonging to far-right subcultures may not only hint on the one hand at the complexity and fragmentation of far-right youth scenes itself but also suggest a certain level of mainstreaming of far-right symbolism and consumer items more generally. In conjunction with the rise of far-right popular political parties and an increase in far-right terrorist attacks and violence in Germany and beyond, the complexity of the issue poses significant challenges for policy makers and educators. But it also points to the fact that we still do not know enough about this scene more generally and that more research is needed to respond to and capture the dynamics and constant shifts within style, symbolism, and ideology. On a more general level, the popularity of far-right parties among parts of the younger generations, not only of the AfD in eastern Germany, underscores the need to study the complex relationship between youth and the far right. The mainstreaming of extremist style is a phenomenon that began in earnest in Germany in the early- to mid-2000s, but has rapidly expanded into a global trend, with dozens of dedicated brands across Eastern Europe, Russia, Europe, and North

Fitting in, standing out  89

America selling coded t-shirts and clothing (Miller-Idriss 2018). Other new, mainstream styles are reflected in the khakis and white collared shirts in the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the Proud Boys’ co-opting of Fred Perry polo shirts, and the business-suit style of Richard Spencer and his National Policy Institute (Miller-Idriss 2020). Further comparative research on settings outside of Germany would be very useful to the field and to our broader understanding of the role of subcultures and youth style in shaping youth engagement with the far right. Notes 1 For the original study, 51 interviews with students were conducted. However, for the purpose of this discussion about issues facing contemporary youth, the data from the two oldest interviewees, who were 39 and 34, respectively, were dropped. 2 One interview was conducted in spring 2012, prior to the full data collection, due to an impending retirement. 3 All names used are pseudonyms. 4 We chose pseudonyms that corresponded to the linguistic origin of the interviewees’ real names. However, we did not ask interviewees about their migration history or ethnicity and thus did not base our analysis on presumed ethnicity. So, while the name might hint at an ethnic minority background and may make Mahmut more likely to be sensitive to the presence of the far right, we do not know for sure.

References Arzheimer, K. (2024) ‘The Electoral Breakthrough of the AfD and the East-west Divide in German Politics’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Beier, H. (2016) ‘How do ‘Subcultures of Violence’ Lean to Violence? The Interplay of Internalization and Prevalence of Norms Legitimizing Violence in the Explanation of Youth Violence’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 68(3), 457–485. Blee, K. (2003) Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, C. (1996) ‘The Meaning of Objects and the Meaning of Actions’, Journal of Material Culture, 1(1), 93–105. Campbell, C. (2004) ‘I Shop Therefore I Know that I Am: The Metaphysical Basis of Modern Consumerism’, in Ekström, K., and Brembeck, H. (eds.), Elusive Consumption, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Comaroff, J., and Comaroff, J. (2009) Ethnicity, Inc., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Der Spiegel (03.11.2020) ‘Zahl der Rechtsextremisten steigt auf höchsten Stand seit 1993’, https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/sachsen-zahl-der-rechtsextremistensteigt-auf-hoechsten-stand-seit-1993-a-f6d86b1f-4260-4ff2-b1c3-9bd37f33d2be (last access: 01.11.2021). Goldstein, A., and Kadlubov, D. (1998) Gangs in Schools: Signs, Symbols and Solutions, Champaign: Research Press. Gräfe-Geusch, A., and Miller-Idriss, C. (2020) ‘Studying the Peripheries: Iconography and Embodiment in Far-Right Youth Subcultures’, in Ashe, S., Busher, J., Macklin, G., and Winter, A. (eds) Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice, Abingdon: Routledge.

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Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A., and Willis, P. (1980) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979, Abingdon: Routledge. Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New York: Methuen. Hollingworth, S., and Williams, K. (2009) ‘Constructions of the Working-Class ‘Other’ among Urban, White, Middle-Class Youth: ‘Chavs’, Subculture and the Valuing of Education’, Journal of Youth Studies, 12(5), 467–482. Jamison, D. (2006) ‘Idols of the Tribe: Brand Veneration, Group Identity, and the Impact of School Uniform Policies’, Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, 10(1), 19–41. König, P., and Jäckle, S. (2024) ‘The Violence of the Far Right: The Three Decades after German Reunification’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Lamont, M., and Molnár, V. (2001) ‘How Blacks use Consumption to Shape their Collective Identity’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(1), 31–45. Leach, D., and Haunss, S. (2009) ‘Scenes and Social Movements’, in Johnston, H. (ed) Culture, Social Movements, and Protest, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Lee, B., and LiPuma, E. (2002) ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture, 14(1), 191–213. MacInnis, D., Park, C.W., and Priester, J. (2009) Handbook of Brand Relationships, New York: M.E. Sharpe. Miller-Idriss, C. (2017) ‘Soldier, Sailor, Rebel, Rule-Breaker: Maculinity and the Body in the German Far-Right’, Gender and Education, 29(2), 199–215. Miller-Idriss, C. (2018) The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far-Right Youth Culture in Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller-Idriss, C. (2020) Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far-Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mudde, C. (2000) The Ideology of the Extreme Right, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Muggleton, D. (2000) Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style, New York: Berg. Nayak, A. (2003) Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World, New York: Berg. Nayak, A. (2005) ‘White Lives’, in Murji, K., and Solomos, J. (eds) Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pilkington, H. (2010) ‘No longer ‘on Parade’: Style and the Performance of Skinhead’, in Pilkington, H., Garifzianova, A, and Omel’chenko, E. (eds) Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives, London: Routledge. Pilkington, H. (2016) Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rydgren, J. (2007) ‘The Sociology of the Radical Right’, Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 241–262. Simi, P., and Futrell, R. (2010) American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Swain, J. (2002) ‘The Right Stuff: Fashioning an Identity through Clothing in a Junior School’, Gender and Education, 14(1), 53–69. Swain, J. (2003) ‘How Young Schoolboys Become Somebody: The Role of the Body in the Construction of Masculinity’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(3), 299–314. Todd, A. (2004) ‘Environmental Consumer Ethics of Natural Care Products’, Ethics and the Environment, 9(2), 86–102. Willis, P. (1981) Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids get Working-Class Jobs, New York: Columbia University Press.

5 THE VIOLENCE OF THE FAR-RIGHT The Three Decades after German Reunification Pascal D. König and Sebastian Jäckle

Introduction

Political violence can be regarded as a social thermometer indicating strong resentment against or even extreme dissent with the societal and political order. In this sense, Germany has seen important changes during the fourth wave of far-right politics in the 2010s. The so-called refugee crisis, an unprecedented influx of asylum-seekers into Germany, especially in 2015 and 2016, was the key event. Asylum policy and immigration became highly salient and controversial topics (see Gessler and Hunger 2024 in this volume) which fuelled the rise of the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) (Geiges 2018), facilitating its entry into the national as well as all state parliaments (see Arzheimer 2024 in this volume). This development marks a new chapter in German politics. Beyond party politics, at the criminological level, the years of the ‘refugee crisis’ have seen an increase in xenophobic violence directed against asylum-seekers. Furthermore, several high-profile politically motivated crimes shocked the public, such as the murder of the district president of Kassel, Walter Lübcke, in June 2019, or the terrorist attack targeting a synagogue in Halle in October 2019. While the beginning of the 2010s marked the end of a series of murders and other crimes committed by the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU), at the end of the decade other extreme-right networks, even within the German police and armed forces, surfaced. These recent developments should not be underestimated, in particular given the fact that Germany currently represents ‘the country in Western Europe with the highest level of RTV (Right Wing Terrorism and Violence) in absolute terms’ and that these ‘numbers reflect the size of Germany’s organized extreme-right scene compared to those of other Western European countries’ (Ravndal et al. 2020: 17–18). DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-7

92  Pascal D. König and Sebastian Jäckle

The present chapter maps and analyses far-right violence in Germany in the three decades since 1990, focusing on the 2010s until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.1 It contextualizes core developments in this period: Has political violence increased over time? What are the most important trends? We look at key features of far-right violence by presenting and discussing available empirical evidence. Moreover, we analyse the political discourse on this violence to examine how recent serious acts of violence have been interpreted by politicians, journalists, and pundits. The chapter is structured as follows. We start by describing and defining the term ‘far-right violence’. We then analyse the situation in Germany in five sections. Drawing on official records, we study (a) extremists prone to violence and (b) the politically motivated violence conducted by them; (c) we take a more detailed look at attacks on asylum-seekers and their accommodations as one of the most frequent forms of far-right violence; (d) we depict lethal attacks since 1990; and (e) we qualitatively discuss recent developments in far-right violence with a view to more recent occurrences and the emergence of militant radical-right networks. Finally, we analyse the media debate on key acts of political violence during the 2010s in order to understand how public actors have made sense of them. Defining and classifying far-right violence

The terms extreme- or far-right violence link violence to a specific ideology: rightwing extremism. Rooted in nativist and authoritarian views on society, this orientation presumes a naturally given unequal worth of peoples and accepts violence as a legitimate course of action (Heitmeyer 2003: 401). Right-wing extremism makes moral distinctions between social groups and individuals as it sees them as superior or inferior depending on sociodemographic features such as gender, ethnic origin, or religion (Heitmeyer 2005: 148–149). While far-right violence can generally be regarded as violence that is motivated by this mindset (McLaren 1999: 171), this definition also entails both conceptual ambiguity and practical problems. Conceptual ambiguity results from the fact that far-right violence may be committed by isolated individuals as much as by (hierarchically organized) groups. In addition, these may differ markedly with regard to their concrete political views and the enemies they target (Holbrook and Taylor 2013). Furthermore, a practical problem arises because the thoughts and motives of those committing acts of violence are often not accessible to others. Whether the intentions behind acts of violence were indeed ideologically motivated and rooted in a target being perceived as inferior, e.g., due to nativist or racist thought, cannot always be determined with certainty. This is further complicated by ‘the fact that extreme right-wing activists rarely recognise or operate under this label that has been defined by others to describe their activities’ (Holbrook and Taylor 2013: 3).

The violence of the far-right  93

Nonetheless, the combination of the use of violence and the targeting of certain groups is an expression of a far-right extremist political message (Ravndal 2018: 847). The concrete acts of violence may take very different forms, ranging from nonphysical harm over homicides to terrorism. Terrorism in itself is, as Bjørgo (2005: 1–2) notes, a complex concept that refers to a range of different phenomena. Consequently, there may be cases in which the terrorist nature of a violent act is debatable. We adopt the definition of terrorism as planned, premeditated violence without any legal or moral restraints, commonly targeted at civilians and designed to spread fear among the targeted group (Wilkinson 1995, Heitmeyer 2005, Schmid 2011). Farright terrorism is thus to be distinguished from spontaneous attacks (Ravndal 2018). Far-right violence in Germany: Developments from 1990 to the fourth wave of far-right politics

In Germany’s federal political system, both the Federal Office and the State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution are responsible for the surveillance of extremists. In a broad sense, these institutions define extremists as persons actively taking action against the free democratic order of the state and/or against international understanding (Art 9(2) German Constitution GG), particularly the peaceful co-existence of nations (Art. 26(1) GG). This definition comprises right-wing, left-wing as well as foreigners’ and religious extremism. The State Offices do not only collect data on extremist groups and individuals, but also on criminal acts categorized as politically motivated. For these politically motivated crimes, a coherent system of categorization in all 16 Länder was only established in 2001. In theory, this should allow for a comprehensive comparison. Yet, diverging standards of reporting in the annual reports of the State Offices represent obstacles to this goal. For example, systematic numbers on a major type of far-right extremism, antisemitic violence, are not available for all states. Furthermore, official numbers should also be treated with caution since hate crimes2 are known for being significantly under-reported (Erentzen and Schuller 2020) – a deficit that became particularly obvious after the exposure of the neo-Nazi terrorist group NSU. In consequence, some of the State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution have been accused of taking right-wing extremism less seriously than other forms of extremism (Deutsche Welle, 2011). Therefore, in the following descriptions, we will supplement official sources with data collected by NGOs or the media to present as complete a picture as possible. Violence-prone extremists in Germany: 1990–2019

In their annual reports, the State Offices provide information on the number of political extremists and the subgroup of violence-prone extremists. The latter group, for which comparable official reporting is available from the early 1990s onwards,

94  Pascal D. König and Sebastian Jäckle

FIGURE 5.1 Violence-prone

far-right and far-left extremists in Bavaria, Brandenburg, Berlin, and Baden-Wuerttemberg from 1990 to 2019.

can be regarded as a measure of the potential for political violence in Germany. Figures 5.1–5.4 depict the absolute number of extremists classified as far-right and far-left in each of the 16 states. Evidently, except for Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia, the number of violent far-right activists either remained stable during the 2010s or even

FIGURE 5.2 Violence-prone far-right and far-left extremists in Bremen, Hesse, Hamburg,

and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania from 1990 to 2019.

The violence of the far-right  95

FIGURE 5.3 Violence-prone far-right and far-left extremists in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-

Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Schleswig Holstein from 1990 to 2019.

FIGURE 5.4 Violence-prone

far-right and far-left extremists in Saarland, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia from 1990 to 2019.

Note for Figures 5.1–5.4: Own representation based on the annual reports of the States Offices for the Protection of the Constitution (www.verfassungsschutzberichte.de/). Single missing values were imputed based on numbers in the previous and following years. Otherwise, missing values were inferred from the number of all extremists based on the known proportion of violent extremists to all extremist in a state in other years. In some cases, no meaningful imputation was possible, e.g., in the Saarland, where the local Office for the Protection of the Constitution only started publishing reports of in 2013, with data beginning in 2009.

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FIGURE 5.5 Violence-prone

inhabitants.

far-right extremists in 2019, per 100,000 German

Note: Own representation; for Mecklenburg-West Pomerania: 2018 data; sources as in Figures 5.1–5.4 and the Federal Statistical Office.

increased (Hesse, Brandenburg, or Saxony). The official sources count more farleft extremists in the city states of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen as well as in Saarland; in most other states, there are more far-right than far-left extremists. To assess how the potential for far-right violence varies among German Länder, Figure 5.5 presents the number of violence-prone far-right extremists in 2019 per 100,000 German inhabitants (i.e., population without foreigners). With the exception of Thuringia, the four other eastern German states and Berlin occupy by far the top positions. As Figures 5.1–5.4 show, the pattern of a stronger far-right violent scene in eastern Germany has been relatively persistent throughout the last three decades. Politically motivated acts of violence in Germany: 2001–2019

The potential for violent far-right extremists in the eastern German states also corresponds to a higher number of far-right acts of violence there. Based on the official records, Figures 5.6–5.9 show that in comparison to far-left and foreign/religious acts of violence, far-right acts make up the biggest share of politically motivated crimes in the eastern states for most of the period. Furthermore, not only in these states, but also in others like North Rhine-Westphalia or Bavaria, the years 2015 and 2016 mark a significant peak in the registered acts of far-right violence. The number of acts of far-left violence varies stronger over time, mostly because of the relevance of specific events (e.g., an event against Nationaldemokratische Partei

The violence of the far-right  97

FIGURE 5.6 Politically motivated acts of violence in Bavaria, Brandenburg, Berlin, and

Baden-Wuerttemberg from 2001 to 2019.

FIGURE 5.7 Politically

motivated acts of violence in Bremen, Hesse, Hamburg, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania from 2001 to 2019.

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FIGURE 5.8 Politically

motivated acts of violence in Lower Saxony, North RhineWestphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Schleswig Holstein from 2001 to 2019.

FIGURE 5.9 Politically motivated acts of violence in Saarland, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt,

and Thuringia from 2001 to 2019.

Note for Figures 5.6–5.9: Own representation; sources as in Figures 5.1–5.4.

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Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) rallies during the state election campaign in Bremen in 2011 or protest against the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017). All in all, the number of politically motivated acts of violence attributed to farright extremism hardly shows a clear trend in any of the 16 Länder in the 2000s and 2010s, except for an upward spike in 2015/2016 in the eastern German states. Notably, any peaks are largely state-specific and not consistently visible across Germany – which resembles the equally inconsistent number of violence-prone extremists in Figures 5.1–5.4. A different picture emerges, however, when focusing on a specific type of far-right violence: attacks against asylum-seekers. Violence against asylum-seekers

Attacks against foreigners and asylum-seekers were already a defining element of far-right extremist violence in the early 1990s. Infamously, the pictures of hundreds of neo-Nazis targeting asylum-seekers and former Vietnamese contract workers in a pogrom-like manner in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, in 1992 – with thousands of onlookers cheering for them (Prenzel 2012) – marked the beginning of a new wave of attacks against asylum-seekers at that time, which sparked intense public debates about asylum policy (Krueger and Pischke 1997, McLaren 1999). The arrival of a large number of asylum-seekers in Germany in 2015, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, was followed by a similar dynamic. Debates about potential political consequences quickly became highly polarized (König 2017) – as did societal reactions. On the one hand, chancellor Merkel’s iconic statement ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (We’ll manage!) reflected a widespread willingness in the population to help the asylum-seekers. On the other hand, it was especially AfD politicians who took a highly confrontational stance towards the government and advocated more restrictive policies towards asylum-seekers, adopting a rhetoric that depicted the newcomers as a general threat to German society.3 Germany then saw restrictive legislative changes in the area of asylum law (in October 2015 and February 2016). Meanwhile, as shown in Figure 5.10, the country experienced a strong increase in attacks against asylum-seekers. Two patterns are important: First, there was a general rise in attacks after the large asylum-seeker influx in late 2015, followed by a gradual decrease until 2019. Disaggregating the picture on a monthly basis (not presented) also reveals a sharp rise in attacks in January 2016. Second, attacks have been particularly concentrated in some parts of eastern Germany as well as the western German Ruhr region. While the overall trend in the countrywide level of violence against asylum-seekers can be attributed to the wider societal and political climate – related to the rising number of asylum-seekers and the corresponding salience of the asylum issue – the temporal and geographic concentration of attacks needs to be attributed to more specific influences.

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FIGURE 5.10 Violence

against asylum-seekers (sum of personal injuries and arson attacks on accommodations) (2014–2019).

Note: Own representation based on data from the project ‘Mut gegen rechte Gewalt’ (Courage against right-wing violence) of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation4 and the weekly magazine Stern, which reports attacks against asylum-seekers based on a screening of news reports.

Specifically, certain events evoking perceptions of asylum-seekers as threatening, like the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, have sparked violence against asylum-seekers. This incident is particularly notable because it led to a massive increase in violence against asylum-seekers throughout Germany over several months (Jäckle and König 2019, Frey 2020). Further, empirical evidence indicates a contagion dynamic: Attacks against asylum-seekers occurring in one municipality on a given day increased the likelihood of such attacks in neighbouring municipalities, ceteris paribus, in the following one to two weeks (Jäckle and König 2018, 2019, Frey 2020). These dynamic short-term influences proved to be of much bigger importance than structural explanations. Factors such as the

The violence of the far-right  101

local unemployment rate, the share of school leavers, or electoral turnout had very limited explanatory power (Jäckle and König 2017, 2018). However, in line with the contact hypothesis (Allport 1954), violence was more prevalent in places with fewer inhabitants with migration background. In general, this factor may also account for the higher number of attacks in eastern Germany, where the share of people with migration background is lower. While similarly fine-grained data is not available for the early 1990s, the overall pattern of a sudden increase of violence against asylum-seekers that levels off after a few years is comparable to what was observed back then (Krueger and Pischke 1997). However, unlike the 1990s, with arson attacks in Mölln, Solingen, and Lübeck killing 18 individuals, the mid-2010s did not see many severe cases of arson attacks on asylum accommodations. Nevertheless, in the recent past, attacks against asylum-seekers have become widespread. Individuals killed by far-right violence, including terrorist attacks

Finally, we look at the most severe acts of far-right violence, i.e., attacks in which people were killed (see Figure 5.11). We base our analysis on data from several sources because official numbers may generally underestimate the true extent of violence.5 Figure 5.11 includes both official as well as unofficial numbers. The substantially higher number of individuals killed in the 1990s and early 2000s include attacks on asylum accommodations and repeated skinhead attacks, also against homeless people. From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, the number of cases went

FIGURE 5.11 

Number of people killed by far-right violence (1990–2020).

Note: Own representation based on official cases as well as cases additionally registered by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation.

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down. The two remaining spikes in 2016 and 2020 were the result of far-right terrorist attacks in Munich and Hanau. Importantly, these numbers hide one crucial fact: More recent instances of right-wing extremist violence indicate a change in quality, marked by right-wing networks, partly with ties into the state apparatus, and several acts of extreme violence within a short period of time. In the following, we illustrate this development by discussing four cases that can be regarded as proto-typical for those novel developments. The NSU and its silent terrorism. From 2000 to 2007, the neo-Nazi group NSU killed 9 migrants and a police officer, attempted several additional murders, and conducted 3 explosive attacks and 15 robberies. The core group consisted of three far-right extremists who managed to stay undetected for more than a decade as they maintained the outward appearance of living normal civic lives. Only after a bank robbery in November 2011 did the police track down two NSU members. The two men killed themselves before they could be caught. To some extent, the NSU was a conventional type of terrorist group comparable to others such as the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF) (e.g., in terms of its internal organization and its financing through robberies). Yet, the NSU also had unique new features. First, its strategy of ‘silent’ terrorism, i.e., of not openly claiming responsibility for attacks, is rarely used by other terrorist groups (although such an approach is more common in far-right terrorism).6 Second, the NSU operated as a self-sufficient cell based on the idea of leaderless resistance instead of relying on superordinate control structures (Edinger and Schatschneider 2016: 134). This idea had become prominent among far-right extremists during the 1990s when the neo-Nazi network Blood and Honour7 aimed at building a structure of autonomous cells and promoted the paramilitary training of militant extremists (Winkelsdorf 2010). Although acting autonomously, the NSU maintained close connections to (inter-)national far-right extremist groups such as Combat 18 as well as to a network of up to 200 local supporters throughout Germany which provided fake passports, amongst others (Köhler 2014). In 2011, the NSU and its criminal acts became public. From 2013 to 2018, the trial of Beate Zschäpe, the only surviving member, took place. Moreover, several parliamentary committees of inquiry took place. The key question in public debate was to understand how police and intelligence services failed to detect this organized series of racist murders for such a long time (Quent 2016: 13). The political murder of Walter Lübcke. On 2 June 2019, Walter Lübcke, the district president of Kassel, Hesse, was shot in the head in front of his house. In 2015, Lübcke’s staunch defence of the German government’s asylum policies made him an object of hate for the far-right. The murderer, Stephan Ernst, convicted in 2021, was NPD member from 2000 to 2004 and later involved in Free Resistance Kassel (Freier Widerstand Kassel) (NDR Panorama 2019). After being convicted of several xenophobic hate crimes, he was placed under surveillance by the Hessian

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intelligence service until 2009. Afterwards, the agencies no longer observed him, believing that he had left the extremist scene. In fact, evidence indicates that he instead followed the ideas of leaderless resistance and also maintained ties to extremist groups such as Combat 18. As the first killing of an active politician by a far-right extremist in Germany since 1945, the Lübcke murder was a decisive event and marked an exceptional case of far-right violence, which in most other cases is directed against marginalized societal groups instead of representatives of the state (Schedler 2019). The Halle ‘lone wolf’8 shooting. On 9 October 2019, a 27-year-old attacker attempted to assault the Jewish community in a synagogue in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt. He was armed with explosives and several guns, mostly built by him using a 3D printer. Not only did the perpetrator choose the holiest day in Judaism, Yom Kippur, for his terrorist attack, but he also streamed it on a gaming platform. When he failed to get through the synagogue’s front door, he fatally shot two passers-by and wounded two more before being arrested by the police. This terrorist act must be seen in the context of other far-right shootings around the world (e.g., the attacks in Norway in 2011 committed by Anders Breivik, the killings in Munich in 2016, or the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019). They all have certain aspects in common: All perpetrators were young, socially isolated9 men who self-radicalized online (e.g., on imageboards as 8chan; see also Hoffmann and Rone 2024 in this volume) without being members of a formal extremist organization. They all believed in white supremacy and conspiracy theories which they documented in manifestos.10 Most of them were also fascinated by earlier mass shootings and killer video games. The Hanau attacker, who was particularly driven by antisemitism and anti-feminism, deliberately used the aesthetics and language of ego-shooters for his video – for example, when speaking of his goal to achieve a ‘kills high score’. On the one hand, this approach helps terrorists to achieve fame within the virtual community in which they radicalized (from a psychological point of view, this can also be seen as one of the major motives for these attacks). On the other hand, this type of publicity is thought to motivate others to follow and copy them. It is therefore important to note that while these ‘lone wolves’ operate on their own, they do so in the certainty of having a larger community behind them – their attacks rely on various ties to extremists offline and online (Hartleb 2020). Explaining these shootings as cases of isolated attacks by mentally ill persons would be a problematic simplification. The NSU 2.0 hate mails. Since 2018, more than hundred hate mails have been sent, first to lawyers representing the victims of NSU, then to politicians, journalists, and actors who campaigned for the rights of asylum-seekers or against antisemitism and racism. These mails were signed as ‘NSU 2.0’ and included death threats as well as private information about recipients and their families. In October 2021, the public prosecutor’s office brought charges against a 53-year-old unemployed man who had allegedly sent the letters. He had allegedly obtained the addresses by calling the police and authorities pretending to be police himself.

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In the course of the investigations, several chat groups indicating the presence of a larger far-right network within the police were unveiled. Together with the discovery of the far-right militant Hannibal-network in the German armed forces that allegedly prepared for an armed coup and the assassination of politicians (tageszeitung, 2018), the NSU 2.0 investigations started a public debate about the risk emanating from far-right extremists within government agencies. This danger can be seen as another new quality in the violence of far-right extremists in Germany. Right-wing extremist violence in Germany’s public debate

Politically motivated violence is a threat to public safety and therefore also to society at large. However, the degree and type of threat posed by such violence and the broader political problems it may reflect are subject to social and political debate. We thus take a look at public debate in Germany and the dominant perspectives on key events of far-right violence. Specifically, we look at four severe acts of far-right violence: two cases of armed attacks on politicians and two shooting sprees. To study the mediatized public debate, we draw on articles from two national newspapers – the rather centre-left Süddeutsche Zeitung and the rather conservative Die Welt – published in the two months following the respective events. Overall, 438 articles with reference to the attacks were included. Table 5.1 provides an overview. Our qualitative content analysis focuses on two aspects: the causes of these acts of violence according to a variety of claim makers such as politicians, journalists, and pundits (e.g., online hate speech) and how they contextualize these cases of violent action (e.g., as a reflection of long-standing societal problems or as unique and novel phenomenon). TABLE 5.1  Overview of selected events for the analysis of media discourse.

Type of event

Event

Armed Knife attack on Henriette attack on Reker, 17 October 2015 politicians Murder of Walter Lübcke, 2 June 2019 Shootings Halle shooting, 9 October 2019 Hanau shooting, 19 February 2020

Newspaper

Number of Number of collected articles in articles selection

Süddeutsche Zeitung Die Welt Süddeutsche Zeitung Die Welt Süddeutsche Zeitung Die Welt Süddeutsche Zeitung Die Welt

33 32 115 70 129 100 96 54

14 18 83 51 88 62 73 49

Note: Created by the authors, based on an analysis of articles in Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. The articles were searched using Factiva. Keywords for the first two attacks were ‘Henriette Reker’ and ‘Walter Lübcke’, respectively. For the other two events, the search strings were ‘Halle’ or ‘Hanau’ and (‘opfer’ or ‘anschlag’ or ‘angriff’ or ‘täter’).

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Knife attack on Henriette Reker and murder of Walter Lübcke. The attack on Henriette Reker, at the time a candidate for the office of mayor of Cologne, occurred during a campaign event on 17 October 2015. While Reker was handing out roses to passers-by, one man approached her, accepting a flower from her, and then stabbed a hunting knife into Reker’s throat. While severely injuring her, the perpetrator also harmed various bystanders who had tried to disarm and overpower him. Reker survived the attack and won the election while being in an artificial coma. Even though the attack caused public outrage, it received the least public attention of the four examined events. Journalists and political pundits frequently attributed the attack to a general climate of hatred that had developed over the course of the refugee crisis. Although the attacker did not have clear ties to right-wing extremist organizations, a few reported statements explicitly classified the attack as an act of politically motivated and right-wing extremist violence. Mostly, however, the incident was seen as a reflection and result of the political climate in general. Some observers also blamed far-right organizations, namely the anti-Islamist group Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicisation of the Occident, PEGIDA) (see Herold and Schäller 2024 in this volume), for contributing to a general climate of hatred and inciting violence. Public responses after the murder of Walter Lübcke, local Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) politician and president of the government district Kassel, on 2 June 2019, were markedly different. Not only was the coverage wider, but the extremist background of the perpetrator and his ties to far-right extremist groups were also repeatedly emphasized in media discourse. Some observers pointed to insufficient state efforts in dealing with far-right extremism: Although the perpetrator’s extremist past was known to the authorities, state agencies had disregarded the immediate threat. Another prominent topic in media coverage was the role and responsibility of online hate speech: Many politicians and commentators regarded the tone of social media discourse as an important driver of radicalization. On several occasions, politicians also explicitly accused the AfD and right-wing organizations of inciting hatred and violence, especially online. Lübcke’s murder led CDU politicians to strongly distance themselves and their party from the AfD when some AfD politicians responded with cynicism and indifference to the murder. One AfD delegate received criticism for remaining seated during a minute of silence in the Bundestag. Looking at the dominant public interpretation of this murder, the media coverage featured statements stressing continuity, either by regarding the murder as the expression of a long-standing or even growing problem of right-wing extremism or by comparing it to the NSU murders. At the same time, media reports linked the Lübcke murder to a new quality of far-right violence. Since it was directed against a politician, it was regarded as a direct threat to the state and at times compared to RAF anti-state or Islamist terrorism.

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Halle and Hanau shootings. The shootings in Halle and Hanau were both acts of far-right terrorism. Whereas the attacker in Halle failed at his attempt to kill members of the local Jewish community celebrating Yom Kippur on 9 October 2019, the attacker in Hanau, Hesse, did carry out his assault on the targets that he had initially sought out: On 19 February 2020, the 43-year-old attacker shot nine people in two shisha bars before killing his mother and himself in his parents’ home. Despite the differences in the targets and outcomes, the Hanau attack shares certain aspects with the Halle shooting as both count as ‘lone wolf’ shootings. Despite the higher number of deadly victims in Hanau, the media reactions to the Halle attack were even stronger – arguably because of its antisemitic nature. In terms of content, there were several similarities in the coverage of the attacks. A prominent public criticism, especially in the case of Halle, was that state authorities were not taking far-right extremism seriously enough, particularly regarding extremist online networks. The fact that no police officers were protecting the synagogue at the time of the attack further fuelled such criticism. The antisemitic motive in Halle was immediately obvious. Moreover, in the case of Hanau, the racist worldview of the attacker quickly became apparent, not just because of the victims, but also because he had published a pamphlet online that was deeply imbued with extreme-right ideology. Some commentators and politicians pointed to a twisted ideology of the Hanau attacker, blending racism, anti-Islamism, and antisemitism with conspiracy theories and misogyny. Yet, it was mainly the perpetrator’s racist worldview that was repeatedly highlighted in media discourse. Nonetheless, Jörg Meuthen, then spokesman of the AfD, initially framed the attack as an isolated case committed by a ‘lunatic’ – and so did other AfD politicians. It took some time until Meuthen, together with co-chairman Tino Chrupalla, called the attack a racist and xenophobic crime. After both the Halle and Hanau shootings, politicians of the governing parties were lashing out against the AfD, blaming it for the use of language that they regarded as trivialization of right-wing extremism and violence. Some of this criticism was quite strong and explicit, e.g., when SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich blamed the AfD of being complicit in the Hanau terrorist attack after fuelling xenophobic and racist thought. In a similar vein, CDU party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer called the AfD the ‘political arm of right-wing radicalism’ after Halle, whereas Paul Ziemiak, secretary general of the CDU, accused the AfD of creating a climate of hatred. The AfD responded to these attempts by accusing its competitors of exploiting the terrorist attacks politically. In further attempts to explain the occurrence of both attacks, various observers also pointed to a climate of hate more generally and emphasized the threat of radicalization in online networks without attributing blame to specific actors. Turning to the question of how commentators contextualized the Halle and Hanau shootings, politicians, experts, and journalists saw a new quality of farright violence. Some emphasized the similarities to the Christchurch shootings (e.g., online streaming). Others interpreted the attacks as individualized terrorism

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committed by ‘lone wolves’ embedded in loose structures and networks, driven by personal resentment and who self-radicalized in online environments, without clear ties to extremist organizations. However, the attacks were most frequently seen as the expression of a general societal problem of far-right extremism and the willingness of its followers to use violence. According to many observers, the attack in Halle only made a more fundamental problem of prevalent racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism obvious. Other voices explicitly diagnosed a growing militancy of right-wing extremists, especially when it comes to antisemitic acts. Yet, these conclusions were only backed by subjective perceptions or by statistics indicating a short-term increase of right-wing extremist violence. Notably, after the Halle attack, Minster of the Interior Horst Seehofer referred to far-right extremism as the greatest threat for public safety, together with Islamic radicalism. After the terrorist attack in Hanau, he spoke of far-right extremism alone as the greatest societal threat. All in all, we identify similarities in how actors tried to make sense of recent severe acts of far-right violence. The media discourse clearly conveyed its novel quality while at the same time framing violence as a reflection of a more general societal problem of right-wing extremism. Many statements linked right-wing extremist networks and radicalization to social media, online networks, and rampant online hate speech. Remarkably, the attacks have also reinforced divides between mainstream parties and the AfD, turning those events into occasions of fierce political attacks and blame games. By now, far-right violence is not merely contested and negotiated in the periphery of politics, but rather, at least in part, in the centre of party competition. Conclusion

Right-wing extremist violence, as Ravndal (2018: 846) has noted, comes in waves. Analysing far-right violence in Germany from 1990 to 2020, this chapter has provided support for this diagnosis. Far-right violence significantly increased in the aftermath of German reunification.11 However, data does not identify a clear trend since the end of the 1990s. In 2015 and 2016, after the large influx of asylumseekers during the fourth wave of far-right politics, we see a peak of violent acts and a countrywide wave of violence directed against asylum-seekers. However, the early 1990s saw more fatal attacks and the recent spell of violence seems to be waning again since 2018. Yet, compared to earlier decades, the ‘return’ of violence in the mid-2010s was marked by important differences. Especially the 1990s saw many isolated cases of far-right extremists who individually or as groups engaged in violence that involved excessive brutality against arbitrary and often outnumbered victims (Sitzer and Heitmeyer 2008: 178). Far-right violence, particularly in the early 1990s, can be partially explained as an extreme response to turbulent social changes, with many asylum-seekers fleeing to Germany from the Yugoslavian Wars (McLaren

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1999: 167, Sitzer and Heitmeyer 2008: 171). Moreover, the long-standing causes of specific acts of violence also lie in the social changes and problems associated with reunification (Lehr 2013: 194). Similarly, the rise of right-wing violence in the mid-2010s can partly be linked to the context of the large influx of asylum-seekers. Yet, instead of the rather ‘organized’ violence typical of the 1990s, the mid-2010s see more cases in which ‘more or less ordinary persons without previous ties to extremist groups and movements got caught up in severe, but more or less spontaneous, plots or acts of violence’ (Koehler 2018: 73). It seems like the face and quality of right-wing violence partly changed and now present novel challenges for law enforcement and policy makers. Indeed, recent attacks, especially the shootings in Halle and Hanau, point to important changes that cannot easily be grasped through statistics that merely count overt acts of violence: There seems to be an increased militancy of the far-right scene. Recent attacks have been targeted less at individuals and more at society or the state, making them more similar to classical left-wing terrorism of the RAF in the 1970s. In addition, the second half of the 2010s saw the uncovering of several right-wing terrorist networks (Gruppe Freital, Gruppe S., Revolution Chemnitz) that often had ties into the militant Reichsbürger movement. The so-called Hannibal-network and revelations in the course of the NSU 2.0 trial have uncovered far-right structures in the police and armed forces. A trend towards creating loose networks and organizations has been observed for some time (Lehr 2013: 195) but has only lately become a more overt phenomenon. Furthermore, right-wing extremist violence has become partly politicized. In public debate, mainstream parties have attacked the AfD, accusing it of having created a climate of hatred conducive to far-right violence. In turn, AfD politicians have occasionally fuelled conflict with trivialization and provocation. In comparison to earlier decades, the political debate seems to have changed. Instead of a relatively uniform condemnation of violent attacks by all relevant political parties, today these acts fuel political conflict between parties, showing how extremist forms of far-right activism shape party competition. It remains to be seen whether making far-right violence an object of political competition will increase public awareness of the problem or, on the contrary, lead to its gradual normalization. Notes 1 The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany in March 2020 – after the Hanau shootings of February 2020 – marks an exceptional period that has probably had consequences for patterns of far-right violence. Whether this leads to a substantial and sustained change will have to be evaluated in retrospect. 2 The Federal Government defines hate crimes as politically motivated crimes whose presumed motive is based on the ‘political attitude, nationality, ethnicity, race, skin color, religion, ideology, origin, sexual orientation, disability, appearance or social status’ (Bundestag, 2009) of the victim. 3 For example, the AfD stoked fears by spreading conspiracy theories of a planned ‘population exchange’ and tried to justify the use of raw force against asylum-seekers

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when major AfD politicians such as Beatrix von Storch demanded to stop asylum-seekers (also women and children) at gunpoint from entering the EU (Der Spiegel, 2016). 4 Amadeu Antonio was one of the first victims of far-right violence after the reunification. On 24 November 1990, a group of 50–60 neo-Nazis beat him to death in Eberswalde, Brandenburg. Since 1998, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation has been active against farright extremism, racism, and antisemitism. 5 The classification of killings as motivated by right-wing extremism can be controversial: Official statistics count roughly a hundred cases since 1990. Research by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and by the weekly Die Zeit has, however, arrived at a number about twice as high, even without counting further suspected cases. Their research caused government agencies to partly revise their accounts. 6 An NSU video claiming responsibility for the attacks in the form of a cynical comic strip, but without including any concrete political demands (as known from other terror groups), was made public only after the terror cell was exposed. Observers argued that their decision not to claim responsibility earlier helped the NSU to stay undetected and thus to murder more efficiently (Funke as cited in Der Spiegel, 2011). 7 The three NSU terrorists were active members of the Blood and Honour group in Jena before they went underground. 8 The term ‘lone wolf’ is criticized since it is heavily used in the right-wing extremist scene itself, promoted for example by US far-right activist Tom Metzger (Michael, 2016). Yet, due to its prominence in the public, political as well as scientific discourse, it is also used in this publication. 9 This does not mean that these terrorists had no social or political contacts at all. In many cases, lone wolves have online or offline ties to other extremist actors or groups (Puls, 2019). 10 Yet, these lone wolves do not follow a single coherent ideology, but they all ‘cobbled their ideologies together in a do-it-yourself manifesto,’ as terrorism expert Peter Neumeier put it (New York Times, 2020). 11 Following a steady increase in the 1980s (Sitzer and Heitmeyer, 2008: 171).

References Allport, G. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge: Addison-Wesley. Arzheimer, K. (2024) ‘The Electoral Breakthrough of the AfD and the East-West Divide in German Politics’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Bjørgo, T. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in Bjørgo, T. (ed) Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality, and Ways Forward, London: Routledge. Bundestag (2009) Drucksache 16/13035, 14 May, https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/16/130/ 1613035.pdf (last access: 01.11.2021). Der Spiegel (2011) ‘Bekennervideo der Zwickauer Zelle: 15 Minuten Sadismus’, www. spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/bekennervideo-der-zwickauer-zelle-15-minuten-sadismus-a797608.html (last access: 01.11.2021). Der Spiegel (2016) ‘Spitzenpolitiker entsetzt über Waffeneinsatz-Äußerungen von AfD-Frauen’, www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-beatrix-von-storch-schiessbefehl-aeusserung-loestentsetzen-aus-a-1074937.html (last access: 01.11.2021). Deutsche Welle (2011) ‘Auf dem rechten Auge blind?’ www.dw.com/de/auf-dem-rechtenauge-blind/a-15531314 (last access: 01.11.2021). Edinger, M., and Schatschneider, E. (2016) ‘Terrorism Made in Germany – The Case of the NSU’, in Kiess, J., Decker, O., and Brähler, E. (eds) German Perspectives on Right-Wing Extremism, London: Routledge.

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Erentzen, C., and Schuller, R. (2020) ‘Exploring the Dark Figure of Hate: Experiences with Police Bias and the Under-reporting of Hate Crime’, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 62(2), 64–97. Frey, A. (2020) ‘“Cologne Changed Everything”—The Effect of Threatening Events on the Frequency and Distribution of Intergroup Conflict in Germany’, European Sociological Review, 36(5), 684–699. Geiges, L. (2018) ‘Wie die AfD im Kontext der “Flüchtlingskrise” mobilisierte. Eine empirisch-qualitative Untersuchung der “Herbstoffensive 2015”’, Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 28(1), 49–69. Gessler, T., and Hunger, S. (2024) ‘The Politicization of Immigration and Radical Right Party Politics in Germany’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Hartleb, F. (2020) Lone Wolves: The New Terrorism of Right-Wing Single Actors. Cham: Springer. Heitmeyer, W. (2003) ‘Right-Wing Extremist Violence’, in Heitmeyer, W., and Hagan, J. (eds) International Handbook of Violence Research, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Heitmeyer, W. (2005) ‘Right-Wing Terrorism’, in Bjørgo, T. (ed.) Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality, and Ways Forward, London: Routledge. Herold, M., and Schäller, S. (2024) ‘Germany’s Anti-Islamic PEGIDA Movement: The Broader Impact of a Local Phenomenon?’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Hoffmann, M., and Rone, J. (2024) ‘Interconnected Realities: The Hybrid Dynamics of Far-right Online and Offline Mobilization’, in Weisskircher, M. (ed) Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics: From the Streets to Parliament, Abingdon: Routledge. Holbrook, D., and Taylor, M. (2013) ‘Introduction’, in Taylor, M., Holbrook, D., and Currie, P. (eds) Extreme Right Wing Political Violence and Terrorism. New Directions in Terrorism Studies, London: Bloomsbury. Jäckle, S., and König, P. (2017) ‘The Dark Side of the German “Welcome Culture”: Investigating the Causes Behind Attacks on Refugees in 2015’, West European Politics, 40(2), 223–251. Jäckle, S., and König, P. (2018) ‘Threatening Events and Anti-Refugee Violence: An Empirical Analysis in the Wake of the Refugee Crisis during the Years 2015 and 2016 in Germany’, European Sociological Review, 34(6), 728–743. Jäckle, S., and König, P. (2019) ‘Drei Jahre Anschläge auf Flüchtlinge in Deutschland – welche Faktoren erklären ihre räumliche und zeitliche Verteilung?’, KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 71(4), 623–649. Koehler, D. (2018) ‘Recent Trends in German Right-Wing Violence and Terrorism: What are the Contextual Factors behind “Hive Terrorism”?’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 12(6), 72–88. Köhler, D. (2014) ‘The German “National Socialist Underground (NSU)” and AngloAmerican Networks. The Internationalisation of Far-Right Terror’, in Jackson, P., and Shekhovtsov, A. (eds) The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right, London: Palgrave Macmillan. König, P. (2017) ‘Intra-Party Dissent as a Constraint in Policy Competition: Mapping and Analysing the Positioning of Political Parties in the German Refugee Debate from August to November 2015’, German Politics, 26(3), 337–359.

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Krueger, A., and Pischke, J. (1997) ‘A Statistical Analysis of Crime against Foreigners in Unified Germany’, Journal of Human Resources, 32(1), 182–209. Lehr, P. (2013) ‘Still Blind in the Right Eye? A Comparison of German Responses to Political Violence from the Extreme Left and the Extreme Right’, in Taylor, M., Holbrook, D., and Currie, P. (eds) Extreme Right Wing Political Violence and Terrorism. New Directions in Terrorism Studies, London: Bloomsbury. McLaren, L. (1999) ‘Explaining Right-Wing Violence in Germany: A Time Series Analysis’, Social Science Quarterly, 80(1), 166–180. Michael, G. (2016) ‘This is War! Tom Metzger, White Aryan Resistance and the Lone Wolf Legacy’, in Morgan, J. (ed) Focus on Terrorism, Hauppauge: Nova Science. NDR Panorama (2019) ‘Mutmaßlicher Lübcke-Mörder: Wer ist Stephan E.?’, www.ndr.de/ fernsehen/sendungen/panorama3/Mutmasslicher-Luebcke-Moerder-Wer-ist-StephanE,luebcke134.html (last access: 01.11.2021). New York Times (2020) ‘Far-Right Shooting Shatters an Already Fragile Sense of Security in Germany’, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/world/europe/germany-hanau-shishabar-shooting.html (last access: 01.11.2021). Prenzel, T. (2012) ‘20 Jahre Rostock-Lichtenhagen. Kontext, Dimensionen und Folgen der rassistischen Gewalt, Rostocker Informationen zu Politik und Verwaltung’, www. ipv.uni-rostock.de/storages/uni-rostock/Alle_WSF/IPV/Forschung/Graue_Reihe/grauereihe32.pdf (last access: 01.11.2021). Puls, H. (2019) ‘Rechtsmotivierte ‘Einzeltäter’ in Deutschland’, in Quent, M., Salzborn, S., and Salheiser, A. (eds) Schwerpunkt: Rechtsterrorismus. Wissen schafft Demokratie, Jena: Amadeu Antonio Stiftung. Quent, M. (2016) Rassismus, Radikalisierung, Rechtsterrorismus: Wie der NSU entstand und was er über die Gesellschaft verrät. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Ravndal, J. (2018) ‘Explaining Right-Wing Terrorism and Violence in Western Europe: Grievances, Opportunities and Polarization’, European Journal of Political Research, 57(4), 845–866. Ravndal, J., Lygren, S., Jupskås, A., and Bjørgo, T. (2020) ‘RTV Trend Report 2020’, Oslo: Center for Research on Extremism, www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/groups/rtv-dataset/ rtv_trend_report_2020.pdf (last access: 01.11.2021). Schedler, J. (2019) ‘Rechtsterrorismus und rechte Gewalt: Versuch einer Abgrenzung’, in Quent, M., Salzborn, S., and Salheiser, A. (eds) Schwerpunkt: Rechtsterrorismus. Wissen schafft Demokratie, Jena: Amadeu Antonio Stiftung. Schmid, A. (2011) ‘The Definition of Terrorism’, in Schmid, A. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, Milton Park: Routledge. Sitzer, P., and Heitmeyer, W. (2008) ‘Right-Wing Extremist Violence among Adolescents in Germany’, New Directions for Youth Development, 119, 169–185. tageszeitung (2018) ‘Hannibals Schattenarmee’, https://taz.de/Rechtes-Netzwerk-in-derBundeswehr/!5548926/ (last access: 01.11.2021). Wilkinson, P. (1995) ‘Violence and Terror and the Extreme Right’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 7(4), 82–93. Winkelsdorf, L. (2010) Waffenrepublik Deutschland: Der Bürger am Abzug, Köln: Fackelträger.

PART II

The Electoral Breakthrough of the AfD

6 THE POLITICIZATION OF IMMIGRATION AND RADICAL RIGHT PARTY POLITICS IN GERMANY Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger

Introduction

The fate of radical right parties has frequently been linked to the politicization of immigration. In fact, immigration – next to opposition to international economic integration – has been identified as the main factor uniting radical right voters (Arzheimer 2018) as well as the right-wing populist party family (Ivarsflaten 2008). Moreover, in historical studies, the emergence of radical right parties has sometimes been linked to periods of significant demographic change caused by immigration (Kaufmann 2014). Hence, there is substantive evidence for the importance of the issue for radical right parties. But even though radical right parties are one driving force behind the politicization of immigration in advanced Western societies (Kriesi et al. 2008, Gessler and Hunger 2022), the electoral weakness of such actors in some countries has not made immigration irrelevant there. On the contrary, also mainstream parties have brought immigration to the political agenda (Meyer and Rosenberger 2015, Green-Pedersen and Otjes 2017), whether as a reflection of their own political goals or in an attempt to prevent radical right challengers from being successful. Notably, the long-term increase in the salience of immigration has ultimately been suspected to drive the electoral success of radical right parties also in countries where they initially suffered from electoral weakness (Arzheimer and Carter 2006, Arzheimer 2009, Dennison and Geddes 2019). Germany was often treated as an exceptional case due to the absence of an electorally successful radical right party. This only changed at the peak of immigration salience in the mid-2010s, with the electoral breakthrough of Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) during the fourth wave of far-right politics. Importantly, however, our chapter shows that even before the party entered the political stage, the country saw some heated political debates DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-9

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over immigration and integration. In the past decades, the salience of the issue has followed cyclical ups and downs, often connected to exogenous events such as the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s and the 2015 refugee crisis. In many ways, these debates challenged Germany’s national identity and were shaped by the country’s transformation since reunification. To study these debates, this chapter draws on a multitude of data sources on public opinion as well as parties’ immigration stances. Drawing on the concept of politicization that is frequently used to measure party conflict surrounding an issue (Hutter and Kriesi 2019), we focus on both the salience (that is, public visibility) of the immigration issue and, to some extent, the distribution of positions among the public and parties. Using these data also allows to study important changes over time and to compare Germany with other European countries. We start by outlining some of the suspected drivers of politicization, namely immigration numbers, the changing cleavage structure of Western European societies and new incentives for political parties to speak about immigration, as well as public attitudes toward immigration. We then present an empirical assessment of the development of the immigration debate in Germany, first on a general party system-level, before discussing differences in individual parties’ behavior. We do so by using different sources, i.e., electoral manifestos and parliamentary speeches, which allow for comparing different arenas of political contestation. Lastly, we contextualize the German case based on a cross-European comparison. We conclude the chapter by summarizing the main observation regarding the politicization of immigration in Germany until the electoral breakthrough of the AfD by also emphasizing the role of other political parties. Germany as an immigration country

For most of our analysis in this chapter, we use the year 1990 as starting point. On the one hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ‘reunification’ in 1990 constitute a major turning point in German history. On the other hand, this choice is also driven by the increased public and political attention to immigration at that time (Hess and Green 2016). Figure 6.1 shows the development of annual immigration and asylum numbers until the electoral breakthrough of the AfD. As visible, immigration numbers have substantially changed over time, marked by cyclical ups and downs and a general increase after reunification. West Germany experienced migration early on, with displaced people in Germany after World War II and so-called guest workers arriving from mostly Italy, Greece, and Turkey since the Anwerbeabkommen (recruitment agreements) of the 1950s and 1960s (see Figure 6.1). Research that links immigration numbers to the politicization of immigration mostly focuses on the period after the end of the recruitment agreements in 1973 and the growing entry rates of asylum seekers from the late 1970s onward. During that time, immigration increasingly started to become a feature of public debate (Karapin 1999). For a long time, however,

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FIGURE 6.1 

Immigration and asylum applications.

Source: Created by the authors from the BAMF Wanderungsstatistik

the history of immigration into the Federal Republic did not shape the country’s self-perception – a fact famously symbolized by a sentence in the 1983 coalition agreement between the Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) and the Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party, FDP): ‘Germany is not an immigration country’ (Herbert 2001). Applying for asylum became an important avenue for immigrants entering the country, which led the governing CDU to call for a tightening of the immigration and asylum laws. This was initially met with resistance by both the liberal FDP and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party, SPD) (Boswell and Hough 2008). Additionally, political debate very much centered around the future of the guest workers in the country, which amounted to some 14 million in 1973 (Koopmans 1999). Family reunification and return policies were issues of political contestation and a large share of German citizens was in favor of guest workers’ return to their country of origin (Schönwälder 1996, see also the section on public opinion). However, as emphasized above, the debate on immigration intensified only during the 1990s: Parallel to the rising number of refugees fleeing from former Yugoslavia, the number of ethnic German Aussiedler from Eastern Europe increased in the early 1990s (Boswell and Hough 2008). Both movements combined led to a marked surge in the number of immigrants (see Figure 6.1). These developments

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affected eastern Germany in particular, where many of the arrivals were re-located to. In the context of social and economic insecurity after reunification, eastern Germany saw several outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence (see König and Jäckle 2024 in this volume as well as McGowan 2006). The situation in the early 1990s provided the context for an important turning point in immigration policy: In 1993, Article 16 of German Basic Law, which granted the right to apply for asylum, and which the CDU had tried to restrict since 1986, was finally amended, with the SPD ending its long resistance (Karapin 2002). This step can be seen as an attempt to contain the increasingly successful radical right-wing party Die Republikaner (The Republicans, REP). However, violent incidents remained a regular phenomenon throughout the 1990s (see König and Jäckle 2024 in this volume). In contrast, asylum applications and immigration in general decreased and remained stable for more than a decade. The so-called asylum compromise substantially reduced the eligibility to apply for asylum and introduced many of the rules that still govern asylum decisions, including the principles of so-called safe countries of origin and safe third countries, which regulate who is qualified to apply for asylum in Germany in the first place. From 2010 onward, the recently granted Freedom of Movement for EU citizens and the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU boosted immigration. The year 2011 marked the end of transitional agreements in Germany that prevented regular migration from those Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004. Asylum applications saw the most significant peak during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 when growing numbers of refugees, most of them from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, arrived in Germany. These developments led to a renewed reflection on Germany’s role regarding the reception and integration of asylum seekers. However, notably, other forms of immigration have always exceeded asylum applications by far. How have the ups and downs in immigration flows influenced the politicization of the issue? It is important to highlight that research studying the link between immigration (and asylum) numbers and the political debate on immigration has provided mixed results. While there is substantive evidence for the importance of local immigration numbers, both for building tolerance and for bursts of antiimmigration sentiment (Hopkins 2010, Pettigrew et al. 2011, Gessler et al. 2022), evidence on national immigration numbers is tenuous. Results on a potential relationship between immigration numbers and changes in the issue salience are inconclusive (Van der Brug et al. 2015a, 2015b, Green-Pedersen and Otjes 2017, Mendes and Dennison 2020). According to the literature, moments that constitute rapid increases in the number of arrivals (particularly for asylum seekers) may be more important than long-term change in national immigration numbers. Clearly, our period under study includes two such rapid movements: The early 1990s, which were marked by increasing arrivals of war refugees from Yugoslavia, and the European refugee crisis in 2015.

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The restructuration of political conflict in Western Europe

In the past decades, along with increasing immigration and in line with other Western European societies, Germany underwent drastic socio-structural changes (Kriesi et al. 2006). This change is characterized by the new importance of cultural cleavage. While Western European societies had traditionally been shaped by class-based and religious conflicts, the new cultural dimension of the political space developed over two successive waves of political mobilization (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008, Bornschier 2010). In the 1970s, an expanding new middle class adopted liberal and green values, which created political opportunities for the new left. The emergence of green parties is a lasting consequence of this transformation. The second wave of cultural mobilization was driven by the new opposition between ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of globalization (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008, 2012, Bornschier 2010). This led to the emergence of the so-called new right gaining strength since the late 1980s. Wielding more electoral power than green and new left parties in many Western European countries, parties of the new right have attracted conservative voters but have also challenged center-left hegemony over the working classes. An important consequence of these developments is a new incentive to speak about immigration: Next to European integration, immigration has been a central element in helping right-wing populists to mobilize previously unrepresented left-authoritarian voters (Van Der Brug and Van Spanje 2009, Lefkofridi et al. 2014). Their mobilization led to the emergence of a tripolar party competition in a twodimensional political space in which the traditional economic cleavage between the mainstream left and right is complemented with an increasingly relevant and transformed cultural cleavage (Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012). Importantly, however, some recent studies also highlight the contribution of mainstream parties in politicizing immigration (Meyer and Rosenberger 2015, Green-Pedersen and Otjes 2017, Grande et al. 2018). Incentives for mainstream parties to do so differ according to their ideological orientation (Abou-Chadi 2016). Previous studies show a general hardening of center-right parties’ positions on immigration since the late 1990s (Bale et al. 2010, Van Spanje 2010, Alonso and da Fonseca 2012), as these parties also aim to attract cross-pressured left-authoritarian voters toward the right side of the party spectrum (Abou-Chadi 2016). Nevertheless, immigration has often remained a contested issue between neo-liberal and value-conservative fractions within such parties (Odmalm and Bale 2015). Similarly, social democratic parties also have to serve different parts of their electorate and need to bridge their heterogeneous preferences on immigration, especially once the issue moves up on the political agenda (Bale et al. 2010, AbouChadi 2016). While the culturally liberal middle classes favor open immigration policies, the working classes might feel threatened by labor market competition (Green-Pedersen and Krogstrup 2008, Akkerman 2012). This dilemma poses a significant constraint to social democratic parties’ ability to strategically decide on their immigration stances (Alonso and da Fonseca 2012).

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Scholarship on Germany argues that both CDU and SPD have developed a new pro-activeness and self-confidence regarding immigration (Schmidtke 2016, Hertner 2022). Arguably, this development may not only be a response to social realities, such as European integration, aging societies, and globalization, but it may also constitute a strategic understanding of naturalized immigrants as a strongly growing electorate (Wüst 2000). While the representation of citizens with a migratory background has always been important for left-wing parties, the CDU has become more active since the beginning of Merkel’s chancellorship in 2005. However, the center-right is still internally split on how to balance different approaches toward the issue (Hertner 2022). Changing attitudes toward immigration among the general public

Even though radical right parties in Western Europe have increasingly politicized immigration, public attitudes toward immigration have become more liberal since the 1980s (Caughey et al. 2019). Figure 6.2 summarizes survey data produced by German broadcasters measuring opinions on the number of foreigners currently living in the country. While the wording of the question has been subject to substantial change over time, answers confirm the broader liberalization trend: After the initial liberalization trend at the end of the 1980s, a narrow majority has held pro-immigration views.1 While this underlying split in attitudes toward immigration is clearly relevant for its politicization, another important aspect is the salience of the topic in the eyes of citizens. Notably, both changing opinions on immigration and an increased salience of the issue for voters may drive parties, including those of the political mainstream, to re-evaluate their handling of the issue. Importantly, researchers have argued that the electoral success of anti-immigration parties across Europe may have been driven not by changing attitudes but by an increased salience of immigration that activates pre-existing negative views (Dennison and Geddes 2019).

FIGURE 6.2 

Public support for immigration to Germany.

Source: Created by the authors from the Politbarometer (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen 2020)2

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FIGURE 6.3 

Immigration as one of the two most important issues facing Germany.

Source: Created by the authors from the Eurobarometer

Figure 6.3 presents the share of citizens who list immigration as one of the two most important issues facing Germany as measured since 2005 by the Eurobarometer. Notably, this share remains below 10 percent for most of the period, up until 2013. Afterward, however, public concern suddenly increases, up to a peak at which three in four citizens list immigration as an important problem. Of course, this particularly high share was measured in November 2015 during the European refugee crisis (see also Mader and Schoen 2019) when pressure on the asylum system was objectively high. While there was a substantial decrease after this peak, following declining arrival numbers and Germany’s increasing capacity to deal with newcomers, concern with immigration as a policy problem has remained salient for a significant share of the population. While individual attention to immigration does not tell us which position voters take on the issue, it signals that they may attribute new importance to voting for a party that also represents their position on immigration, whereas they may have been more willing to compromise in this policy area in the past. Such a change in public salience may constitute a fertile ground for parties mobilizing against immigration as well as for parties that hold strong pro-immigration stances. German party politics and the political conflict over immigration

We now empirically study the political conflict over immigration in German party politics. We do so in three ways: First, we construct measures of attention to immigration and apply them to political debates starting in 1990. Next, we turn to the party politics of immigration more specifically and describe differences between left and right parties. Finally, we place the German development in the wider European context.

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Political parties’ attention to immigration

To assess the extent of political conflict over immigration, we study attention to immigration in German party manifestos (see Figure 6.4) and plenary speeches in the Bundestag (see Figure 6.5). Here, we rely on a dictionary of words frequently used in the German immigration debate.3 We visualize their frequency per 10,000 words over time. While some studies measure issue salience and positions on immigration based on hand-coded party manifestos (Lehmann and Zobel 2018) or newspaper articles (Hutter and Kriesi 2019), we rely on the dictionary measure as it allows for longer over-time comparisons. Furthermore, applying the dictionary to parliamentary speeches also enables us to capture what happened between national election campaigns. This is important as parties in Germany have been internally divided on whether to mobilize on immigration in election campaigns (see Boswell and Hough 2008). Moreover, data on elections only provide snapshots that may miss important developments during legislative periods (Proksch and Slapin 2009, Gessler and Hunger 2022). Notably, our results in Figure 6.4 mostly confirm previous studies that argue that migration has only been politicized from the 1980s onward (e.g. Boswell and Hough 2008). A partial exception in West Germany is the very first election

FIGURE 6.4 

Frequency of immigration-related terms in party manifestos.

Source: Created by the authors from the Manifesto Corpus (Burst et al. 2020)

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FIGURE 6.5 

Frequency of immigration-related terms in parliamentary speeches.

Source: Created by the authors from the PARLSpeech dataset

in 1949 when immigration was relevant as the country was dealing with 12 million displaced citizens following World War II (Green 2013). In the three decades following 1949, however, our data show that the issue remained relatively irrelevant in West German party competition, despite the guest worker agreement and corresponding immigration from Southern Europe after 1955. It was only from the late 1970s onward that the issue attracted some attention by political parties, already long before the rise of a radical right challenger. As discussed above, this development was shaped by the debate on the return of guest workers to their countries of origin and the increasing numbers of asylum seekers. The period from 1980 to 1994 is then characterized by an increasingly frequent use of immigration-related words in party manifestos. During these years, several dimensions of immigration determined the political agenda, most importantly, the relatively steady increase in asylum applications. As mentioned above, from 1986 onward, this development sparked a major political debate on the right of asylum, with the CDU and its sister-party Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union, CSU) proposing an amendment of the Basic Law. While visa requirements and work restrictions for asylum seekers had already been introduced in the 1980s, the SPD only agreed to vote in favor of the amendment of the Basic Law in 1993, thus ensuring the required two-thirds majority of both legislative chambers (Karapin 1999, 2002). Moreover, the Ausländergesetz (Law on Foreigners) was revised in 1990 and, in this context, the right to family reunification

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was heavily contested between the parties (Green 2013). After these key political debates, however, the salience of immigration decreased and remained stable until the election in 2017, i.e., the one following the refugee crisis, when the AfD entered the Bundestag for the first time. Similar developments are also visible in the shorter time span for which we can analyse parliamentary speeches (see Figure 6.5). Notably, especially during the 2000s, most parties only focused very little on immigration. While this trend may partially be a consequence of agenda effects in parliament due to the legislative cycle that sets the topic of many speeches, the more fine-grained data on speeches allow us to engage with immigration debates in more detail. Most notably, studying the trend also reveals that parties paid more attention to immigration issues following 1998 when the new German Nationalities Act was subject to political contestation. The law replaced legislation that had been in place since as early as 1913 and marked a (partial) departure from the previous German citizenship model of ius sanguinis, i.e., an ethnic understanding of belonging to a national community. The Nationalities Act was brought forward by the first center-left government in Germany, formed by SPD and the Greens in 1998, and marked a major turning point in immigration and integration policies. More inclusive elements of the initial legislative proposal, however, such as extensive rights to dual citizenship, were revoked before the law was passed in 1999 (Koopmans 1999, Howard 2008, Boswell and Hough 2008). Nearly simultaneously, a public debate on the role of Leitkultur, the idea of a dominant national culture, emerged, probing how much diversity Germany could tolerate and how much assimilation it would demand from immigrants (Green 2013). The 2000s were marked by a depoliticization of the issue: Only little attention was dedicated to immigration in electoral manifestos (Figure 6.4) as well as in parliamentary speeches (Figure 6.5). Nevertheless, this period was characterized by major changes in German immigration policies (Hess and Green 2016). Germany was ‘catching up’ with other European countries with the 2005 Immigration Law and the 2006 General Act on Equal Treatment. Even the new CDU-led Grand coalition formed in 2005 did not depart from this more inclusive political course (Green 2013). While we do not see this in our data, previous literature has highlighted that labor migration became a heated political issue during the period, accompanied by a debate on the need to recruit qualified workers from abroad to counter the aging of Germany’s population (Boswell and Hough 2008). The literature also reports controversial integration-related events, especially the establishment of two consultation bodies under chancellor Merkel in 2006, namely the National Integration Summit and the German Islam Conference (Musch 2012). Importantly, however, our textual analysis, focusing on asylum and immigration, shows a comparatively limited salience of these issues when compared to other periods. This trend continues into the early 2010s, including the parliamentary election of 2013, which was still marked by low political attention to immigration. Only with the so-called

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  125

refugee crisis and increasing arrival numbers in the preceding months did political parties again strongly focus on the issue. Political parties’ stances on immigration

Above, we have already discussed the different incentives for parties to politicize immigration. Existing scholarship shows that both German centrist parties, CDU and SPD, abstained from engaging deeper with the immigration issue for years, as they did not expect to benefit from such a focus, fearing that it could provide opportunities for a potential radical right competitor. Howard (2008) argues that, despite divided public attitudes, liberal immigration policies remained relatively uncontested as the liberalization process was mostly elite-driven: Public consultation was avoided in order to reduce public attention. Similarly, Schmidtke (2016) shows that the SPD downplayed the issue because the party was afraid to politicize it. These choices resulted in a relatively low focus on immigration, especially by the center-left, also in international comparison (Dancygier and Margalit 2020). However, looking at individual parties, depicted as dots in Figures 6.4 and 6.5, reveals that a mere focus on the two historically largest German parties hides heterogeneity in (smaller) parties’ emphasis on immigration. Since the late 1980s, it has been primarily the Greens and the Left Party that emphasized the topic (see also Wüst 2016). Both in parliament and in party manifestos, we see that they pay substantially more attention to immigration than the social democrats and the CDU/CSU. Their unique focus on the issue only finds an end with the emergence of the AfD (see Arzheimer 2024 in this volume): AfD electoral manifestos mention immigration far more often than any similar documents of other parties. Also, the AfD and those independent MPs who left the AfD in its first year in parliament also exceed all other parties in their emphasis on immigration in Bundestag speeches. Additionally, the FDP’s above-average concern for immigration in the electoral manifestos of 1982 and 1986 reflected the party’s opposition to restrictions on the right to family reunion and to other attempts of toughening the immigration law (Boswell and Hough 2008). Thus, while Germany’s largest parties paid often only limited attention to immigration, smaller parties have made some attempts to politicize the issue. Even though centrist parties’ focus on immigration remains comparatively weak, also their attention has slowly been increasing since the beginning of the 1980s. While the salience measure of the SPD is below the party-system average for nearly the whole period of observation, it is occasionally higher for the CDU. Potentially, this may be a result of the party’s internal conflicts regarding the issue. In party manifestos, which more clearly show the importance parties attribute to forming a position on a policy issue, centrist parties’ immigration salience increased slowly but steadily from 1982 until the election of Gerhard Schröder in 1998, which marked a major watershed. This change in government, the first ever including the Greens, brought along not only a change in policy but also a change

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of consciousness: German political elites started to consider Germany as a country of immigration and acted accordingly (Green 2013). The liberalization trend in public opinion described above can be regarded both as an incentive for and a consequence of the new attention for the issue. Differences in parties’ emphasis are important since each party is also characterized by a distinct discourse on immigration. To illustrate these differences, we considered a five-word context window around immigration-related words in the parties’ parliamentary speeches. These context words may serve as an indication of how immigration is framed in very different ways by the German parties. We find distinct themes mentioned in the parliamentary speeches of each party (see Tables 6.A2–6.A6 in the appendix for an overview using a four-year window). Most change is visible in the case of the CDU/CSU: While its discourse was initially mostly focusing on asylum seekers (including the potential abuse of the right to asylum), it later shifted to discussing the legal regulations of immigration, citizenship, and immigrants’ willingness to integrate. These findings clearly reflect some of the controversial campaigns of the party we have mentioned above. In the 2000s, the party also focused on Muslim immigrants and concerns about so-called parallel societies – quite differently from Angela Merkel’s framing of immigration, at least since 2015. In contrast, the SPD has discussed immigration in a broader context already since the beginning of our analysis. Additionally, already early onward the party also discussed hostility toward foreigners, a topic that has otherwise been most important to the Left Party. Just as with salience, both the Greens and the Left Party also showcase a distinctly different discourse on immigration that emphasized the reasons why citizens seek protection (e.g. gender- or sexuality-based violence) as well as the European Union’s attempts to restrict immigration through Frontex. In contrast, the AfD has most prominently discussed illegal immigration and so-called mass-immigration and has thereby set a new tone in the public debate over immigration in Germany. The case of Germany in a European context

Lastly, we compare the role of immigration in German party politics to other European countries. For this purpose, we study the salience of national identity and multiculturalism in electoral manifestos: Figure 6.6 presents the average weighted salience of immigration in the 27 EU member states (Burst et al. 2020). Whereas Germany is presented by the thick, solid line, other countries are included with light-gray lines. The vertical line marks the beginning of the refugee crisis that led to an increase in immigration salience across Europe. While manifestos are only available for a few countries in the earlier decades (namely Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), Figure 6.6 clearly shows that Germany’s low salience of immigration during this period was rather atypical. Even with the increasing attention in the early 1970s, the Federal Republic’s parties were still only within the European average. Since the

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  127

FIGURE 6.6 

Immigration salience across EU member states.

Source: Created by the authors from the Manifesto Corpus (Burst et al. 2020)

1980s, when data for more countries are available, Germany still showed comparatively low levels of salience up until the 1994 election. Note that – while the numbers are not directly comparable given the different metrics – this increase in attention to national identity and multiculturalism happens somewhat belated in comparison to our immigration attention measure presented in Figure 6.4. In the following period of political contestation around the immigration issue, Germany never presents an exceptional case, not even in the first election after the 2015 refugee crisis. How does the comparison improve our understanding of the politicization of immigration in Germany? Clearly, Germany – despite the absence of an established radical right party before the fourth wave of far-right politics – is no exception concerning the politicization of immigration. In other European countries, we can also identify a non-linear trend of increasing attention to immigration over time. Whether the new presence of a radical right party in parliament will have a lasting effect on immigration politicization in Germany remains an open question. Clearly, immigration has also been ‘on the agenda’ in the decades before the rise of the AfD. Therefore, the analyses of parliamentary speeches and manifestos do not necessarily imply a diffusion effect from the AfD to other parties (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5).

128  Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have discussed the importance of the immigration issue in German politics from 1945 until the electoral breakthrough of the AfD during the fourth wave of far-right politics. While the chapter has focused on the behavior of political parties, we have also considered citizens’ attitudes on the issue. In the arena of party politics, the politicization of immigration increased only slowly since the 1980s and then remained relatively constant, with some periodical fluctuations until the 2015 refugee crisis. To some extent, these developments – visible through the analysis of electoral manifestos and parliamentary debates – mirror real-world developments such as refugee numbers and external events, such as the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and the refugee crisis in 2015. The increasing salience of the immigration issue also reflects Germany’s long-term transformation to a ‘country of immigration’. Importantly, despite the lack of an established radical right party until the mid-2010s, Germany was well within the European average of immigration politicization. While the peak of immigration salience in the mid-2010s contributed to the breakthrough of the AfD, the country had already experienced important political debates on immigration in previous decades. Our assessment of political contestation around immigration also points to the importance of smaller (opposition) parties. While previous scholarship has highlighted mainstream parties’ contributions to the politicization of the issue (Meyer and Rosenberger 2015, Green-Pedersen and Otjes 2017, Grande et al. 2018, Dancygier and Margalit 2020), we show that the Left, the Greens, and – to some extent the FDP – have dedicated more attention to immigration and thus should also be seen as drivers of politicization of immigration in Germany. To be sure, another small party, the AfD, has quickly become the party that focuses most strongly on immigration, electorally benefiting from the salience of the issue. Still, the party also managed to reenter parliament in 2021 at a time when the public attention of the topic was weak, overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, we may assume that not only AfD but also other parties will continue to politicize immigration, which can be explained by objective immigration numbers, new incentives due to the changing cleavage structure of Western European societies, as well as public attitudes toward immigration.

Notes 1 Note, however, that survey questions during the 1980s asked about so-called guest workers explicitly rather than foreigners in general. 2 Note that question wording and answer options were subject to substantial variation over time – see Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (2020, p. 20). Importantly, we code answers that state immigration is just right as opposition to more immigration, given this answer option was only available for a short period (in 2004, 2006 and 2007) and primarily seems to capture respondents who oppose more immigration when forced to choose.

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  129

3 Specifically, our dictionary includes a set of keywords that were constructed based on the PImPo data set (Lehmann and Zobel 2018), a collection of parties’ position and salience regarding integration and immigration in 14 countries. We combine these crowd-coded data on the quasi-sentence level with the verbatim coming from electoral manifestos. Using keyness and frequency statistics, we determined which words are most indicative for the wider topic of immigration and integration. We use these words as a dictionary to measure the salience of immigration in electoral manifestos and parliamentary speeches. These measures can be applied to a longer time period and different data sources than the original PImPo data set covers. The full list of keywords can be found in the appendix, Table 6.A1.

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Appendix Context of immigration-related terms

Below, we select a five-word window around each hit for the above-discussed immigration-related dictionary. We then calculate keyness-statistics for the terms included in this window using the Chi-square statistics based on sequential fouryear periods for each party. This gives a measure which words were most typical for a party, compared to other parties, during the specific period. TABLE 6.A1  Immigration-related terms. Asylum

Immigration

Citizenship

Integration

*flüchtling* flüchtend* *geflüchtet* Frontex flucht*

vertrieben* ausländer* *asyl* *migration* migrant* *zuwander* *einwander* *immigrant* *immigration* *migrant* *migration* Verfolgte drittstaaten* Personenfreizügig herkunftsländer* familiennachzug*

einbürgerung* integrationsversäumnis staatsbürgerschaft* integrationsbereitschaft doppelstaatsbürgerschaft integrationsverweiger* integratsförder* integrationspoli* integrationswillig* integrationsmaßnahmen minderheiten rassismus staatsangehörigkeit aufenthaltsrecht aufenthaltsstatus bleiberecht* ehrenmord* kettenduldung zugewandert eingewandert *abschieb* schlepperei parallelgesellschaft* integrationsvereinbarung fremdenfeindlich* gastarbeiter gastrecht schutzsuchende* integrationsförderung arbeitsbewilligung arbeitserlaubnis

Culture interkultur* willkommenskultur muslim* moscheen* islam* multikultur*

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  133 TABLE 6.A2 SPD.

Time period Feature

Chi2

p

n_target n_reference

1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011

133.23761 123.17058 32.21205 28.33577 28.08930 25.18848 22.61049 22.42950 22.01662 21.00075 37.72114 26.51565 23.93905 22.53806 21.71734 21.15462 21.15462 20.81945 20.55022 18.07604 45.55833 38.74497 25.97296 24.56894 20.66686 18.73500 17.88485 17.15570 16.64190 16.19447 32.99418 18.84065 16.39295 14.11011 13.49854 13.15835 13.15835 11.93109 11.67235 11.64985 50.83354 39.08363 33.28460 32.67152 32.24330 32.14320 31.24015 28.57420

0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000001 0.0000001 0.0000005 0.0000020 0.0000022 0.0000027 0.0000046 0.0000000 0.0000003 0.0000010 0.0000021 0.0000032 0.0000042 0.0000042 0.0000050 0.0000058 0.0000212 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000003 0.0000007 0.0000055 0.0000150 0.0000235 0.0000344 0.0000451 0.0000572 0.0000000 0.0000142 0.0000515 0.0001724 0.0002387 0.0002862 0.0002862 0.0005520 0.0006344 0.0006421 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000001

222 64 60 22 16 14 14 13 32 8 16 9 18 13 21 26 26 14 24 77 364 29 19 98 79 49 21 116 110 60 50 14 1025 7 19 8 8 45 14 6 27 43 11 19 65 12 15 248

zuwanderung migranten fluchtursachen zuwanderungspolitik umgehen migrationspolitik zuwanderungssignal drittstaatenregelung zuwanderungsfragen steuerung -zu zuwanderern geburt kriegsflüchtlingspolitik migration zuwanderungsgesetz aufenthaltsstatus uns flüchtlinge mazedonien geduldete 000 fremdenfeindlichkeit schutz ausländischen vertriebenen flüchtlingen unter fremdenfeindlichkeit einbürgerungen und neuzuwanderern zuwanderungsbeibehaltung überwiegend integrationspolitik flüchtlingsneuzuwanderinnen doppelte lage eigentum gemeinsam staatsbürgerschaft angriffe türkische •

250 20 72 13 6 4 5 4 33 0 3 0 12 5 18 27 27 7 24 146 512 8 5 111 88 46 11 156 147 66 39 5 2195 0 14 1 1 57 9 0 11 41 0 9 91 1 4 566

(Continued)

134  Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger TABLE 6.A2 (Continued)

Time period Feature

Chi2

p

n_target n_reference

2007–2011 2007–2011 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019

23.08625 22.98397 40.27930 31.20245 30.68037 28.37577 27.16125 25.70595 24.51979 22.96094 21.49895 21.49170 157.52115 38.95282 33.81120 33.09975 30.37018 28.14603 27.40844 27.04095 26.96452 25.89122

0.0000015 0.0000016 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000001 0.0000002 0.0000004 0.0000007 0.0000017 0.0000035 0.0000036 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.0000001 0.0000002 0.0000002 0.0000002 0.0000004

8 19 18 24 11 16 10 23 8 59 525 36 977 292 286 30 228 34 1144 407 20 73

türkisch-muslimischem arbeitsmigration einwanderungsgesellschaft gastarbeiter flüchtlingskind teilen einwanderungsflüchtlingskinder mangelnder flüchtlingspolitik flüchtlinge asylbewerberinnen wir flucht ich kümmern uns kolleginnen flüchtlinge flüchtlingen vertriebene einwanderungsgesetz

0 14 6 18 1 7 1 20 0 99 1505 49 2356 735 739 29 574 41 3706 1167 16 137

TABLE 6.A3 CDU/CSU.

Time period Feature

Chi2

p

1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1999–2003 1999–2003

84.69534 77.06098 58.12766 46.49044 35.64961 33.18780 31.43059 29.31894 29.07767 25.08330 47.99938 37.98278 30.90962 29.33264 28.24065 24.09112 22.64967 21.89404 21.82065 21.67130 124.06930 88.07344

0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 1.00e−07 5.00e−07 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 1.00e−07 9.00e−07 1.90e−06 2.90e−06 3.00e−06 3.20e−06 0.00e+00 0.00e+00

000 asylbewerber durchführung asylpolitik vorschriften asylbewerbern mißbrauch europäischen ausländischer illegalen ausländer bundesgebiet generelle deutschland ausländerrecht wir staatsangehörigkeit zweitens konsequente mißbrauch zuwanderung zuwanderungsbegrenzung

n_target 194 547 47 105 40 168 56 98 50 24 403 22 20 210 89 336 189 22 13 15 366 39

n_reference 125 578 8 67 13 159 30 78 26 6 481 1 2 240 75 448 225 7 0 2 483 5

(Continued)

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  135 TABLE 6.A3 (Continued)

Time period Feature

Chi2

p

n_target

n_reference

1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019

31.85084 30.50016 28.67693 28.60319 28.60319 27.11665 26.98697 22.48049 77.78534 34.14370 28.10153 26.08895 23.47679 23.23376 22.31136 18.35732 16.87338 16.59736 53.48305 44.39326 43.38372 41.24232 31.97274 27.06702 26.56247 25.58237 25.21184 24.83648 82.48587 59.26611 51.41135 40.34086 38.85494 34.43636 32.69018 32.22124 25.86306 23.29262 99.46497 90.09877 71.49003 57.68440 57.36935 57.16486 51.41954 43.60411 41.57452 40.85260

0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 1.00e−07 1.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.10e−06 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 3.00e−07 1.30e−06 1.40e−06 2.30e−06 1.83e−05 4.00e−05 4.62e−05 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 2.00e−07 3.00e−07 4.00e−07 5.00e−07 6.00e−07 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 4.00e−07 1.40e−06 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00

122 40 309 13 13 15 194 12 319 54 56 64 45 24 81 58 18 245 45 61 380 73 17 13 16 234 48 25 245 205 119 32 59 185 84 120 36 84 306 205 86 158 3598 288 37 797 58 117

178 33 596 1 1 4 342 2 238 21 27 36 21 5 57 38 4 267 17 40 576 58 2 0 3 358 40 12 208 187 88 7 32 200 66 113 18 78 215 120 27 104 5078 252 3 967 22 79

staatsangehörigkeit unser nicht belastbarkeit überschritten integrationsbereitschaft deutschland ausländers zuwanderung asylbewerber islamisten 000 islamistische parallelgesellschaften islamistischen vertriebenen führt deutschland islam-konferenz unserem wir muslime miteinander theologie ausländerwahlrechts haben am moscheen migration asylbewerber bundesamt asylblg asylanträge 000 asylbewerbern asylrecht politisch vertriebenen asylbewerber flüchtlingskrise bewältigung unser der zuwanderung zuwanderungsrecht im asylsystem herkunftsländern

136  Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger TABLE 6.A4  Left Party (Die Linke/PDS).

Time period

Feature

Chi2

p

n_target

n_reference

1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011

ausländerinnen rassismus asylbewerberinnen und immigranten immigrantinnen gegen asyldebatte asylantinnen brd ausländerinnen asylbewerberinnen migranten migrantinnen und rassismus ausländerfeindlichkeit -immigranten arbeitsimmigrantinnen vertriebenenverbände rassismus geschlechtsspezifischer einwanderinnen pds lesben äthiopien und ausländerinnen kosten behinderungen förderprogramm migrantinnen migranten kulturellen alg-ii-empfänger asylbewerberinnen berechtigten flüchtlingsdruck kindbezogenen migrantenunternehmen migrantinnen arbeitsmigrantinnen migranten -migranten und förderung flüchtlinge fallen

838.48271 483.03910 477.44187 264.40101 262.54835 145.24212 137.59759 131.87617 85.51237 85.51237 363.86646 157.03769 156.14551 122.86919 112.04432 74.43385 66.21615 53.13680 53.13680 52.99142 92.72480 59.83576 50.40063 44.76409 40.68664 40.68664 39.45705 37.41343 36.64441 33.33767 129.8832 115.79696 96.81024 92.84065 56.10494 56.10494 56.10494 56.10494 56.10494 56.10494 141.38286 72.08207 66.67076 66.01781 56.95228 50.92168 50.80233 47.57768

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

260 148 101 1264 42 23 202 55 14 14 111 32 68 55 631 60 25 8 8 17 58 11 9 16 6 6 547 32 12 6 8 60 78 11 4 4 4 4 4 4 341 13 381 12 907 20 165 11

174 97 29 5106 2 0 527 55 0 0 95 13 89 74 3090 131 28 0 0 14 115 3 2 17 0 0 3399 79 11 1 0 272 465 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 1003 0 1458 0 4207 16 538 2

(Continued)

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  137 TABLE 6.A4 (Continued)

Time period

Feature

Chi2

p

n_target

n_reference

2007–2011 2007–2011 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019

endlich menschen migrantinnen migranten und linke gegen rassismus ausgrenzung flüchtlingsabwehr menschen endlich flüchtlingsabwehr rassismus terrorbanden gegen waffen sie staat flüchtlinge islamistische steuerflüchtlinge

46.57772 42.72195 514.70116 329.56253 98.72523 95.27795 57.28332 49.05799 45.22180 44.20645 41.19378 39.03914 182.77978 127.88834 109.59855 107.87193 92.52422 74.51721 66.72559 65.29829 62.84957 55.79803

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

26 92 349 436 1331 33 130 122 16 13 197 46 46 114 22 222 20 450 90 979 62 14

31 258 339 705 4556 12 275 268 5 2 539 69 10 166 0 520 1 1497 171 3871 97 2

TABLE 6.A5  Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen).

Time period

Feature

Chi2

p

n_target

n_reference

1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1991–1995 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1995–1999 1999–2003

einwanderer einwanderinnen flüchtlingsgesetz einwanderungsgesetz einwanderungseinwanderern zuwanderinnen flüchtlinge und gleichstellung sicheren flüchtlinge einwanderer rücken endlich angst abschiebung gemacht wurde abschottung migranten

389.05700 148.84090 147.18058 139.01453 109.45614 108.78240 95.74908 91.12268 87.13978 62.41597 43.98059 36.23219 32.40658 31.87876 31.78307 29.40688 28.57362 27.23746 25.58845 25.04950 172.64647

0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 1.00e−07 2.00e−07 4.00e−07 6.00e−07 0.00e+00

81 27 26 38 33 30 13 215 934 13 16 236 24 11 30 13 87 21 37 11 189

39 8 7 30 30 24 0 849 5436 5 4 633 22 2 34 5 186 20 56 4 197

(Continued)

138  Theresa Gessler and Sophia Hunger TABLE 6.A5 (Continued)

Time period

Feature

Chi2

p

n_target

n_reference

1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 1999–2003 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2003–2007 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2007–2011 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2011–2015 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019 2015–2019

migrantinnen genfer muslim flüchtlingskonvention integrationspolitik bin minderheiten rücken junge asyllageberichte überproportional kinder generation migranten-communities migrantenkinder familienleistungen innenministerium merkel ich immigranten immigrantinnen einwanderer drittstaatenangehörige asylsuchenden migrantenkinder asylverfahrens einwanderinnen fehlt frontex einwanderinnen einwanderer immigranten ausländermaut homosexuellen zugang sie ? arbeitsagenturen einbürgerung geflüchteten geflüchtete sie migrantinnen ausländermaut einwanderungsgesellschaft sammelabschiebung -migranten fit echte

93.83391 49.56329 44.47610 41.53809 31.76598 28.96247 27.56300 27.45641 27.15106 27.54468 27.02976 26.77026 22.91171 22.86946 19.04104 18.21084 18.21084 18.21084 18.14946 117.51443 72.02954 40.67234 36.43379 33.98351 30.50707 30.50263 30.43519 30.43519 25.40119 114.34239 80.97395 62.03558 57.29968 38.91855 35.83800 32.97213 29.65423 29.04520 25.77082 138.70626 81.64695 74.99472 69.04713 57.14379 47.73948 47.01990 40.73513 40.73513 39.21566

0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.00e−07 2.00e−07 1.70e−06 1.70e−06 1.28e−05 1.98e−05 1.98e−05 1.98e−05 2.04e−05 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 5.00e−07 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 1.00e−07 1.00e−07 4.00e−07 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00 0.00e+00

158 49 21 48 41 16 117 17 19 7 8 31 8 6 14 5 5 5 72 37 17 18 17 21 23 14 10 10 23 30 48 16 23 9 28 225 63 7 32 133 88 415 100 25 31 12 8 8 14

218 47 8 52 48 8 238 10 13 0 1 47 2 0 15 0 0 0 190 10 0 10 9 18 24 7 2 2 28 6 45 2 13 0 34 724 140 0 54 237 169 1532 227 22 41 3 0 0 8

The politicization of immigration and radical right party politics  139 TABLE 6.A6 AfD.

Time period

Feature

Chi2

p

n_target

n_reference

2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018 2017–2018

migranten masseneinwanderung islam globalen illegale illegalen migrant hierzulande bakterien pakt

401.26244 122.72124 103.33062 88.27164 69.11072 58.12552 58.12552 54.41997 50.71421 48.23044

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

358 21 81 33 34 22 22 12 8 27

793 3 164 34 47 23 23 4 0 42

7 THE ELECTORAL BREAKTHROUGH OF THE AfD AND THE EAST-WEST DIVIDE IN GERMAN POLITICS Kai Arzheimer

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, members of the radical right party family have become relevant in most Western European polities, including many of Germany’s neighbours such as Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. For decades, Germany remained an outlier: Parties like the Deutsche Volksunion (German People’s Union, DVU), the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD), and Die Republikaner (The Republicans, REP) had some success at the local and regional level but in the end never managed to escape from the shadow of ‘Grandpa’s Fascism’. This only changed with the rise, transformation, and electoral breakthrough of Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), a new party that was founded in 2013 during the fourth wave of far-right politics in Germany. Within a span of just over three years, the AfD established itself as the predominant political actor on the far right. In the first ten years of the party’s existence, this position remained unchallenged. Many observers have noted that the AfD has been particularly strong in Germany’s ‘new’ states – a pattern emerging already shortly after the party’s foundation (Arzheimer and Berning 2019, Betz and Habersack 2019, Pesthy et al. 2020, Weisskircher 2020, Hansen and Olsen 2022). This chapter shows how the regional level proved to be crucial for the party’s national breakthrough. I will first demonstrate that the AfD’s eastern branches and the party’s disproportionate support in the ‘new’ states were crucial for its breakthrough and subsequent ascendancy. I will then show that the AfD’s lopsided electoral success can be fully explained by significantly higher levels of nativism among the eastern German population. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120049-10

The electoral breakthrough of the AfD and the east-west divide  141

Easterners also display higher levels of right-wing extremism and populism than their western compatriots. It is at least plausible that this environment has shaped the development of the eastern party branches, both through recruitment effects and through attempts to appeal to this specific constituency. One should note, however, that right-wing extremism and populism have no additional positive effect on AfD voting in the east once nativism is controlled for. Moreover, extremist and populist tendencies within the AfD are by no means confined to the east. Before embarking on this analysis, the elements of the underlying theoretical framework1 (which draws heavily on Mudde 2007, 2019) should be introduced briefly as follows. Nativism is the central tenet for all far-right actors and their supporters. It is a world view that combines xenophobia with nationalism and portrays non-native elements (persons and ideas) as a threat to the ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation-state (Mudde 2007: 19). Nativism is a necessary but insufficient condition for being classified as far right. Following Mudde (2007: 22–23) and his reading of Altemeyer (1981), right-wing authoritarianism is the second essential feature that distinguishes the far right from other rightist actors. Its key elements are an excessive level of support for established cultural norms and practices (conventionalism), a reverence for strong leadership (authoritarian submission), and, perhaps most crucially, hostility towards outgroups (authoritarian aggression). Within the far right, a further distinction can be made between radicals and extremists (Mudde 2007: ch. 1), which differ in their approach to democracy. Extremists want to replace the democratic order with some autocratic system. A positive view of past authoritarian regimes and their ideologies (most notably National Socialism) is a sufficient condition for extremism. Conversely, radicals shy away from open attacks on democracy itself and may even claim to be democracy’s true defenders. This is particularly true for actors who also espouse populism, which is a ‘thin ideology’ that pits the pure people against a corrupt elite and reduces democracy to the rule of a majority unfettered by minority rights and liberal institutions such as courts and parliaments (Mudde 2007: 21–23). Empirically, the lines between these categories are sometimes blurry, but they have considerable analytical value. More specifically, they are useful for explaining the AfD’s trajectory, its appeal to voters, and the nature of its persistent internal conflicts. The AfD’s rise, transformation and breakthrough, and the role of the eastern German states

Over its short history, the AfD has undergone a remarkable transformation (see Lees 2018, Arzheimer 2019, Betz and Habersack 2019). The AfD began its life in 2013 as a soft Eurosceptic project that billed itself as ‘liberal-conservative’, i.e., economically liberal yet socially conservative. Its most prominent leaders had been (or could have been) members of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)

142  Kai Arzheimer

and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). While their early manifestos put them unambiguously on the right and while both the rank and file and the leadership were ideologically heterogeneous, the party was neither radical nor particularly populist until 2015 (Arzheimer 2015). In the beginning, there was also nothing that would have suggested an especially ‘eastern’ profile of the party. The party was formally founded in Oberursel, a prosperous town near the western financial centre of Frankfurt, by a small group of mostly western men (Die Zeit 19.07.2017). Alexander Gauland, one of the most influential figures in the AfD, who would go on to lead the party in Brandenburg and become a leader of both the delegation in the Bundestag and the national party, was born in the eastern city of Chemnitz in 1941. But Gauland fled from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1959. He enjoyed a career as a bureaucrat and politician in the western state of Hesse and was a member of the old Federal Republic’s elite for about three decades before he became a newspaper editor, journalist, and writer in Brandenburg and Berlin in the 1990s. The only prominent easterner at the time was Frauke Petry, who became party leader in Saxony and was elected as one of the AfD’s three ‘speakers’ (party leaders with equal rights) at the first party conference in 2013. But even Petry’s biography was hardly typically ‘eastern German’: while she was born in Dresden in 1975, her family moved to the Ruhr area in 1990. After finishing secondary school, Petry won a scholarship for the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, where she completed a bachelor’s degree. This was followed by a postgraduate degree, a PhD, and a postdoc at the University of Göttingen. She only moved back to Saxony in 2007 to set up a company. Similarly, two other party leaders that rose to prominence in the east – Björn Höcke and Andreas Kalbitz – both grew up in western states, moving to the east in the 2000s when they were already in their 30s. While it is true that the AfD’s eastern state party chapters quickly began to appeal to regional and even sub-regional identities and issues (Weisskircher 2020: 4), this is what all parties do in Germany’s federal political system. It was only during the radicalisation of the AfD that some eastern politicians began referring to the legacy of the eastern GDR dissidents and the Peaceful Revolution of 1989/1990, mirroring a similar rhetoric deployed by PEGIDA (see Herold and Schäller 2024 in this volume). Even then, the AfD as a whole carefully steered clear of presenting itself as a regional political force, which would have alienated western voters. How did support for the AfD develop at the national and, importantly, regional level over time? Figure 7.1 addresses this question. The dark grey line shows support for the AfD in national polls, which was constructed by locally smoothing over the headline numbers from the ‘Politbarometer’ and ‘Deutschlandtrend’ series.2 The symbols in Figure 7.1 represent election results at the Land (circles), federal (squares), and EU (diamond) levels. Hollow symbols stand for individual western states (Land elections), or results aggregated over all western states (federal and EU elections). Filled symbols represent the analogous numbers for the eastern states.

The electoral breakthrough of the AfD and the east-west divide  143

FIGURE 7.1 

Support for the AfD 2013–2022 (elections and national polling average).

Source: Created by the author from official results and the headline findings of the Deutschlandtrend and Politbarometer survey series.

The leftmost symbols in the plot show that even in the 2013 federal election, when the party’s image was still shaped by members of the western elites, the AfD was slightly more successful in the east. While the difference was tiny (1.5 percentage points), it may have been of psychological relevance for party activists, as it put the party just above the electoral threshold in the east. This (relatively small) east-west difference was replicated eight months later when the AfD gained its first seats ever, winning 7.1 per cent of the vote share in the European Parliament election in 2014. However, the party’s public perception at this time was dominated by Bernd Lucke, a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, another westerner to whom the media often simply referred as ‘the founder’ of the party. Lucke led the slate of candidates for the European Parliament, all of whom had a similarly western German background (Arzheimer 2015: 552). At what point can we speak of AfD’s electoral breakthrough? Did it already occur at the European Parliament election of 2014? As Art (2011: 4) observes, the literature does not provide an undisputed definition of ‘what constitutes an electoral breakthrough’. Although the AfD remained just below the threshold in the 2013 federal election, their vote share of 4.7 per cent was certainly enough to ‘attract the attention of the media and other political parties’, one potential criterion mentioned by Art. Conversely, their good result in the European Parliament election was perhaps less relevant for establishing the party as a relevant player than it seemed at the

144  Kai Arzheimer

time. First, turnout (48 per cent) and public interest in the election were low, and there was no (explicit) electoral threshold so that a whole host of non-established parties won seats.3 Second, German media rarely report on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and their work and do not treat politicians in the EU arena as on par with the national or regional ones. Third, and relatedly, Lucke and the other members of the AfD’s EP delegation spent a significant amount of their time in Brussels and Strasbourg, which somewhat isolated them from their fellow party members. In short, the European Parliament election result alone would probably not have guaranteed ‘persistence’ (Art 2011), but the elections in the eastern states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia that followed in August and September 2014 certainly did. At a time when the national polling average was barely above the electoral threshold, the eastern state parties won between 10 and 12 per cent of the vote. This gave the AfD 36 state-level MPs, all based in (eastern) state capitals and equipped with considerable resources. Each single state-party delegation alone was bigger than the AfD group in the European Parliament. Apart from a focus on regional instead of European issues, the manifestos in Brandenburg and Thuringia very much resembled the European one. All three stated a preference for a ‘Canadian style’ point-based immigration regime and discussed migration almost exclusively in economic terms. While they had a socially conservative slant and while the Thuringian manifesto featured an early attack on ‘political correctness’, none of the three contained any statements on religion (often a proxy issue for immigration from predominantly Muslim societies, see Zúquete (2008)). On the stump, however, the respective party leaders and frontrunner candidates (Alexander Gauland in Brandenburg and Björn Höcke in Thuringia) already departed from this script by framing immigration as a cultural threat and making this their main issue. The Saxonian manifesto was presumably the first major AfD document that explicitly mentioned Muslims: it demanded referenda on plans to build mosques with minarets (section IV.2.5). The AfD also warned of a ‘de-legitimisation of citizen protests [against mosques]’ and campaigned against ‘integration folklore’ such as anti-discrimination courses. At the end of 2014, Petry publicly stated that the newly emerged PEGIDA protests represented ‘issues that had been neglected by politicians’, while some members of the state party leadership even joined in the protests (FAZ 10.12.2014). The AfD’s delegation in the Saxony parliament met with PEGIDA’s leadership in January 2015 but could not agree on a closer cooperation, not least because of personal animosities. At the grassroots level, however, there was a substantial overlap between AfD and PEGIDA activists (Vorländer et al. 2016: 39–43). The open question of the party’s relationship with PEGIDA and other farright actors and its position towards right-wing populism more generally soon developed into a major internal cleavage (see Weisskircher 2024 in this volume). Early in 2015, it became linked to the conflict over Lucke’s attempts to

The electoral breakthrough of the AfD and the east-west divide  145

centralise power within the party. Nationwide support for the AfD was stagnating if not declining (see Figure 7.1), and the party barely scraped past the electoral threshold in the city states of Hamburg (Lucke’s home state) and Bremen. The (mostly western) ‘liberal-conservatives’ blamed their electoral difficulties on internal attempts to move the party further to the right, while the (mostly eastern) proponents of this new course pointed out that the Hamburg and Bremen state parties had failed to capitalise on the immigration issue and had not invited successful eastern leaders such as Gauland and Petry to join local campaign events (FAZ 15.02.2015). In March 2015, some of the right-most party members launched the ‘Erfurt Resolution’, a rallying cry against Lucke’s alleged attempts to bring the AfD into the mainstream (Arzheimer 2019: 92–93). Supporters of the resolution became known as ‘Der Flügel’ (‘The Wing’), an informal faction within the party whose influence grew over the years. The meetings of the Wing were named after the Kyffhäuser monument in the eastern state of Thuringia, which has been a focus of right-wing extremist mobilisation since the 1890s. Three of the most prominent members of the Wing – Björn Höcke, Andreas Kalbitz, and André Poggenburg – were or would become leaders of eastern state parties. Gauland signed the resolution during his tenure as party leader in Brandenburg. A related network, the ‘Patriotic Platform’, which partly overlapped with the Wing and was disbanded in 2018, was also largely based in the east, although neither was exclusively eastern. After the Bremen election in May, Lucke emailed all party members and urged them to support a competing manifesto/faction called ‘Weckruf’ (wake-up call). Escalation followed: at the request of his co-leaders, Lucke was subsequently locked out of the internal mailing system (FAZ 18.05.2015). After Petry reached an agreement with the ultra-rights at the party conference in July 2015, co-founder Lucke, four of the other six MEPs, and about ten per cent of the members, including a significant share of mid-level functionaries, left the AfD. This massive conflict had two major consequences. First, the AfD’s leadership structure has remained highly fragmented, even by German standards. Public disagreement between leading politicians and within the national executive has been frequent, and the state-level chapters have retained a high degree of autonomy. Second, Frauke Petry, who replaced Lucke as the AfD’s most prominent face, first encouraged, then failed to contain a shift to the right. Under her stewardship, the AfD became a more or less normal radical right party, and its electorate changed accordingly (Arzheimer and Berning 2019). As depicted in Figure 7.1, support for the AfD hovered around the electoral threshold during and after the power struggle. Apart from the two remaining MEPs, Marcus Pretzell (who also led the state party in North Rhine-Westphalia) and Beatrix von Storch (who became leader of the Berlin state party in 2016), and those Bremen and Hamburg deputies that did not leave the party, the eastern state MPs were the only AfD members holding public offices. Back then, the AfD looked very much like another failed far-right project.

146  Kai Arzheimer

However, support for the transformed party began to rise again towards the end of 2015 against the backdrop of the so-called refugee crisis (according to Gauland ‘a gift for the party’, Der Spiegel 12.12.2015) and reached between 12 and 15 per cent in nationwide polls (see Gessler and Hunger 2024 in this volume). In the 2016 Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate state elections, the party won bigger vote shares than any far-right party since World War II. But these results paled in comparison to the election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where a particularly right-leaning state party led by Poggenburg won almost a quarter of the vote. Conversely, their results in a string of western state elections held in the spring of 2017 were disappointing for the party, reflecting both a decline in national poll numbers and persistent east-west differences. Just before the federal election in September 2017, the AfD had won 73 seats in western state parliaments but 100 seats in the east. In the 2017 Bundestag election, the AfD did comparatively well in the west (11 per cent) but extraordinarily well in the east (22 per cent). Although less than a quarter of the population lives in the eastern states including Berlin and although turnout is lower in the east (affecting territorial representation), about one third of the 94 new federal MPs were elected in the east. Put differently, while about 25 per cent of the party members lived in the eastern states (Niedermayer 2019: 6, 19), they made up roughly one half of the party elite. The extraordinarily good results in the 2019 eastern state elections further increased this imbalance. Since the 2017 election, national support for the AfD has waxed and then waned as immigration moved down the political agenda and the most extreme elements within the party came under scrutiny by the media and the authorities. More recently, it has risen against the backdrop of the global economic and political turmoil triggered by Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine. Still, the general pattern in Figure 7.1 has remained stable: with the exception of Berlin (an atypical eastern state), support for the AfD is twice, if not three times higher in the east than in the west for both state and national elections. Marked differences in support for radical right parties are not unusual per se. The French Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) has longstanding strongholds in the south, the northeast, and now also in the northwest that partly represent urban-rural and economic cleavages. The Italian Lega began its life as a regionalist and even nominally separatist party, and the Vlaams Belang is confined to Flanders and Brussels. What sets the AfD apart from other radical right parties in Europe is that they are cultivating ties to right-wing extremist actors, with openly extremist ideas, and that their codes are becoming more acceptable within the party, particularly since the 2017 election. These developments are often attributed to the growing influence of the Wing faction, which had come under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and disbanded at the request of the party’s national executive in April 2020. As the Wing never had any formal structures and as its members were not properly expelled from the party, this was widely seen as a

The electoral breakthrough of the AfD and the east-west divide  147

diversion. In May 2020, a slim majority of the national executive also voted to declare Kalbitz’s membership null and void because he had failed to declare previous memberships in extremist organisations, but Kalbitz has been fighting this decision in the courts and is still a member of his regional party’s parliamentary group. On both the elite and the voter level, extremist tendencies seem to be particularly pronounced in the east.4 I will address this important pattern, which raises profound and uncomfortable questions about the state of democracy and political culture after unification, in the next section. A micro-level model of the AfD vote from an east-west perspective

In the previous section, I have shown that the AfD is disproportionately successful in the ‘new’ states, where it often acts more openly extremist than in the west. At the same time, ever since unification, levels of nativist attitudes, right-wing extremist activism, and violence have been substantially higher in the east than in the west (see, e.g., Kurthen et al. 1997, Rucht 2018, König and Jäckle 2024 in this volume). Taken together, this suggests that east-west differences in support for the AfD result from underlying differences in demand for populist and far-right politics. To test this assertion, this chapter will explore three closely related questions: 1. Are populist, nativist, and extremist attitudes really more prevalent in the eastern states? 2. Do these attitudes have a stronger or otherwise diverging impact on voting behaviour in the east? 3. Are attitudinal differences in level and effect sufficient to explain the diverging appeal of the AfD, or is there an additional, region-specific component to the AfD’s success in the east? Addressing these questions requires both adequate data and a statistical model for estimating the prevalence and electoral impact of these attitudes. Because constructs such as nativism are complex and not directly observable, each of the attitudinal variables should be operationalised by multiple indicators. A recent wave of Germany’s General Social Survey (ALLBUS) provides data that are almost ideally suited to address these questions. Field work took place from April 2018 until September 2018, a period when the AfD had become a nationwide political force whose connections to right-wing extremist actors were widely discussed. The ALLBUS includes a host of items designed to measure backlash against immigration and immigrants specifically as well as nativist tendencies more generally. While it lacks items that measure authoritarianism, the survey also encompasses a scale specifically designed to measure populist attitudes.

148  Kai Arzheimer TABLE 7.1  Indicators for populism.

Variable

Text

pop01/pa29 pop02/pa30 pop03/pa31

The Members of the Bundestag must only be bound to the will of the people. Politicians talk too much and do too little. An ordinary citizen would represent my interests better than a professional politician. What they call compromise in politics is in reality just a betrayal of principles. The people, not politicians, should make the important political decisions. The people basically agree what needs to happen politically. Politicians only care about the interests of the rich and powerful.

pop04/pa32 pop05/pa33 pop06/pa34 pop07/pa35

Note: Created by the author based on the ALLBUS data set. The first variable name (e.g. pop01) is the one used in the replication files, the second one (e.g. pa29) is the name in the original ALLBUS data set (ZA 5270). Where necessary, variables were recoded so that higher numerical values correspond to stronger populist orientations.

The ALLBUS also replicates a right-wing extremism scale that was developed at the height of the third wave of right-wing mobilisation during the 1990s. Many items in this battery refer to elements of traditional German right-wing extremism that are rarely polled, including positive evaluations of Hitler and the Nazi regime and support for violence against out-group members.5 Tables 7.1–7.3 give an overview of how the constructs were operationalised. Figure 7.2 shows the overall structure of the model. Right-wing extremism, populism, and nativism are latent variables that may be positively related to each other. They are all assumed to have positive effects on voting for the AfD. The size of these effects and the strength of their inter-relationships are allowed to vary across regions. The means of the attitudinal constructs are also allowed to vary. However, for interregional comparisons to be valid, the measurement models need to work in equivalent ways in both parts of Germany. More formally, at least ‘scalar invariance’ of the measurement models is required. Scalar invariance means that for all indicators, both the intercepts and the factor loadings can be constrained to be the same across regions (Davidov 2009: 69) while still achieving a good model fit.6 Measurement errors may vary under scalar invariance. TABLE 7.2  Indicators for right-wing extremism.

Variable

Text

px04 px05

National Socialism also had its good sides. If it hadn’t been for the Holocaust Hitler would be regarded as a great statesman today. The Jews still have too much influence. There is something peculiarly different about the Jews which stops them from fitting in with us. I can understand that people carry out attacks on homes for asylum seekers.

px08 px09 px10

Note: Created by the author based on the ALLBUS data set. Variable names are the same for both the replication files and the original ALLBUS data set (ZA 5270). Variables are coded so that higher numerical values correspond to stronger right-wing extremist orientations.

The electoral breakthrough of the AfD and the east-west divide  149 TABLE 7.3  Indicators for nativism/anti-immigrant sentiment.

Variable

Text

px01 px02 px06

I am proud to be German It’s about time we found the courage to have strong national feelings again Because of its many resident foreigners, Germany is dominated by foreign influences to a dangerous degree Foreigners should always marry people from their own ethnic group Immigrants should be required to adapt to German customs and traditions Immigrants are good for Germany’s economy (rev) The influx of refugees to Germany should be stopped Refugees: a risk for the welfare state Refugees: a security risk Refugees: a risk for social cohesion Refugees a risk for the economy

px07 mig1/pa09 mig2/pa17 mig3/pa19 mig4/mp16 mig5/mp17 mig6/mp18 mig7/mp19

Note: Created by the author based on the ALLBUS data set. The first variable name (e.g. mig1) is the one used in the replication files, the second one (e.g. pa09) is the name in the original ALLBUS data set (ZA 5270). Variable names starting with px were retained. Where necessary, variables were recoded so that higher numerical values correspond to stronger nativist orientations.

A preliminary measurement-only model shows that three items are unreliable and should be removed from their scales.7 One of them (px03) was also responsible for the only substantive regional difference in measurement errors. Without the offending item, the model can be re-specified under the assumption of ‘strict invariance’, i.e., with identical measurement errors across both regions, which makes it much more parsimonious. All latent variables were given variances of one. Their covariances therefore reduce to correlations, and factor loadings reflect a change of one standard deviation in the latent variable. Because voting intention was modelled as a binary8 choice (AfD vs. any other party), the effects on this variable (see Table 7.7) are probit coefficients. All other relationships are linear. Estimation was carried out in MPlus 8.2, using the WLSMV estimator, which handles missing values in a transparent fashion. Even under strict invariance, the model fit is excellent, with an RMSEA of 0.033 (CI 0.031; 0.035). Table 7.4 shows the intercepts and factor loadings for all 21 indicators as well their residual variances. In sum, the results demonstrate that the remaining 21 items are reliable indicators for the latent variables.

FIGURE 7.2 

A structural equation model of AfD voting.

Source: Created by the author

150  Kai Arzheimer TABLE 7.4  Measurement models.

POP2 POP3 POP4 POP5 POP6 POP7 PX02 MIG1 MIG2 MIG3 MIG4 MIG5 MIG6 MIG7 PX06 PX07 PX04 PX05 PX08 PX09 PX10

Loadings

Intercepts

Residual variances

0.66*** (0.02) 0.75*** (0.03) 0.83*** (0.02) 0.69*** (0.03) 0.65*** (0.03) 0.68*** (0.02) 0.56*** (0.02) 0.60*** (0.02) −0.66*** (0.02) 1.01*** (0.03) 0.64*** (0.02) 0.54*** (0.02) 0.68*** (0.02) 0.74*** (0.02) 1.15*** (0.04) 0.59*** (0.02) 0.70*** (0.03) 0.53*** (0.03) 0.82*** (0.03) 0.68*** (0.02) 0.50*** (0.02)

3.92*** (0.02) 2.69*** (0.02) 3.00*** (0.02) 2.99*** (0.02) 2.79*** (0.02) 3.10*** (0.02) 3.70*** (0.02) 4.06*** (0.03) 3.36*** (0.02) 2.71*** (0.03) 3.70*** (0.02) 3.94*** (0.02) 3.34*** (0.02) 3.00*** (0.02) 2.77*** (0.03) 1.84*** (0.03) 1.63*** (0.04) 1.57*** (0.04) 1.79*** (0.04) 1.64*** (0.04) 1.36*** (0.04)

0.52*** (0.02) 0.87*** (0.03) 0.61*** (0.02) 0.95*** (0.03) 0.96*** (0.03) 0.73*** (0.02) 0.96*** (0.03) 0.67*** (0.02) 0.77*** (0.02) 0.68*** (0.02) 0.51*** (0.01) 0.34*** (0.01) 0.62*** (0.02) 0.60*** (0.02) 0.64*** (0.02) 0.88*** (0.03) 0.64*** (0.02) 0.85*** (0.03) 0.65*** (0.03) 0.58*** (0.02) 0.60*** (0.02)

Note:*** p