Comparatively Rich and Reactionary: Germany between “Welcome Culture” and Re-established Racism

Germany’s Right Wing becomes Socially Acceptable

After overthrowing their former founders, the Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) yielded assent from voters in the latest regional elections in March 2016. In Saxony-Anhalt, which has a population of 1.9 million, the AfD received 24.2% of the votes; they also received 15.1% in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 12.6% in Rhineland-Palatinate. In contrast to prior elections, the turnout was not low, which allowed right-wing parties to enter local parliament. Voter participation rose to higher levels than in previous elections; it increased by approximately 10% (267,000) in Saxony-Anhalt, 9% (319,000) in Rhineland-Palatinate, and 4% (701,000) in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Together, these three federal states account for 390,000 (30%) of former non-voters who cast their votes for the AfD. This shift in votes was most prominent in the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU); 278,000 former CDU-votes were cast for the AfD, with half of this figure being gained from former social democratic votes (147,000). Seventy-eight thousand supporters of the Greens switched to the AfD and 62,000 former voters for the Left Party joined the political right. ¹

The initial interpretations of the AfD’s success, besides the refugee situation in Germany in 2015, focused on the theory of “protest voters” who do not feel understood by the traditional parties. The notion of “protest vote” leaves a door open for both sides, or at least that is what most politicians are hoping for: we noticed your protest, now you can go back to normal. Members of the established parties can barely manage to discuss alternative reasons for the success of the AfD without bashing potential future voters or admitting that a reactionary portion of the German population has found a new political home. Nevertheless, harsh criticism has slipped out occasionally, and right-wing activists have happily taken advantage of the denunciation to present it as quod erat demonstrandum.

A closer examination of voters’ motivations and the answers provided by the radical right reveals that the refugee situation, combined with the lingering economic crisis embedded in ongoing neo-liberal policies and the abasement of welfare, has catalysed and exposed a growing acceptance for antihuman attitudes that are not new to Germans after the Second World War. Standing up for one’s racist attitudes was not socially acceptable and was therefore not rewarded in previous decades. Individuals who embraced reactionary explanations to societal problems kept their grudges private, for the most part, and found their political homes throughout the entire spectrum of political parties. This political “containment” is now broken – “I am not a racist, but it should be possible to say …” is a typical feature of this new self-confidence among the reactionary segment of German citizens.

Surveys of AfD voters show that this party is perceived as standing up against the immigration of refugees, which is no surprise. Nevertheless, this position has always been the trademark of the National Democratic Party (NPD), a band of neo-Nazis with affiliations to militant structures as well as to the German intelligence service. Their failure rate at the polls tells us that their way of presenting racist worldviews is still socially unacceptable on a cultural level. What is striking about the success of the AfD is that they are also perceived as advocates for social justice. Certainly, this is not something that could be derived from their election manifesto, which is a naïve repetition of neo-liberal ideology combined with anti-Islamism and neo-conservative dogma. In this regard, this type of right-wing “populism” ² is not equal to the strategy of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, for example. The AfD attempts to gain credibility within the wealthy camp. Consequently, after its regional success, the AfD seems to be going through a process of identifying what it needs to represent to maintain voters’ approval. It is unclear whether the party will adopt the successful model of the National Front in France or stick to their neo-liberal, neo-conservative undertones. Currently, they are not united on the issues of leaving the Eurozone and returning to the Deutschmark, which is an unpopular topic in Germany. It is likely that they will become stuck in an internal storming-and-norming phase, which is a common phenomenon in every young party. However, their public display of incompetence does not seem to be harming their image among their voters.

Impact on the Political Establishment

Two major consequences for the parliamentary representation of the conservatives (CDU/CSU), social democrats (SPD), Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), and socialists (Die Linke) are foreseeable or already in motion:

All the major political parties in Germany have unique, market-friendly factions that contrast with labour-friendly minorities. This even applies to the socialist party, where the unionist faction is corporatist and bound to “Sozialpartnerschaft”, the institutionalised partnership between labour and capital. Each party’s market-friendly faction is generally attributed to “realism” and “competence”, although the estimate of the economic performance of the ruling party or coalition may differ depending on the voter’s party preference. Nevertheless, the common belief that a thriving economy will result in individual economic wellbeing is still relevant, especially when the issue of economy is salient (Singer, 2011). ³

If, on the other hand, a raw critique (aside from wealth chauvinism translated into xenophobia of all kinds) of unjust wealth distribution motivates former voters for the social democrats and the socialists to vote for the AfD, the experience of the growing gap between the rich and poor is not interpreted as a flaw (or even the rationale) of capitalism. Since the profound changes in social policy (Agenda 2010) under the coalition of social democrats and Greens (1998–2005), the (in)famous “Third Way” politics, that are a parallel to Blair’s New Labour in the UK, have created a layer of working poor and an overall precarity in one of the richest European economies. The (monetary) middle classes have lost 8% of their income per household over the last 20 years. Roughly 35% of households are poor (< 60% of the median income), and poor and middle class households depend on social security systems in addition to the income that workers in the lower to middle classes generate, at wage levels between €7.55 and €15.29 per hour (Bosch and Kalina, 2016). The low-wage labour market constitutes approximately 25% of all employment relationships (Bischoff and Müller, 2016).

Most voters, not only voters who avow themselves to the AfD, agree with the notion that Germany has too many bureaucratic hurdles strangling market activities, supports too many “welfare scroungers”, and acts as Europe’s purser. It is not too surprising and psychologically comprehensible that this critique is aimed at the “others”, not oneself. The fact that Germany’s export-oriented economy functions within a scheme of begging-thy-neighbour policies is unfamiliar to the public, whose economic understanding is framed by the narrow worldview of neo-classical key elements. The expected demise of neo-liberalism is more a form of proto-fascist rebirth.

How the Political Establishment Reacts to the Love to Hate

This explosive mixture of liberal market ethos and group-focused enmity raises the question of how the market-friendly wings, especially within the social democrats and the socialists, intend to deal with the growing pressure from the right. While losing voters’ appreciation, the social democrats find themselves unable to disrupt the legacy of the Agenda 2010 policy, as their leading personnel defend it as their part of the success of the last two terms of the grand coalition under Merkel. An overthrow from the left within the social democrats will not occur in the foreseeable future; and a prominent social democrat as an object of such a projection is not probable (Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, who is now stepping forward, isn’t even well-known among Germans). The last candidate who attempted such an endeavour, Oskar Lafontaine, left the social democrats a long time ago and helped to build the socialist party, Die Linke.

Within the camp of the German conservatives, social democratisation – claiming an agenda that traditionally would have been that of the social democrats – has been quite successful under Merkel, whose critics within the party had a tough time with their urge to preserve the conservative brand of the party. This situation changed with Merkel’s attitude to the refugee crisis, which altered her reputation worldwide, but caused dissent among voters and the party. The Bavarian conservatives (CSU), who traditionally add a reactionary sauce to the conservative dish, directed threats and accusations towards their sister party (CDU) as they were anxious about Merkel unwillingly strengthening the AfD in the next federal elections. Consent for Merkel and her policy among conservative voters has reached new lows, but her power politics left no successor who could supersede her and change the course towards right-wing positions to harness the new popularity of right-wing attitudes.

So far, the socialists of Die Linke, who were formally the largest portion of the opposition besides the Greens in the Bundestag (lower house of parliament), have not profited from the current instabilities of the grand coalition of conservatives and social democrats. Surveys project the AfD would be the largest opposition party if the elections were held at present. The socialist party does not profit from the non-parliamentary left, apart from being connected to a wide spectrum of discourse that often results in unproductive disputes and intense navel-gazing.

The fight between left “fundamentalists” and liberal “realists” within the Green party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) is almost over. The Greens are no longer the natural partner for coalitions with the social democrats, a model that lasted for some time, both on the regional and the federal stage. In Baden-Wuerttemberg, one of the most conservative and richest federal states in Germany and the home of a luxury-car industry and booming mid-tier, since the Greens have dethroned the conservative party and made them their junior partner in a coalition, a triple coalition between social democrats, socialists, and Greens has become increasingly unlikely. A form of negative-dialectic market-friendliness with a green tinge and an urban attitude sparked the success of the Greens, leaving behind their anti-capitalist critique. Currently, there is not a single left-wing regional association that is part of the eight state government coalitions between the Greens and other parties. The probable connection of the minority left wing and the socialist party is thwarted by the concurrence-driven unionist clientelism. Progressiveness regarding ecological issues is not a strength of the revisionist wing of the socialists; it is unlikely that they will catch up on the ecological question any time soon, apart from the usual superficial statements seen in every party’s manifesto (Strauß, 2015). The socialist party lacks the ability to communicate their positions in a manner that is convincing to progressive-minded people. Addressing the reactionary-minded as “protest voters” does not work either, as those who are thus addressed perceive it as an attempt to win their vote, and overall it simply nourishes the popular notion that equates socialists with fascists. Furthermore, the socialist party lacks the ability to profoundly combine social and ecological issues, leaving it to the interpretative sovereignty of the green side of neo-liberalism, and the conservatives who have already adopted the usual “sustainababble” that hurts no one.

More of the Same: Strengthening Politics that Have Already Weakened Societal Progress

In relevant studies (Greiffenhagen, 1981; Heitmeyer, 2002–2011; Decker et al., 2016) on right-wing attitudes, wealth chauvinism is identified as a key aspect of the right-wing’s worldview. Market-friendly factions in all parties have already signalled their appeal to the wealth chauvinism of their lost voter groups. There is not one federal state government run by coalitions with a mix of green or red in it that would deviate from the austerity policy. Job cuts and extra workload in public services have become routine, zero-deficit spending is the new religion, and the Minister of Finance, Schäuble (CDU), is the priest – a man with a plan for Europe, as Yanis Varoufakis once put it. If there is any theory behind the adherence to market-friendliness, it will constitute the simplistic idea that working in favour of the rich will result in overall societal enhancement. Thus, a new gospel of the old trickle-down economics in all its varieties is to be expected. Since the world economy will remain in the doldrums, the absolute mode of skimming off surplus value will be the overall preferred method of exploitation, aside from the one-off benefits of worldwide expropriation (the politics of grabbing), until further large-scale catastrophic events occur.

There was a short period of time to regard the phenomenon of a “welcome culture” in Germany as an opportunity for the left wings of the social democrats, the Greens, and the socialists to discard their tribal rivalries and address willing people who do not buy into the agenda of the right-wing block. Practical work combined with the knowledge of political structures would have been required in order to empower the volunteers and possibly the refugees. If one asked who was (and still is) actually doing this, the answer would be: the churches with their caritative infrastructure, and progressive non-governmental organisations, as well as a few small leftist groups.

Progressive Forces Without a Clue?

Is it simply that the progressive circles, from the Greens to the socialists, are omitting to make way for a change of the neo-liberal agenda in a comparatively rich society that, unlike South and East European societies, has wealth to redirect? In terms of the narrative of post-democracy (Crouch, 2004) – which invokes the idea of reducing the influence of elites such as experts and policy professionals who depleted democracy to a mere institutional shell, while the large-scale decisions were made elsewhere – the omission-argument seems to fit. This argument would shift the focus to the failures of the old political parties mimicking the organisational patterns of corporations. The wrath against the political establishment seems to be rooted in this development. The sacrifices of the working class in the wider economic framework have not been rewarded; even their traditional political representatives have left them behind. However, this does not fully address the fact that non-parliamentary political activism, especially in the younger generation, is not connected with a steady affiliation to a party or a trade union that once made these organisations powerful. An interesting exception, which must still pass the test of continuity, is the Podemos movement in economically weak Spain. The attempt of the outer parliamentarian left in Germany to transform a fragment into a “mosaic left” looks somewhat pale, and is rooted in academia rather than “on Main Street”.

Another argument against the notion of a post-democratic crisis has been presented by Blühdorn (2013). The commercialisation of politics by professional campaigners, following opinion surveys (one of Merkel’s preferred governmental techniques and possibly one of the reasons why she changed to the side of the “welcomers”) rather than political principles, gave political parties the appearance of “policy providers” (Blühdorn, 2013). Politics became, in the eyes of the public under constant neo-liberal propaganda, similar to products on a policy market. From this perspective, the shallow character of the political establishment seems to fit the concept of political opportunism, which puts individual interest before common good. Blühdorn (2013) strongly emphasises a change of subjectivity that is characterised by a (non-sustainable) consumerist attitude and the will to reduce, not to say: to avoid complexity in individual decision making. In his view, the return of political partisanship based on strong normative values is impossible since the subjective preconditions do not exist anymore: the psychological structure required for a renaissance of normative politics is lacking. The Marcusian inspiration here is apparent, however: Blühdorn uses a quasi-psychological explanation with his image of “fluid subjectivity” – but as a follower of Luhmann’s systems theory approach, he cannot but avoid the Freudian background, and Marcuse’s Marxism all the more so. Nassehi, one of Germany’s most renowned sociologists and bound to Luhmann’s systems theory, forcefully pleas for a laying aside of the differentiation between left and right, which presents the old mainstream agenda in new clothes. Nassehi (2015) argues both leftist and rightist interpretations of society should be regarded as too one-dimensional to provide answers for the societal complexities; it being merely a problem of false perceptions and not objective social conditions that put real pressure on real people. In a strange way, the political left–right scheme is thus transformed into a scheme in which the main differentiation is made between analogue daily thinking and the higher art of considering digitised reality. The bottom line: what is countable, counts, and again sociological systems theory serves as an advocate of raw economism. On top of this, the more intellectual ideologists of the European right-wing movements herald similar tunes concerning the end of left–right differences in favour of the blossoming identities of peoples. Do contemporary systems theoreticians and their political interpreters know their strange bedfellows?

While Nassehi’s approach practically aligns with contemporary political piecemeal engineering, Blühdorn’s theoretical description would make the European right-wing movement appear to be disappointed and wrathful customers who are unhappy with what they have been served. In the case of Brexit, the opposite is true – most of the Brexiteers do not have upper-class consumerist troubles and fears of maintaining (more or less) luxurious lifestyles. The same goes for a great deal of Trump voters. Their wrath is not that of a “fluid subjectivity”; it is more like a 19th century state of mind, with its notion of making the nation “great again”. Regarding the increasingly violent characters of the right-wing movements in Germany and elsewhere, this type of explanation appears to be too soft, as it generalises problems of a societal minority of lifestyle-trendsetters. Moreover, the fact that the rightists are acting highly irrationally – and, as members of the working class, against their own interest – contradicts the idea of fluid characters with changing identities who are solely acting egotistically, like a consumer of politics who wants to get the most out of it. The reactionary portion of the public and the majoritarian overlapping positions of the market religion reflect the mindset of what Marcuse once repeatedly analysed as the withering aptitude for critical thinking over the course of repressive desublimation (Marcuse, 1964, 1965). Telling the story from a Marcusian perspective, socialisation in a consumerist structure has created a psychologically weakened subjectivity that is used to living at the cost of the rest of the world and shows its lingering fascist character in times of crisis. Now, of all times, forgetting about terms like class, creation of value and its appropriation by a minority, is a way to sleepwalk into disaster.

At this point, the capitalist class has no use for the right-wing movement; business under the given circumstances is (in the short-sighted view) “ideal”, with the central banks promising to assist to support the usual path of economic growth (shallow), and to continue the tale of trickle-down economics (even shallower – the “protest voters” left the church before the sermon started). This raises the question of what forms the proto-fascist movements all over Europe will take, and what the political left provides for an answer. How shall they deal with the new urge for homogeneity, this time within a culturalist framework, the (chauvinist) politicisation of terrain and the re-sacralisation of social functions, such as leadership (Brumlik, 2016)? Within the wake of the Podemos movement, a new approach embracing the concept of populism is part of the contemporary leftist discourse in Germany, with high hopes of turning the tide (without the slightest trace of a comparable movement in Germany). The emphasis of this approach to dealing with the potential “protest voter” lies on anti-establishment wrath as a justified emotional way to express anti-capitalist attitudes. Unfortunately, there is no well-developed concept regarding the question of how to transform the irrational projections that come with the wrath into reasonable class politics – a lingering issue that has been blocked out so far. The possible course of events is not exactly rocket science: so long as certain charismatic leaders, wherever they may appear, embrace their role, things could go in fruitful directions, providing one does not dare to combine this with core leftist positions such as gender equality, anti-racism, internationalism, etc. Strange enough: while some leftist thinkers, especially in the (not-too-cosy) ivory tower of academia, seem to have forgotten about their duty to break down their expertise for common understanding, others are performing a hat trick of re-interpretation of the goings-on behind the protest voters’ foreheads. They probably have not yet discovered that “protest” may be the last fig leaf to hide the bitter truth that lies beyond what is socially acceptable currently.