End of AfD poll surge prompts renewed political soul-searching in Germany

If supporters of Germany’s populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) were turkeys, they would vote for Christmas.

That, in effect, is the stark claim in a new study into AfD voter behaviour, published just as a summer surge for the populist party appears at an end and support ebbs once more below 20 per cent.

Its rise in polls to become Germany’s second-largest party triggered prompted panic in other parties, but analysts suggest that highlighting the party’s own policies is the best way to prune it back still further.

According to one study, The AfD Paradox by Berlin’s DIW economic institute, the populist party’s core voters would be the most adversely affected by its policies should the party make it into power.

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“There is an individual misjudgment by many AfD voters,” said DIW president Marcel Fratzscher in the study. “They do not realise that a policy of discrimination and exclusion would affect them themselves strongly – and negatively.”

The study took economic snapshots of areas where the party has performed well in election – in particular eastern states marked by weak economic structure, poor prospects and a flight of younger generations.

The DIW then compared these regions with a survey of standardised questions which each political party is asked to answer before Germany elections.

Covering everything from taxes to speed limits, these answers are fed into a website which allows voters find their ideal party in an online multiple choice test called the “election-o-mat”.

The AfD’s 2021 answers reveal a stark neoliberal profile that, for the DIW, could “hardly be more at odds” with the interests of its voter profile: disproportionately middle-aged men with basic to middle-level education.

“Tax cuts for top earners, lower wages for low earners and a curtailment of social systems would hit AfD voters much more negatively than the voters of most other parties,” according to the DIW survey, suggesting an AfD government would redistribute income and social benefits away from its own voter base to those of other parties.

“There is no shortage of AfD voters who are convinced that rolling back globalisation, stronger nationalism and neoliberal politics ... would offer them more security and opportunities,” argues the DIW report, “but the opposite would happen.”

AfD policies would first hit migrants and other minorities but, soon after, risk “marginalising its own voters who are already often on the margins of society even more and curtail their social and political participation”.

[ AfD backs far-right candidates in challenge to leadership ]

[ AfD regional win rips up German political rulebook ]

The study doesn’t reflect on the possibility that AfD voters are aware of the party’s politics, but back them anyway in protest at the status quo – mirroring how millions of US blue-collar voters back the Republicans in the so-called rust belt states.

Similar to the United States, many analysts see a link between the AfD surge, growing economic pressures and voter disillusionment with the political solutions on offer – particularly Germany’s bickering “traffic-light” coalition of chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“The traffic light has no real vision to lead out of this crisis, leading to huge transformation pressures,” argued German market researcher Dirk Ziems in his own study in the Welt daily. “Meanwhile the AfD presents itself as a paternalistic protective power of the supposedly better good old days.”

While he views the AfD as protest party, promising to turn back time, the liberal Zeit weekly sees the roots of AfD success more in the satisfaction it offers supporters in the present.

Like other populist parties, it links the AfD’s success to a political ideology and world view that strips out differentiation, complexity and self-reflection and “allows you to see yourself as a one-eyed person in the valley of the blind”.

“And then, if you want,” it added, “you can variously view yourself as a marginalised victim or part of a critical counter-elite – which is mentally a very comfortable state in which to live.”

While no analysts see a silver-bullet solution, political adviser Johannes Hillje suggests one starting place: an end to unreflected news stories that fanfare AfD “record poll numbers” in such a way as to make its rise in support a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“People who have not yet tended towards the AfD get the impression that 20 per cent plus of voters can’t be wrong and that the AfD is a normal, electable party,” he told the Tagesspiegel daily. Just as striking now, he added, is “are the lack of headlines about the end of the AfD’s rise in most opinion polls”.