The rise of the German Eurosceptic party Alternative für Deutschland,between ordoliberal critique and popular anxiety

Abstract

Germany came relatively unscathed through the economic turbulence of recent years. For some observers, Germany is the biggest beneficiary of the Eurozone and the winner of the crisis. This begs the question of why, at the height of Germany’s post-war European influence, have an increasing number of Germans withdrawn their support from the European project? The Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) is Germany’s first Eurosceptic party to attract substantial electoral support in local, national and European elections. The article firstly presents a brief summary of the AfD’s European politics. It then traces the party’s ideological roots back to ordoliberal critiques of the Maastricht Treaty and argues that there was a deep scepticism towards European integration among Germany’s conservative elites well before the introduction of the Euro. The sudden surge in German Euroscepticism has to be understood within the context of broader cultural changes and a lack of political choice. An unprecedented moral panic about European bailouts and the European Central Bank’s monetary policy created a sense of emergency that paved the way for the AfD’s success.

Keywords

Germany Euroscepticism Alternative for Germany ordoliberal European debt crisis far right

Introduction

Germany came relatively unscathed through the economic turbulence of recent years. After a brief contraction in 2008, the German economy continued to grow. While Spain and Greece experienced youth unemployment of more than 50 per cent, in Germany it dropped to record lows (OECD, 2013a). Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain struggled to control spiralling sovereign debt and were made to implement stringent fiscal policies. Germany, on the contrary, was able to borrow money on international markets on favourable terms, saving up to 40 billion Euros in interest payments between 2010 and 2014 (Spiegel Online International, 2013). The subdued Euro also underpins Germany’s export-driven economic model. For some observers, Germany is the biggest beneficiary of the Eurozone and winner of the sovereign debt crisis (Wolf, 2010; Young and Semmler, 2011). Despite this, strong gains of the Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) in recent elections suggest that German backing for European integration moved from an era of ‘permissive consensus’ (Inglehart, 1971) to a period of ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe, 2007).

The AfD is Germany’s first Eurosceptic party to have attracted substantial electoral support in local, national and European elections. In the general elections in September 2013, the AfD gained 4.7 per cent of the vote with its critique of the single currency and bailout policies and nearly entered the Bundestag. During the European Parliament elections in May 2014, the AfD achieved 7 per cent and has been able to send seven members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Strasburg. The party entered local parliaments in Saxony (9.7 per cent, 14 seats), Brandenburg (12.2 per cent, 11 seats) and Thuringia (10.6 per cent, 11 seats) in autumn 2014 as well as in Hamburg in February 2015 (6.1 per cent, 8 seats). Given that the AfD had its inaugural conference only in April 2013, this is a considerable result.

Particularly in local chapters in eastern Germany, the AfD is increasingly adopting a xenophobic, nativist and law and order rhetoric, which puts the party into close proximity to the radical right. This article is, however, primarily concerned with the rise of German Euroscepticism and the AfD’s ordoliberal critique of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Moreover, the article argues that the sudden surge in German Euroscepticism has to be understood as part of a complex constellation of wider cultural changes, a lack of political choice and a moral panic about the impact of European monetary policy on German stability culture.

The Alternative for Germany: Pro-European but anti-Euro

In 2013, the AfD mobilised voters with a Eurosceptic programme that sets it apart from the pro-European position of Germany’s centrist parties Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU)/ Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The thrust of the AfD’s European critique is directed at the fiscal and monetary regime of the European Union (EU) and the failures of the Maastricht Treaty in establishing the EMU. The AfD argues that the convergence criteria set out in the Maastricht Treaty are not adhered to: fiscal discipline has been watered down (notably by France and Germany in 2005); the ‘no bailout’ clause has been broken with the Fiscal Compact, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSM) and the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and that the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) bond-buying programme goes beyond its mandate. The Bank is financing government spending by lowering the costs of borrowing; it surrendered to political pressures and cannot be considered independent. According to the leader of the AfD, Bernd Lucke, uncontrolled inflation rather than price stability will be the likely consequence of the ECB’s loose monetary policy, while German savers and pensioners will be faced with stealthy dilution of their wealth through low interest rates (Lucke, 2013, 2014).

The AfD argues that the Euro has split Europe into donor and debtor countries. It has created social and political tensions within and among member states and threatens to become a major risk for peaceful European cooperation (Hau and Lucke, 2011). Despite imposing huge liabilities on citizens and leading to further concentration of power in European institutions, the treaty establishing ESM has been rushed through national parliaments without adequate checks and democratic consultation. The AfD thus calls for an end to the ‘Euromantic’ (Henkel, 2014) ideological experiment and suggests the orderly dissolution of the Eurozone in either national currencies or currency blocks and a return to ‘sound economic reasoning’, the ‘rule of law’, greater citizen participation and transparent democratic institutions (Lucke, 2013).

The AfD’s critique rests on ordoliberal economic doctrine, which is rooted in Germany’s catastrophic experiences during the first half of the 20th century and which underpinned its post-war ‘economic miracle’.¹ Ideologically ordoliberalism sits midway between Keynesian interventionism and neoliberalism (Bonefeld, 2012; Ptak, 2004). Since its inception, ordoliberals argued that the EMU lacks a political framework and that participating countries do not constitute an optimal currency area. Although predominantly academic, the debate also took place in the public forum of the influential national newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Already in 1992, Ohr and Schäfer suggested in an open letter signed by over 60 fellow academics that there was no compelling economic argument to impose a currency union on a politically and socially divided Europe. The authors argued that hastening a currency union would bring about economic tensions at huge political costs. Kösters et al. (1998) launched a similar appeal, which found support among 155 economists from Germany and Austria. The authors lamented that the EMU will deny struggling economies to use exchange rates for macro-economic adjustments and argued that policymakers will thus revert to political pressure on the central bank levering out the bank’s independence. The authors concluded that currency union should be postponed until the currency area meets basic convergence criteria.

The lack of democratic underpinnings for the EU and the EMU was a source of concern from when the Maastricht Treaty was first drafted. To delegate national competencies to the EU, ratification of the Treaty implied changes to German Basic Law, which were perceived by critics as disempowering German democratic institutions. The Treaty was challenged in the German Constitutional Court as early as 1992. A series of legal cases followed: in 1998 against the introduction of the Euro (see and Hankel et al., 2001; Schachtschneider, 1998), in 2005 against the Treaty of the European Constitution, in 2007 against the Lisbon Treaty, in 2010 against the Fiscal Compact and in 2012 against the continuation of bailout politics.

Most plaintiffs come from the same conservative liberal milieu and are members of a generation who helped to shape West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’. Among them are academics like Albrecht Schachtschneider, Joachim Starbatty, Wilhelm Hankel and Wilhelm Nölling, but also high-ranking members of the Christian Social Union (CSU) like Peter Gauweiler. Schachtschneider, an expert in public law, and Starbatty, a renowned economist, were co-founders of the Eurosceptic splinter party Bund freier Bürger (BfB) in 1992, which is the predecessor of the AfD (Häusler, 2014). Both support the AfD, for which Starbatty functions as a member of the scientific advisory board. Starbatty was also elected to the European Parliament in May 2014. He is currently chairing the influential liberal Aktionsgemeinschaft Soziale Marktwirtschaft. Despite this widespread concern about European integration in the 1990s, liberal parties with anti-European rhetoric found little support among German voters (Decker, 2000). The AfD is in many respects the continuation of these early challenges to the Maastricht Treaty. In the following sections, this article will explore why Euroscepticism has found greater support in Germany in recent years.

Lack of political choice

‘Alternative for Germany’ is a reference to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech about the importance of the ESM in stabilising the single currency in the Bundestag in September 2011. Merkel described the European debt crisis as a historic challenge for Europe and Germany. Peace and German prosperity are intrinsically linked with the advancement of the European idea. Germany therefore has no alternative but to support the Euro.

After centuries of wars, the European Union is the permanent driver for reconciliation and the guarantee for a peaceful Europe since the end of the Second World War. … History tells us that countries that share the same currency were never at war with each other. That is why the Euro is much more than just a currency. The Euro is a guarantee for the unity to Europe, or in other words, if the Euro fails, Europe fails. Because a democratic and free Europe is our homeland, the Euro cannot fail and will not fail. (Merkel, 2011)

Until German unification, the catastrophic experience of National Socialism was the pivotal historiographical point for Germany’s collective identity (Brunssen, 2005; Taberner and Finlay, 2002). West Germany’s denationalised post-war state identity was oriented towards its Western allies (Westbindung) and inextricably bound to the creation of a supranational European community that guaranteed peace and mutual cooperation rather than political isolation. Indeed, the historically driven dictum since the end of the War has always been to make Germany more European (Marcussen et al., 1999; Risse et al., 1999).

In the years from 2010 to 2013, there has been remarkable agreement in the Bundestag that it is Germany’s duty to underpin the Euro and to support struggling member states. The opposition did not question bailout policies but criticised the ruling coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP for delaying swift and effective action and for its lack of leadership (SPD, 2011). SPD leader, Sigmar Gabriel, called for the introduction of Eurobonds and for far-reaching European reforms to effectively tackle the instability of financial markets arising from the insolvency risk of individual states. The Green Party took a similar position (Bündnis 90 die Grünen, 2013). Differences between parties’ crisis resolutions were merely considerations of form and process. While the CDU/CSU and the FDP linked rescue packages with calls for austerity and increased budget discipline to drive down sovereign debt, the Social Democrats and the Green Party asked for growth-oriented spending policies and debt relief rather than all-out austerity. Only die Linke voted against bailouts because their top-down implementation lacked democratic legitimacy (Gysi, 2012).

There was (and is) equally broad agreement among centrist parties that currency union is marred by structural and institutional deficiencies and that there is an urgent need for reform. The persistent discourse, however, was ‘more Europe is the answer’ (Foreign Minister Gido Westerwelle, 2012a) and not ‘populist re-nationalisation’ (Westerwelle, 2012b). The current coalition government between SPD and CDU/CSU carries on in the same tradition. The coalition’s contract confirms Germany’s continued commitment to the single currency and states that progressing European integration is Germany’s greatest responsibility (Koalitionsvertrag zwischen CDU, CSU und SPD, 2013).

In short, there were and still are no political alternatives to the prevailing pro-European integration doctrine in the Bundestag. Moreover in the last three legislative periods, Germany was governed twice by ‘grand coalitions’ between CDU/CSU and SPD. Before and during the European debt crisis, the political programme of Germany’s main parties became increasingly indistinguishable and consensus politics left little room for real political choice and meaningful political opposition.

The AfD instrumentalised this perceived democratic deficit. In a vocal critique of the political establishment, leader of the party Bernd Lucke (2013) argued that the European debt crisis was ‘the hour for political opposition’, a moment for debate. He lamented that an effective opposition would have unravelled the ‘obvious mistakes’ of the German government and bemoans that there were only ‘yes-men’ in the Bundestag. For the leader of the AfD, the absence of political deliberation was a clear indication of the degeneration of German democracy (Lucke, 2013).

AfD MEP Hans Olaf Henkel (2012) went a step further in the ‘them and us’ debate and described the imposition of political correctness through the discrediting and defamation of alternative voices as a strategy of silencing. According to Henkel, critique of the Euro is taboo in German politics. Henkel referred to the case of Tilo Sarrazin. Sarrazin (2010), a member of the SPD, published a best-selling analysis describing the failures of migrant communities to integrate into German society as being due to biological and cultural determinism. The arguments put forward in the follow-up publication ‘Europe does not need the Euro’ (Sarrazin, 2012) overlap substantially with the AfD’s anti-Euro discourse. Sarrazin’s political positions were deemed to be irreconcilable with his post at the Bundesbank and he was subsequently suspended from public office. Henkel (2012), in a very strong condemnation, likened Sarrazin’s dismissal by the Merkel administration to political persecution and the Nazi book burnings in May 1933. Henkel concluded that German democracy is deprived of public debate and freedom of expression. He suggested that political class is without morals and shows little interest in the truth.

Germany’s National Socialist legacy created a political culture that stigmatised the radical right (Bornschier, 2012), which is always in danger of being associated with Hitler. This ‘historically contaminated environment’ (Decker, 2012) made it difficult for Eurosceptic ideas to gather electoral support. Konrad Adam (2012), deputy speaker of the AfD, laments that nowhere is it more difficult for conservatives than in Germany where, to silence political opponents, one only has to associate conservatives with the right and the right with Fascism.

German reunification in 1990 presented a major structural shift and fundamentally altered Germany’s internal and external constraints. Germany regained its full sovereignty and became the most powerful nation in the centre of Europe. Despite this, the political establishment and successive post-unification governments pressed on with European integration (Banchoff, 1999; Marcussen et al., 1999). Nevertheless, the events of 1989/1990 also led to a positive revaluation of the Federal Republic’s history since 1949 (Brunssen, 2005). European identity was a substitute for patriotism during the Bonner Republic (Wittinger, 2010) but 25 years after unification, the perception of ‘Germanness’ has regained a positive association. According to a representative survey of the Identity Foundation (2009) Germans are no longer frozen by historic guilt. Nearly three quarters of respondents thought that it is possible to be proud to be German. National identity normalised, Germans can have a sense of patriotism yet again. Demographic changes are also responsible for this shift in national self-perception. While current generations are no longer willing to carry the mantle of shame, the majority of those whose biographies were shaped by the experience of the Third Reich and post-war reconstruction withdraw increasingly from public life.

With its slogans ‘courage for the truth’ and ‘courage to stand up for Germany’ the AfD offers a communitarian or patriotic counterweight to a ‘corrupted’ and ‘dishonest’ professional politicians who remain caught in the country’s past. For Bernd Lucke (2013), the AfD epitomises civil society revolting against the ruling elites similar to the Vormärz. Vormärz, symbolising popular uprising and the struggle of progressive national-liberal forces to repel the conservatism following the Congress of Vienna, is an important moment in German history that ultimately led to the formation of the modern German nation. The AfD’s close association with the ‘disempowered people’ and its differentiation from the political elite is a common communication strategy of populist movements (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007). General dissatisfaction with the state of German democracy and a renewed sense of popular patriotism made the AfD the preferred ‘alternative’ of protest voters to voice dissent in recent elections.

The accidental empire

Ulrich Beck argued in 2013 that Germany created, unintentionally and without military master plan, an empire. This ‘accidental empire’ is based on one hand on hard economic facts: Germany is Europe’s strongest economy. On the other hand, Beck argues that political and economic divisions in Europe contributed to Germany’s dominance. The European debt crisis fundamentally altered the balance of power in Europe. Germany’s ascension is also due to other countries choosing to opt out from further integration. Britain’s not being a member of the single currency, the withdrawal of the British Conservatives from the centrist European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, and British Prime Minister Cameron not signing up to the fiscal compact, weakened the UK’s hand in Brussels (Teasdale, 2013). France, due to economic woes and dragging structural reform (OECD, 2013b) has become increasingly less competitive than Germany. Some observers suggested that this ‘new sick man of Europe’ (Elliott, 2013) should copy the Germany system (former German Chancellor Schröder, 2013). British withdrawal and French decline helped Germany to assume greater political power in Europe.

Reform of Germany’s welfare and pension system, export-oriented specialist manufacturing and vocational education contributed to the country’s resilience and competitiveness. German employees were forced to accept unprecedented declines in real net wages over several years (Brenke, 2009). Germany itself is a transfer union with the stronger industrial states subsidising weaker states, which is frequently a point of political contention. In addition, German unification came at immense costs. For the period from 1991 to 1999, net transfer payments from West to East Germany accumulated to 1.2 trillion German Marks, causing Germany’s debt to double in the same period (Görtemaker, 2009). Other observers put the costs of unification up to 2013 at two trillion Euros (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2014).

When contemplating the success of the German economic model, the AfD overemphasises internal choices, which are often discussed outside complex, interconnected global contexts that underpinned German economic growth. Many Germans believe that the country’s recent prowess is due to particularly German values – a savings culture, hard work, technological innovation and organisational efficiency. From a German perspective, the accidental empire has been built on Weberian asceticism. Economic prudence, sustainability and social responsibility are virtues of the AfD’s ideology, so Lucke says (2013). The AfD put forward a simplistic moral argument condemning the problems of the European south as self-inflicted – lack of discipline, low work ethic, corruption and a spending culture. Much of the AfD’s debate about a two-speed Europe is based on a crude distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ economic conduct. In the period from 2010 to 2013, this ‘them’ and ‘us’ discourse was fuelled by a widespread negative media campaign led by the tabloid Bild Zeitung. Greece was in the centre of a media storm that depicted the Greek economy as corrupt and Greeks as work-shy spenders, unwilling to pay taxes while receiving big handouts of social security payments. It appeared deeply unfair that Germans should pay for the homegrown structural problems of the Hellenic economy. ‘Why are we paying luxury pensions to Greek pensioners?’ asked Bild (2010).

When Greece opted for a popular referendum in 2011 on austerity measures, Bild countered: ‘We are liable for billions of Euros to rescue the bankrupt Greeks – and now they have a referendum on whether they actually want to save money? We now want a referendum also; no more billions for Greece, Greece get out of the Euro!’ (Bild, 2011b). The day the Bundestag decided on the second Greek rescue package, Bild ran the headline ‘More money for bankrupt Greece, Bild says No!’ (Bild, 2012a). At the same time, the use of metaphors and comparisons to frame the hegemonic German position in Europe in the 21st century as a continuation of German 20th-century expansionist politics – Merkel dressed in Nazi uniform (Bild, 2011a), the EU as Germany’s Fourth Reich (Daily Mail, 2011) – created a sense of isolation and fostered anti-European and ultimately inward-looking nationalistic feelings among some Germans.

Mudde (2013) has observed that political discourse underwent a ‘tabloidisation’ in the past decade, which generated favourable opportunity structures for (populist) political dissent. Media debates not only in the German tabloid press but also in national broadsheet papers about the relaxation of ECB monetary policy and German contributions to European sovereign bailouts contributed to the rise of the AfD. Exaggerated, distorted negative reporting and the general tabloidisation of EU politics in Germany between 2011 and 2013 created a moral panic through use of sensational headlines and overdramatic vocabulary. The concept of moral panic has been popular in criminology, the sociology of deviance and youth cultures (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009; Thompson, 1998). Moral panics tend to follow a sequence of stages involving different stakeholders with distinct roles, ranging from discovery by the mass media of a perceived threat, to the manning of ‘the moral barricades’ by right-thinking people and the pronunciation of diagnosis and solutions by ‘socially accredited experts’ (Cohen, 2002: 1). While the relationship between political actors, the media and their audiences is nuanced and multi-directional, the media primarily sell services and have financial responsibilities towards their shareholders. News value, either generated in-house or created through simplification and overstatement, is essential to the media business model. The media, thus, have an interest in the (continuous) creation of moral panics (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009).

At the height of the crisis in 2011 and 2012, the German press was saturated with scaremongering headlines such as ‘Inflation alarm – The Bundesbank is softening up the Euro – How quickly will our money be eaten away? Where is my money still safe? Experts warn of double digit inflation because of loose EZB monetary policy’ (Bild, 2012c). ‘Head of Deutsche Bank expects inflation in Europe – Is our money still worth something? Bundesbank argues that banknotes are only paper – Without inflation there is no exit from the crisis’ (Bild, 2012b). Money Focus painted an apocalyptic picture about an apparent attack on people’s wealth with cover pages such as ‘Inflation is coming’ (2011a) and ‘Inflation is here’ (2011b) and advised how to rescue value through the crisis by investing in gold as the last protection (2011c). The renowned Spiegel warned on its front cover: ‘Beware inflation, the sneaking expropriation of the Germans’ (Der Spiegel, 2012). In addition, the prestigious conservative paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wondered whether Draghi’s ‘money politics risks what we fear most: inflation’ (2012a).

The memory of interwar hyperinflation sits deep in the national psyche, not least because the economic volatility of the 1920s and 1930s is considered to be partly responsible for the rise of Fascism. Germans have experienced several currency changes in living memory: the Reichsmark, the East German Mark, the Deutsche Mark and finally the Euro. Currency changes are radical interruptions in people’s lives and always associated with a fear of wealth destruction. The desire for monetary stability is so entrenched in German expectations and habits that it has been termed ‘stability culture’ (Beyer et al., 2009). Bailouts and ECB monetary policies were portrayed by the media as external assaults on this stability culture and ultimately as a threat to national prosperity.

In the period from 2011 to 2013, a climate of existential fear existed throughout German society that had not been seen since the end of the Second World War. The AfD received widespread media attention. Its leading members are established public figures well-liked by the media (such as MEP Hans Olaf Henkel, former Head of the Federation of German Industry), publicists and publishers (such as Alexander Gauland and Konrad Adam). Bernd Lucke was also a welcome guest in numerous TV talk shows. It was therefore relatively easy for the AfD to reach a large audience and to drive public debate.

Party of professors (Professorenpartei)

The German government’s pro-bailout position also came under attack from financial experts and academics. In September 2011, the German chief economist Jürgen Stark left the ECB’s executive board in protest over the bank’s bond-buying programme. Stark had been seen to represent the hawkish German position on the ECB’s monetary board. German economists voiced their objections to Euro rescue politics in an open letter initiated by Hans Werner Sinn, president of the highly influential Institute for Economic Research that was signed by 172 fellow economists (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2012b). In 2013, Roland Vaubel – scientific advisor to the AfD and the Ministry of Finance – together with 136 academic supporters called the bond-buying programme economically wrong and amounting to the funding of sovereign states (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2013). At the same time, the international community and financial markets were awaiting a decision from the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe on whether German participation in bailout funds was contradicting Basic Law. The perceived imminent collapse of political and financial stability called for a strong response from the German government to safeguard national interests. The Merkel administration, however, appeared indecisive and slow to act. Trust in the government’s expertise and resoluteness to confront the crisis was fading among the German public. According to a representative study by Infratest Dimap for the ARD Morgen Magazin, 55 per cent of respondents had no faith in the Merkel administration in 2011 (Infratest Dimap, 2011).

The AfD filled this vacuum left by the perceived incompetence of the government and constructed a public image for itself as the party with economic expertise and scientific authority (Professorenpartei). ‘If Professor was a name, it would be the most common first name in the AfD’ said Hans Olaf Henkel during the second European election party conference in Berlin 2014. The macroeconomist Lucke described the crisis as his ‘home game’. Lack of know-how, according to Lucke, is the weak point of the established parties in the Bundestag (Lucke, 2013). The AfD has indeed a significant and far-reaching academic following. Seven among its 20 MEP candidates in the 2014 European election were members of the professoriate and a further five had a doctorate. Bernd Lucke’s Plenum of the Economists, initiated in 2010, called upon academics to take greater responsibility and actively participate in processes of social change:

We are united in the knowledge that the crisis of the last weeks was only able to come about because political decision makers ignored visible warning signs. We are united in the worry that politicians are driven by events and that they do not have sufficient time to evaluate the consequences of their actions and we are united in the self-criticism that economists did not make themselves heard in Germany in recent years. (Plenum der Ökonomen, 2010)

Nine of the 328 signatory economists were members of the scientific advisory committee at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (as of June 2014). Moreover, two – Roland Vaubel and Charles B Blankart – functioned as scientific advisors in the AfD. Thus, without having won a national election, AfD ideology was well represented in Germany’s corridors of power.

The academic authority of the AfD’s leadership made the party’s conservative national-liberal ideology a persuasive and credible option for voters from all socio-economic strata. Supporters come from the German middle (53 per cent) and upper class (26 per cent). Fifty-five per cent of AfD supporters have A-levels or a higher education degree, while 44 per cent have a net household income of 3000 Euros or more (Der Stern, 2014). Observations at party conferences in 2013 and 2014 confirmed this: attendees included judges, teachers, academics from all disciplines, army officers, policemen, pensioners, tax advisors, lawyers, journalists, publicists and entrepreneurs. Most show little confidence in established parties’ ability to solve the Euro crisis and have a pessimistic view about the future state of the economy. Stable currency, social security and immigration were the most important themes for AfD voters during the European Elections in 2014 (ARD Tagesschau, 25 May 2014).

The BfB failed as a national-conservative anti-Euro party in the late 1990s precisely because of the overrepresentation of academics and the lack of charismatic politicians among its ranks (Decker, 2000). However, the complex constellation of the Great Recession and the European debt crisis, the media-hyped moral panic, disagreements among sets of experts and lack of trust in the German government created a sense of vulnerability and ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1990) among the German public. This climate paved the way for the arrival of the ‘national-liberal economic-expert-politician’. Or, as one party conference attendee in 2014 in Aschaffenburg convincingly put it, ‘if no-one else will understand what is going on only these experts will’.

‘Soft’ Eurosceptic or radical right

Euroscepticism is a multi-faceted phenomena (Leconte, 2010). Boomgaarden et al. (2011) identified five dimensions explaining Eurosceptic voting: limited trust in the efficacy of European institutions and poor evaluations of the EU’s democratic performance, negative assessment of the EU’s utility, limited affection for the EU, opposition to further integration and lack of a European identity. According to Van Spanje and De Vreese (2011), negative evaluation of the EU’s democratic institutions is one of the most important predictors of Eurosceptic voting and it is also one of the main motivators for AfD support. In particular, the democratic deficit associated with European integration has fuelled German Euroscepticism since the 1990s. Support for European integration is also driven by rational choice and the question of what an individual or a nation can gain through membership (Hix, 2007). For a considerable section of German society the positive aspects of EU membership disappeared with mounting pressure to bail out struggling member states. Current ECB monetary policy is perceived as an external threat to German prosperity and stability culture.

The AfD’s (2014) official programme does not table a ‘principled objection’ to European integration. Presently, the AfD supports the idea of the EU and particularly the single market, but it rejects its current institutional arrangement and has doubts about the viability of the single currency. Using Taggart and Szczerbiak’s (2002) classification, the AfD is a ‘soft’ Eurosceptic party. Following Kopecky and Mudde’s (2002) categorisation, the AfD can best be described as ‘Eurosceptics’ rather than ‘Eurorejects’. Reflective of its position on European issues, the AfD joined the soft Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament in 2014 to which the British Conservative Party also belongs. There are indeed considerable similarities between the AfD’s liberal wing and the Tories. The Conservatives’ European reform programme (Cameron, 2013) had a significant influence on German Eurosceptics and the liberal hyperglobalism of the Conservative Party (Baker et al., 2002) is close to the agenda of the AfD’s ordoliberal leadership (interview with Bernd Lucke, Manager Magazin, 2014).

The AfD started off as a single-issue Eurosceptic movement. Its critique of the single currency was based on ordoliberal economic doctrine and was predominantly technical and process oriented. A broad academic and conservative liberal audience in Germany supports this position. The political consequence of the ordoliberal argument put forward by the AfD implies a return to national or regional currencies. Breaking up the single currency is also the aim of the radical right. The AfD is in danger of being undermined by the far right as happened with the BfB in the 1990s. Whilst some leading members in the AfD carefully safeguard the party’s public image as ‘non-ideological conservative liberal’ (like Lucke and Henkel), others comfortably embrace the agenda of the right fringe (like Gauland, Adam and Petry). In particular, grassroots supporters are drawn towards the agenda of European populist radical right parties (PRRPs). Mudde (2007, 2013) defines PRRPs as sharing a core ideology that includes the combination of nativism, affinity to authoritarianism and populism. The conflict between liberal and radical right camps came more and more to light after the general elections. Already in 2013, members of the AfD made contact with like-minded activists from Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the AfD’s youth wing ‘Junge Alternative’ organised a panel discussion with the United Kingdom Independence Party’s (UKIP’s) Nigel Farage in early 2014. There have also been allegations about close ties between AfD members and the German neo-Fascist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). Since 2013, liberal voices in the AfD have become more and more sidelined while the right has been able to consolidate its power base.

The schism between liberals and radical right populist voices came to light during the European campaign party conference in Erfurt in January 2014, when the majority of grassroots delegates questioned economic liberalism. Attendees rejected the establishment of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the USA, and a large minority of delegates voted for the introduction of a minimum wage in Germany. A German contribution to a European defence force was turned down, as was the deployment of German forces in international conflict zones. Controversially the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula was considered within the remits of international law and popular self-determination. Aspects of social-cultural liberalism were equally vetoed in favour of value conservatism: Turkey’s EU membership was opposed on the basis of ethno-cultural differences; gender mainstreaming policies were rejected and the heterosexual nuclear family became the cornerstone of the AfD’s social politics. The AfD’s 2014 European election programme has little grounding in the geopolitical realities of German interests and the socio-cultural diversity of late modern German society. In some respects it is a template for international isolation and protectionism.

During the local election campaigns in 2014 in the Eastern German states of Brandenburg, Thuringia and particularly Saxony, the AfD’s electoral offerings included broader communitarian, nativist themes, reminiscent of xenophobic PRRP ideology. AfD Saxony drew on popular fears about uncontrolled migration, European ‘welfare tourism’, bogus and criminal asylum seekers and trans-border crime, dual citizenship and demanded public referenda to decide on the building of mosques and minarets. Perhaps most indicative of the AfD’s increasing right turn is its positive evaluation of the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West movement (PEGIDA). PEGIDA is a radical right xenophobic social movement that gathered popular support, particularly in the East German city of Dresden in late 2014 and early 2015. Like the AfD, PEGIDA has an anti-elitist and anti-political establishment discourse but it also addresses popular anxieties like the loss of German identity (Überfremdung) and calls for restrictive migration policies. Most importantly, PEGIDA argues that it is defending European Judeo-Christian values against the increasing influence of Islam on the continent. While German mainstream parties were quick to condemn PEGIDA as a xenophobic and an Islamophobic movement, the AfD’s position is more favourable. Party deputy Alexander Gauland described PEGIDA as a natural ally of the AfD and deputy party leader Frauke Petry invited PEGIDA into Saxony’s Parliament in Dresden in January 2015 for discussions about cooperation. There can be little doubt that in the German party system the AfD is right of centre, with an increasing tendency to move away from its conservative ordoliberal roots to become a xenophobic PRRP.

Concluding remarks

This article set out to explain the sudden surge in German Euroscepticism. It argued that Euroscepticism in Germany has to be understood within the context of wider cultural shifts, a lack of political choice and the tabloidisation of the debate about the Euro. Euroscepticism was manifest among Germany’s conservative elites well before the European sovereign debt crisis, but it remained marginal because of the country’s Europeanised state identity following the experience of National Socialism and World War Two. Changes in European geopolitics and German reunification helped to revalorise the Federal Republic and altered German collective identity. Cultural changes have also been triggered by the withdrawal of the war and post-war generation from public life in recent years. The media-fed moral panic following European bailout politics helped to ignite dormant popular German Euroscepticism. In the absence of a meaningful opposition in the Bundestag, the AfD, with its ‘compelling academic authority’, was able to establish itself as an alternative to centrist consensus politics and bring together protest voters who had lost trust in the European project and the German government.

Currently, the AfD is still best described as a ‘soft’ Eurosceptic rather than a ‘hard’ Euroreject party. Since the general elections in 2013, the AfD has been able to consolidate its position within the German party system. Not only can it boast seven MEPs but it has also gained a sizable presence in local parliaments in eastern Germany. Ultimately this leads to the question of whether the AfD will retire to the political backstage once the Euro bailout hysteria has died down or, alternatively, whether it can become a permanent player in German politics. The AfD’s ability to become a lasting force depends on its ability to convince voters that it is not a single-issue party. So far, the critique of the single currency has been its unique selling point but the Euro crisis, while not solved, lost much of its urgency in 2014. However, the ECB’s decision to start a bond-buying programme and the victory of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) in the general election in Greece in January 2015 may start a new chapter in the Euro debate in Germany. Moreover, to continue to appeal to a broad electorate, the AfD needs to overcome infighting between ordoliberal supporters on one hand and the ever louder voices of the radical right faction on the other hand. Recent local election manifestos and the approval of the xenophobic PEGIDA movement by some party leaders suggest that the AfD is steering towards becoming a party of the populist radical right.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for assistance from two anonymous reviewers. I am also thankful for the patience and support from Nathalie Brack, Marian Sawer, Nick Startin and Merrindahl Andrew.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Robert Grimm is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. His current research interests include European radical right movements and the political participation of young people.

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