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Angus Harker
Oct 307 min read

Understanding the AfD’s Appeal in a Fragmented Germany

Updated: 1 day ago

This article was written by Angus Harker a student at the University of Warwick. This article is part of his column 'The Other Side'.


Pathos and Logos

Last month, I was privileged to go on holiday to Italy, and in Siena, on a balcony in an Airbnb overlooking the captivating countryside of Tuscany, I ended up talking to two German sisters sharing the same accommodation. They were in the midst of what I could only assume was a bonding trip, perhaps rekindling what they had in times long gone.

The older sister, at 23, was a stereotypical example of the university educated youth: vegetarian, conscious of her carbon footprint, and voraciously academic. Her sister, 17, did not have the academic prowess, but she exhibited a sympathy for people that her facts-based sister didn’t allow. Archetypal examples of pathos and logos, if you will. Over the course of the evening, the topic drifted from university, to vegetarianism, to politics, and each time it drove a wedge further through the heart of their family bond.

Politics can be a touchy subject, especially on controversial topics, and the AfD are certainly no strangers to that. Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD in Thuringia, does appear to court controversy, and despite his assumed ignorance of the provenance of his Nazi slogans, his background in history suggests he should know better.

So the facts are on the university educated youth’s side. Why, then, do they attract so much support? As with most extremist parties, support tends to come from economic necessity first. The AfD was originally started by a group of Eurosceptic Germans, and despite their assimilation of increasingly radicalised far-right ideals, the heart of their issues remain economic. 



Strapped for Cash

And Germany is in an economic hole - as the Economist notes, “Germany faces its first two-year recession in more than two decades”. It’s a statement of the obvious that voting tends to become less pro-establishment when the establishment doesn’t look like it’s working. But there’s more to this than that – and instead of generalising the AfD’s voter base as merely economically frustrated, it’s important to ask questions instead of making assumptions. Given their far-right beliefs, their use of Nazi slogans, their ties to extremism, and their outwardly racist statements, how could someone overcome these to vote for the AfD?

Let’s break down the economics first. The AfD is very popular in the east of Germany, especially in Länder like Thuringia where Höcke is situated. It’s been noted that almost 40 percent of all employed individuals in the East work minimum wage jobs, in contrast to about 20 percent in the West. On top of that, the German Institute for Economic Research indicated that the “rent burden rate of the lowest income quintile… rose from four percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2018”. Even if that paper suggests that East Germans are happier with their living spaces, the cost for that happiness is not inconsequential. The quoted article and the DIW paper are both from 2020, just as the pandemic started, and two years before Germany entered its economic recession. If it was a high burden in times of prosperity, it’s hard to imagine the stress on low-income families right now. Minimum wage in Germany was increased to €12 per hour in late 2022, and will only increase to €12.82 in January 2025, even though inflation hit a high of 11.6% in 2023. Necessarily, this will hurt lower-income families, and as data suggests that most low-income families are in the east of Germany, then these families will be the ones that are most vulnerable. 

This bleak future motivates a lower-income family’s support for the AfD, who promise several ideas radically different from the establishment, such as higher personal allowance and a “split tax for families”, all of which is aimed at “[reducing] the tax burden of low and middle-income earners” (p. 73). 

Radical policies come and go in politics, and it’s easy to rip into the economic policies the AfD propose and denounce them as pie-in-the-sky thinking. But the purpose of this article is not to delve into that. If the radicalness of your policies are open to intense scrutiny, then smoke and mirrors must be used to create the illusion of an injured party supported by a “forgotten” electorate – which leads us to migration.


Divide and Conquer

Migration is an immensely topical issue and has always been a politicised word, along with its range of synonyms. If you’re critical towards it, you are concerned about “immigrants”; if you’re positive towards it, you term them “migrants”, and if you’re particularly fond of them you call them “expatriates”. Migration, from the very word and its synonyms, can be easily politically charged, and the AfD pulls no punches with their immigration policy. Their chapter on migration opens this with the statement that “topics of asylum and immigration are characterised by an ideologically-biased climate of political correctness, accompanied by banned terms and newspeak” (p. 57), immediately setting the tone of immigration as contentious, political, and Orwellian. Their policies open with the notion that the current government’s stance has led to “unjustified wholesale suspicions of the majority of law-abiding, integrated immigrants and asylum-seekers” (p. 57), which appears to try and portray the AfD as a rational arbiter compared to the outcome of government policies. It’s not necessary to look at their actual immigration policies, but suffice it to say they are against Merkel’s open door policy towards migration and want to “shift the paradigm in asylum immigration” (p. 58). How they will choose to distinguish between “legitimate refugees” and “irregular migrants” is helpfully glossed over.

What’s important to focus on is the politicised notion of migration. That opening statement has far more detail into who their voter base is, and why they support them. It represents the notion that the AfD are opening up a conversation that appears to be closed off, which implies that those who support them feel gagged talking about issues that are personal to them. It’s interesting to compare this seemingly rational standpoint in their manifesto from the far-right views and allusions outlined earlier. These two things may seem distant, but they are in fact related. By being controversial, they attract headlines, which puts them into the mainstream. Then, after interspersing that with seemingly level-headed vernacular, they present themselves as controversial but somehow forward thinking, tapping into the zeitgeist of modern society. 

This is a common tactic used by scam artists on the Internet such as Andrew Tate (on which much investigative journalism has been conducted). The radical elements push the mainstream to close off the conversation, which further alienates the supporter base. If the AfD appears to be half-right in the eyes of their voters, then being shunted to the margins by other political parties only serves to alienate the voters even further, and to increasingly accept their radical ideas.

The facts don’t necessarily align with the AfD’s viewpoint. Merkel’s open-door policy didn’t appear to increase asylum seekers except for a backlog of applications that occurred before her declaration; migration had been steadily increasing before that policy was announced. Furthermore, recent news suggests that 64% of the refugees from the “2015 cohort” are now employed, compared to 77% for the wider German population. But these facts are irrelevant if they cannot be ushered in with the necessary ethos, which the German government fails to do. They have the facts, but not the empathy – and just like those two sisters in Siena, you don’t win the debate by telling the other side that they’re wrong - you win the debate by having discourse and by acknowledging the other side’s problems and persuading them to yours, which requires more than just data.

The AfD’s stance on migration does open up one issue, and that is integration. Despite unveiling a national integration plan in 2018, MIPEX ranked Germany as 58 out of a possible 100, suggesting Germany to be a place of “temporary integration”. Despite improving access to basic education, research has found that those who are more likely to get asylum seeker status have priority access to integration courses, which leaves those nonprioritised groups in the dust.

So there’s this curious case where those who are seeking refugee status cannot work to provide for themselves, they are given money by the state to live on whilst their application takes at least half a year to process. It comes as no surprise that those working minimum wage jobs in an economic crisis are upset at refugees, and the aforementioned radicalisation only fuels that hatred – even if the hatred is misguided. Surprisingly enough, this issue with processing asylum seekers in Germany was shared by both sisters in Siena, after three long hours of conversation between the two. How many families do you think are having those conversations to sort out their differences? 

The AfD is bad for business in Germany and Europe as a whole - that is a truism without a shadow of doubt. However, what has spurred their support can be broken down into an economic crisis alongside a series of gross failings of communication by the government and mainstream parties, that fail to understand the AfD’s voter base and run the risk of being alienated by a third of the populace. With the national elections next year, some serious work has to be done to reverse the momentum they have. This involves some very long conversations and a capacity to empathise instead of demonise the electorate. Just like those two sisters in Siena, whether you have the facts or not is irrelevant – it’s how you can convince the other side that matters the most. Once you can do that, only then can progress be made in restoring the division that these issues have caused between families across Germany.


 

References used:

Politico -

The German Times -

DIW Berlin - 

Migrant Integration Policy Index (Germany) - https://www.mipex.eu/germany

European Consortium for Political Research - https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-6765.12669

The BBC


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