Berlin The latest AfD poll has caused turmoil among economists and business circles. “A turn to the right is also economically damaging and at the expense of prosperity,” said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). “The further growth of right-wing extremism” means Germany Attractiveness for immigrants will be further reduced.
Innovation also requires diversity and an appreciation for diversity. “If this loss of openness and tolerance continues, German companies will increasingly be unable to keep pace with global competition,” the DIW boss warned.
Oliver Holtmoller, deputy director of the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), said: “If more people support claims against an open society, then it is also questionable from an economic point of view.” Security and social cohesion will obviously be overlooked. In order to address the major current issues of demography, decarbonization and digitization, it is important to truly bring all segments of the population with them. “There appears to be a deficit here at the moment.”
Over the weekend, Christian Kuhlmann, chief executive of Essen-based chemical group Evonik, spoke of “a very specific threat to our free, tolerant democracy”. Ludwig Veltmann, managing director of Mittelstandsverbund ZGV, called the development “very worrying”. “Of course, discontent with the federal government is also running rampant among small and medium-sized companies — but that should never induce us to join forces with the populists who live off that discontent,” Weltman said.
The latest polls are worrying. According to Infratest Dimap, the right-wing party has 18% support and will therefore receive as many votes as the Social Democrats.
Each side accuses the other of doing too little to counter the rise of right-wing parties. CDU leader Friedrich Merz accused the Greens of using a “crowbar” to push climate policy. In addition, gender and “identity ideology” can also spark protests. SPD politicians such as parliamentary group leader Dirk Weiss also cited the heating law debate, while the Green Party’s Irene Mihalic demanded that the coalition be united again and FDP general secretary Bijan Gil-Salay urged all parties Self-disciplined – critical.
everything should stay as it is
Will the parties be able to “halve” the AfD as promised by CDU chairman Merz in 2021? Ratification of the AfD has not been interrupted, despite the fact that the party has been labeled a suspected right-wing extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution for years. Is this the beginning of an era of marginalized Democrats? In order to find the answer to the question, it is helpful to see who actually voted for the AfD. The Sinus Institute in Mannheim is one of the state’s leading environmental research institutes.
Robust, flexible, pragmatic and in the middle: this is how AfD voters see themselves. “The typical AfD voter’s value paradigm is characterized by loss of trust, uncertainty, overwhelm, frustration and pessimism about the future, and instead craves support and anchoring and yearns for simple answers,” says Norbert Schäuble , a shareholder of the Sinus Institute. The past is beautified with nostalgia.
Schaeuble and his research team thus placed a quarter of AfD voters in a nostalgic bourgeois environment and 17 percent in an unstable environment. As such, it affects the CDU and the SPD equally.
But environmental researcher Schaeuble has discovered a new social development: The “Adaptive Pragmatist Intermediate” is also open to the AfD with 19 percent. People there who want to work but also want to have fun, want to be anchored and belong, and are disaffected and insecure. “This environment shapes the modern mainstream and is therefore crucial for social cohesion and the success of social transformation,” explains Schäuble. In Austria, this environment has long been chosen by the right-wing conservative FPÖ.
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Like political scientist Kai Alzheimer, a professor at the University of Mainz, Schaeuble said that most AfD voters had a lower-middle education, rather than higher education. They are critical of immigration, dissatisfied with German democracy and feel unable to express themselves freely. Approval rates are higher in the east, largely because of attitudes toward immigration, where there is a “north-south divide and possibly a rural-urban divide,” Arzheimer said.
As the analysis of the 2021 federal election shows, AfD voters are mostly male (61%) and aged 45 or over (two-thirds). They are disappointed with other parties (67%). According to the ARD’s latest “Deutschlandtrend”, only a third said they voted for the AfD out of conviction.
That’s why Arzheimer doesn’t want to talk about the AfD’s aloofness. The party is currently benefiting from a “very favorable environment”. These include “Ukraine, inflation, permanent government crisis”. It helps the party. “I’m just cautioning against counting changes outside of sampling error as big increases.”
In 2024, all parties will face the litmus test
The Mainz party researcher is not convinced that other parties can fully win back AfD voters. The AfD can count on an “ideologically solid electorate base” that will not be intimidated by radicalization and will be difficult to win back, at least in the short and medium term. “Since about 2017, the party has only had 10 to 14 percent support nationally,” Arzheimer said. A third or more would not have voted at all beforehand.
Environmental researcher Schaeuble supports this view. The number of citizens who voted for AfD protests varies with social development. But if problems mount, as Evonik boss Kuhlmann fears, approvals could increase given the economic transition. This is why both Schaeuble and Alzheimer advised other parties not to adopt the AfD position and tighten immigration laws, among other things.
“In modern society, you can gain a lot from the right, but you lose many times over,” Schaeuble analyzed. “What really helps is solution-oriented, pragmatic politics that avoids uncertainty and Fear of the future.” With this and “proper communication, a significant portion of the protest’s potential can be regained.”
Despite the social unrest, the traffic light coalition, the coalition and the left in the opposition have not had much time to organize themselves and convey a sense of security. The focus is on the east: In 2024, new state parliaments will be elected in the states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia.
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Extrapolating from national opinion polls, “the AfD will get 25 percent of the vote in eastern Germany,” said Mathias Moehl, head of the statistics and forecasting platform election.de. He doesn’t think 30% is impossible, which could make the AfD the strongest power in Saxony, for example.
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