Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

In an atmosphere of crisis such as the one we’re currently enduring, there’s no easier way to dismiss your political opponents—especially if you’re in a rush and you need to find the killer stroke in an internet-based brawl—than to call them a “populist.”

It makes things so easy because everyone knows what the word implies, if not what it actually means. It suggests a sort of childish disposition: a populist insists on their moral rightness, they’re not able to have a rational argument, they have no patience for liberal compromise, and—here’s the main thing—they are easily seduced by an “elites” versus “people” view of the world.

That last point is the key element of what has become the textbook definition of the term “populism,” developed by Dutch academic Cas Mudde. In his 2004 paper, the “Populist Zeitgeist,” he defined populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This sharpened the focus of the academic understanding of populism, and though it was apparently little read on publication, it hit its moment emphatically a few years ago.

Mudde’s description of populism chimed particularly well with the global political upheaval that began circa 2014: new parties were suddenly undermining institutions that held the world together, winning elections by exploiting a lack of trust in the mainstream. These insurgents broke the grip of old parties, and they did it by pitting an indivisible “will of the people” against a rich urban elite.

Mudde’s definition proved even more useful because it talked about populism as something more than a strategy but less than a proper ideology. He explained that populism isn’t just rabble-rousing demagoguery—it is a kind of parasite, a simple set of ideas that can feed off either left or right-wing politics. This incidentally turned out to a good explanation for why the term has proved so difficult to define: populism is a boneless, shape-shifting creature, clinging onto other ideologies.

The theory proved a handy intellectual way of explaining the old “horseshoe” cliché about how left and right-wing extremists end up resembling each other. As a result, the doors were opened to countless alarming parallels with the rise of fascism and communism in the early 20th century, which brought with them the sense that a century-long cycle had come round again, and the would-be dictators were on the rise.

Creeping In From the Edges

To bring the point home, Mudde’s definition was adopted by The Guardian in its “new populism” section, which has been tracking the growing success of populist politics all over the world. In the past few months, the United Kingdom’s leading liberal newspaper published two major studies it had commissioned from a team of political scientists across dozens of countries, which came to two conclusions: firstly, that populist parties had tripled their support in Europe in the last twenty years, and secondly, that in the same period there had been a corresponding surge in populist rhetoric from political leaders.

This second survey showed “empirically,” Mudde wrote in the same newspaper in March, “what many have asserted and felt”: that populism was creeping from the edges into the middle. Political leaders from nominally centrist old parties were getting spooked by populist successes, and so “more and more mainstream politicians are using ‘pro-people’ and/or ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric to win voters—in part to fight off electoral challenges from true populist actors.”

The consequence is that populism appears to be a threat to democracy itself: the people’s gateway opiate to full-blown authoritarianism. That is a story told by many new popular politics books, such as How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

It’s hard to argue against this reading, given the developments of the last few years across Europe. That populism is a direct threat to the democratic order of the European Union was shown by the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016, when the Leave campaign shamelessly employed anti-elite rhetoric to make its case.

And for evidence that populists attack democratic institutions as soon as they gain power, one need only look as far as Poland, where the European Court of Justice has had to intervene to stop the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) loading the supreme court with friendly judges. Or one could point at Hungary, whose right-wing Fidesz-led government has been sanctioned by the EU for undermining media plurality and suppressing civil society.

Populism Is Just Politics

But there’s a danger that this narrative widens the definition of populism so far it becomes meaningless: simply conflating populism with the ideologies it might enable doesn’t really help us to understand much. It certainly doesn’t help understand the more profound reasons why our democracy is under threat.

As political scientist Jason Frank of Cornell University wrote in the Boston Review last year, crying populist only perpetuates confusion over the nature of new movements. “Authoritarian attempts to centralize and expand the state’s executive power and wield it against ‘enemies of the people’—however defined by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, and others—should never be equated with the radically democratic institutional experimentalism of Podemos (in Spain) or the Farmers’ Alliance (in 1880s USA),” Frank argued.

Not only that, making populism the preserve of the radicals obscures the fact that apparently rational centrist politicians are just as capable of making blatantly populist moves—like Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) regularly announcing tax cuts just before elections.

The Mudde definition of populism has been questioned by other academics too. Chantal Mouffe of the University of Westminster in London is among those to argue that what gets dismissed as populism is actually just a necessary correction to a system that has seized up. As center-right and center-left government parties fused into a kind of management board whose main job is to oversee a neoliberal debt-based economy, Mouffe argued in The Guardian, something had to give when evidence mounted that that system was failing. No status quo lasts forever.

For Mouffe and others, the rise of populism is actually the sight of politics being reacquainted with its life-blood: a basic conflict about how society should be organized. In fact, one could conclude that the sooner the old centrist politicians start joining that debate, rather than desperately painting the new parties on the right and left as extremist threats, the more likely they will be to survive.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Robert Habeck would hate this article. Or at least he would say he does. The high-flying head of the German Green party, aware that nothing kills a politician’s career quicker than hype, often appears to be deflecting his popularity. But in these past few months, no other political figure has caught the attention of Germany’s media more effectively than the smooth and casual 49-year-old intellectual from the Danish borderlands.

Habeck’s slightly grumpy charisma is infectious. The weekly carousel of German political talkshows (Anne Will, Maybrit Illner, Maischberger and hart aber fair) can’t get enough of his unshaven, tousle-haired charm: a count by the newspaper network RND found that in 2018, Habeck made the most appearances on the four TV staples of any German politician: 13 in all.

As if all that publicity weren’t enough, just last month he was anointed “politician of the year,” along with Green party co-leader Annalena Baerbock, by Politik & Kommunikation, a media trade magazine that felt the need to celebrate the pair after the Green party’s spectacular autumn. In October’s state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the left-liberal environmentalists carved large slices out of the two major political parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the tailspinning Social Democratic Party (SPD), and made themselves the second-biggest force in both state parliaments.

Don’t Call Us a Volkspartei

Politik & Kommunikation’s laudatory editors said that, under Habeck and Baerbock, the Greens were “on the way to becoming a Volkspartei.” But that word, meant to invoke an exalted status, might have set Habeck’s teeth on edge. Literally “people’s party,” a Volkspartei is what Germans like to call the CDU and the SPD, the pragmatic centrists that encompass swathes of sensible citizens from many social strata. For decades, the two parties could put as much as 80 percent of the electorate under their umbrellas, steering Germany across a serene ocean of Realpolitik.

But things have changed. The political landscape is flattening out as people disperse to different camps. Established broad churches aren’t providing the succour they once did, and apart from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), no one appears to have benefited from this fragmentation more than the Greens. This is not to say that German voters have become deranged idealists chasing populist visions, but it does mean that Merkel’s political bloc no longer has a monopoly on conservatism. That became most clear in the aftermath of the Bavarian election, when surveys found that, as well as the 200,000 votes the Greens had stolen from the Social Democrats, the Greens had poached some 170,000 from the Christian Social Union (CSU).

This is significant: tens of thousands of people who had previously identified with an overwhelmingly Catholic conservative party with a hardline anti-immigration stance shifted to a former protest party with an ecological, migration-friendly agenda. The CSU’s election campaign, much like its governing policy in Bavaria for the past three years, was a desperate attempt to head off the threat from the AfD by relentlessly attacking Merkel for letting in too many refugees. That allowed the Greens to appear reasonable, to insist on the rule of law, and allowed the conservative Bavarian voter to find a serious alternative without having to associate with the stuffy leftism of the Social Democrats and (God forbid) Die Linke.

This isn’t all Habeck’s doing, obviously, but he is alert enough to believe that this is why, even though the Greens have now overtaken the SPD in the polls, a Volkspartei is exactly what he doesn’t want them to become—or be seen as becoming. In a society divided and (very slowly) bringing its diversity into its politics, the idea that a substantial part of the population will identify with any major political party is emphatically dead. The basic math supports the point: the Christian Democrats are only just clearing the 30-percent mark, and the Social Democrats can barely muster 15 percent of voters (as late-January polls show)—in other words, the political center can no longer count on the majority of the population.

When explaining this, Habeck occasionally coughs up a soundbite that flirts with meaninglessness, (“We don’t need the lowest common denominator, we need higher common goals,” he told one public broadcaster), but it speaks of optimism and strategic acumen that he sees this growing instability as an opportunity. “Volatility also means there’s a fair chance of winning majorities,” he told Der Spiegel magazine in December. “The loss of old certainties is at the same time the winning of new possibilities.”

Only Squares Join a Party

Habeck also appears to be alive to another aspect of this fragmentation. The whole idea of a political party, with its formalities, hierarchies, and laboriously set-out agendas is starting to weary voters, and German politicians are beginning to do what might be called the Emmanuel Macron En Marche thing: play the anti-elitist outsider and start a political movement from scratch. The most obvious parallel in Germany is the socialist Aufstehen organization, started by Sahra Wagenknecht, who has somehow managed to remain Die Linke’s party leader.

Habeck has ruled out going that far, but his interactions with the Green party suggest that he is carefully nurturing an aura of independence. He’s quite open about technological advances in agriculture, for instance, even if that defies traditional party wisdom.

This much is reflected in his precipitous rise: the son of pharmacists, Habeck grew up in Heikendorf, outside the port city of Kiel. Apart from marrying and raising children, he spent the 1990s producing literary translations, partly in Denmark, and writing a doctorate on literary aesthetics. But by the time he reached his 30s, he switched track. In 2002, he joined the Green party, and by 2004 he was its leader in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein. Even as he ascended the ranks—by 2012 he was the state’s minister for agriculture and environment—he continued as an author, publishing novels together with his wife Andrea Paluch and non-fiction that largely reflected his undergraduate passion for philosophy.

His most recent book, Wer wir sein könnten (“Who we could be”) from October 2018, examines the relations between democratic and totalitarian language, but his 2010 work Patriotismus: Ein linkes Plädoyer (“Patriotism—a left-wing appeal”) might be a better clue to understanding Habeck. It reads as an earnest and pragmatic attempt to reconcile the looming political splits that occurred in the second half of this decade. Still, a vestige of this approach is noticeable in the tour of Germany Habeck undertook last summer, during which, between political engagements, he visited spots that marked milestones in Germany’s path to democracy, such as the Hambacher Schloss, opening debates on how to “own” a left-liberal patriotic mythology.

A Serious Faux-Pas

Such noises have inevitably stirred unrest among the Green party’s ranks, though Habeck and Baerbock’s successes mean they have walked that awkward tightrope well: keeping the core voters on their side while reaching out beyond. For one reason or another, the Greens appear to be the only German party that is not either desperately searching for a new direction or in open conflict with itself. In fact, Habeck’s air of independence, and his close cooperation with Baerbock, have managed to quell the endless conflict between the party’s conservative “realos” and its left-wing “idealos”. For what it’s worth, Habeck is definitely a “realo”: he brought the Green party into coalition with the CDU and the neo-liberal Free Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein, but he’s still in favor of a basic income, or at least ending sanctions on Hartz IV unemployment benefits.

But the bigger test to that inner harmony will come this autumn, when three elections in Germany’s least Green-friendly regions loom: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. The omens so far are not good: Thuringia was the scene of Habeck’s biggest mistake to date in early January, which resulted in his rather drastic renunciation of social media. In a video tweeted by the state’s Green party, Habeck told voters that his party “would do everything to make sure Thuringia becomes an open, free, liberal, and democratic state.”

It was an impromptu video message delivered in a noisy conference room, but that “becomes” was a significant faux pas: a grave insult to Thuringians, made worse by the fact that the Greens already are in the state’s government. Habeck’s statement also played to the prejudice that many Germans have about the Greens: that they are urban smart-asses who want to tell you what to do. For a second, Habeck’s composure, and his ability to speak to non-Green party voters, had slipped. It might yet prove a fateful signal.

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© REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

As soon as an extremely relieved Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had ascended the conference stage in Hamburg on December 7 and accepted the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), it was obvious what Germany’s right-wing political establishment made of her. Old men, their yearning for simpler times written in little veins across their pink cheeks, were elbowing each other aside to find a TV camera into which they could bluster and denounce the failure of nerve among the great Christian conservatives.
The attack lines were foreshadowed, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), to which the CDU has been bleeding votes, was getting ready for a field day. In fact, AfD Bundestag member Gottfried Curio had already come up with an appropriate gag: “AKK,” he told the chamber just over a week earlier, could only be short for “absolut konstante Katastrophe” (“an absolutely constant catastrophe”).

Not another Angela Merkel! Not another aloof, careful, centrist prevaricating compromiser. Not another woman! By shying away from Friedrich Merz, the political embodiment of the alpha-male DAX boardroom, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl had missed the chance to carve out a clear new path (or at least re-carve a weed-ridden old path).

But there are more complex interpretations. Those struggling to spot the differences between Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and her predecessor might want to go on YouTube and watch one of AKK’s annual performances as “Cleaning Lady Gretel” in the carnival in Saarland, the state she governed for seven years.

They might find it more painful than funny (the forced mirth of western Germany’s Karneval might be the tradition that forever calcified the country’s comedy reputation). Still, watching the sight of a top conservative in an apron and broom delivering a solid half-hour of slapstick gags might also help one understand why a majority of CDU delegates picked her in Hamburg, and why many may even have thought of her as a more amenable leader than Merkel herself.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Winner

Kramp-Karrenbauer is more “approachable” than the chancellor, according to Eva Quadbeck, journalist and co-author of a rather well-timed biography published in October. “She’s the kind of woman you could have a chat with if you saw her in the supermarket,” she said.

More than this, this Catholic mother-of-three holds all the right values for the CDU: she expressed her opposition to gay marriage in 2015, and is against abolishing the infamous Paragraph 219a from Germany’s criminal code, which forbids advertising abortion. This has already been a source of tension with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the government coalition.

In fact, suggested Olaf Boehnke, political analyst at Rasmussen Global, Merkel and AKK may already have agreed to play out a “good-cop, bad-cop” routine. While Merkel concentrates on her international duties and maintains a relatively liberal course to keep her coalition together, Kramp-Karrenbauer, with no seat either in the cabinet or the Bundestag to actually affect government policy, will make all the right conservative noises on domestic issues to keep the party on her side while she awaits her turn.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s record also suggests she has “more courage to take risks than Merkel,” Quadbeck argued. In 2012, the then newly-appointed Saarland state premier, impatient with infighting in the allied Free Democratic Party (FDP), dissolved her coalition and called an early election, even though polls had the CDU neck-and-neck with the SPD. “Merkel advised her against this, quite vehemently in fact,” Quadbeck said. “But she did it anyway, and won the election.”

To show the boss that this was no fluke, Kramp-Karrenbauer repeated the trick at the next Saarland election in March 2017, trouncing the SPD with a full 40 percent of the vote, a victory that was credited with bringing the campaign train of SPD chancellor-candidate Martin Schulz to a grinding halt. Merkel once again took note, before securing her own victory over the Social Democrats in September.

What Now?

If AKK can help pull the same results off in next autumn’s state elections in eastern Germany, even the CDU’s old-school traditionalists will surely revere her. The AfD is currently claiming close to a quarter of the electorate in Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. According to Boehnke, that means that Kramp-Karrenbauer will have to prioritize the issues of migration and border controls and look significantly tougher than Merkel.

“She has to shape the profile of the CDU as the one party that is looking for regulation of migration,” said Boehnke. “From a CDU perspective, it’s about limiting the damage of [the refugee influx in] 2015, and trying to win back the supporters who left for the AfD.” For Europe, “that would mean taking all the immigrant quota issues off the agenda.”
“She pretty much backs what Merkel is already doing at a European level,” Boehnke added. “She is definitely a European by passion, but she has to favor the national interest over European interest.”

Kramp-Karrenbauer is already hardening her rhetoric on immigration. She said in November that she would like to see Germany’s rules on dual nationality re-examined—in other words, she would potentially force the grandchildren of immigrants to choose to own one passport only.

Nor is AKK above a bit of the kind of right-wing populism that Merkel has conspicuously avoided: on the campaign trail in November, Kramp-Karrenbauer criticized the fact that some kindergartens had taken to calling traditional children’s St. Martin’s Day processions simply “lantern processions” rather than using the Christian term. “That’s not tolerance, that’s self-diminishment!” she told a local CDU gathering in Berlin, and “no part of her speech got more applause,” DER SPIEGEL reported.

These aren’t necessarily just populist gestures. Indeed, all of Kramp-Karrenbauer’s public statements suggest that, as chancellor, she would steer Germany back onto the pre-Merkel paths that those old CDU conservatives prefer. According to Quadbeck, AKK is “very much in the tradition of Helmut Kohl and his west-orientated world view, while Merkel had adopted a much more multilateral world.”

Ultimately, all this is about securing the future of the CDU, which is currently polling nationally at just under 30 percent. As Boehnke put it: “If Kramp-Karrenbauer can guide the CDU back to 36 percent, she’ll be good to go for the chancellery.”

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Here’s the legend: in 1979, twelve young conservatives were on a boys-only jolly a few thousand feet above the Andes mountains. Aboard a night flight from Caracas to Santiago de Chile, the ambitious merrymakers, all members of the Junge Union, the even-more-conservative youth organization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), were up past bedtime and drinking too much whisky.

As naughty boys like to do, they made a pact: members of the club would not compete against each other for a political position and would never publicly call on another to resign. Whether it was a drunken joke or not, the loyalty of the Andes Pact endured, and the male, white, West German, mainly Catholic members met regularly to reaffirm their political brotherhood—and occasionally increase their numbers. A former CDU parliamentary leader named Friedrich Merz was inducted in 2005.

The Andes Pact, whose existence was first reported by DER SPIEGEL in 2003, has wielded considerable power in Germany: its members became cabinet ministers, state premiers, even presidents—but not a single one ever became chancellor. One by one, each man’s pretensions to the highest office were thwarted by the wily brilliance of a certain Protestant woman from East Germany.

That’s the legend, anyway. It’s as good an explanation as any for why a 63-year-old millionaire consultant who retired from politics nine years ago re-surfaced within minutes of Angela Merkel’s announcement at the end of October that she was stepping down as CDU leader in December. The whisky-drinking boys from the Latin American airplane want what’s theirs, and Merz is their chosen man.

The other explanation is more Shakespearean, or “Old Testament,” if you believe Michael Koss, political scientist at Munich University: “A tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye,” he says darkly. For Merz, it seems, has a grievance against Merkel.

The Merkel-Merz Rivalry

In 2002, with an election looming, Merz fell victim to an ingenious chess move that CDU chairwoman Merkel hashed out with Edmund Stoiber, then leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). In exchange for the chancellor candidacy in the election, the aging Bavarian statesman promised Merkel the leadership of the CDU/CSU’s parliamentary group, the office that Merz had held for two and a half years.

Stoiber was duly swept from history by rambunctious Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, while Merz was relegated to the backbenches without ceremony. Merkel, meanwhile, consolidated her power and united the roles of CDU party leader and CDU/CSU parliamentary leader. Three years later, she won the first of four general elections, and seven years later Merz gave up his seat in parliament. His last notable contribution was a simplified “beermat” tax reform proposal, a classic populist, neo-liberal move (a tag he rejects), which never happened. Apparently all this stuck in Merz’s craw. Now he’s back, Merkel’s Banquo, the ghost of a wronged man suddenly materialized to torment a weary monarch.

“He is really a man on a mission,” says Kai Arzheimer, political scientist at Mainz University. “He always had a grudge against Merkel because he didn’t agree with the whole policy of moving towards the political center, whether it was refugee policy, the minimum wage, or the abolition of nuclear power—all these policies he didn’t like.”

That’s also why, despite being out of politics for nearly a decade, Merz has remained a touchstone for the aging nostalgics in the CDU membership, according to Arzheimer. “I think he’s especially popular with middle-aged men in the party, who have this feeling that they have been sidelined for the last 15 years,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy, but there have always been calls for bringing him back.”

The day of destiny is December 7, at the CDU’s party conference in Hamburg, when 1,001 delegates get to elect the next leader. It’s been a long time since these officials have had such a fateful choice to make, because, given that the CDU remains Germany’s biggest and most successful party, whoever they choose could well take her place in the chancellery after the next election.

Merz’s strongest rival is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s natural heir both in temperament and politics, which only makes the CDU’s choice even more crucial. The German conservatives’ future’ will either be the Merkel way (sober centrism, a careful husbanding of options, leavened with social liberalism) or it will be what Merz himself, true to the Andes Pact, has been styling as a return to the CDU’s “trademark values”: law and order, traditional families, and protecting businesses. Despite his protestations that he would serve Merkel loyally, it seems unlikely that the CDU under his leadership will be able to maintain its already tense relationship with the Social Democrats for very long.

A View to the Right

Although Merz has made overtures to the Greens, praising the party that has surged in the polls and leaving open the possibility of forging a coalition, all signs suggest that Merz’s campaign is, as Koss put it, “about AfD voters only. More specifically, he will make sure to be (or at the very least seem to be) more tough on migration.” In fact, despite his studied insistence that his aim is to keep the CDU as “the party of the center,” Merz recently adopted one of the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) favorite tactics: make a statement that undermines a basic pillar of the German state, then row back on it after the inevitable uproar has died down.

That happened in late November, when Merz suggested that the article of the German constitution that guarantees asylum to refugees needed to be re-considered. The AfD accused him of plundering their policies, other CDU figures distanced themselves, and the Social Democrats branded Merz as “Trump light.” Naturally Merz took the remark back the next day, saying that all he meant was that the issue of migration had to be “resolved at the European level.” In other words, German law needed to be in harmony with the rest of the EU.

Merz has made no secret of the fact that he wants to win back CDU voters who have drifted to the AfD in the past five years, and despite insisting that his battles with Merkel have not left any scars, he is not above criticizing the party the CDU has become under her leadership. In an interview with the Deutschlandfunk radio station, he accused his party of having accepted the AfD’s election successes of the past few years “with a shrug.” (That irritated Kramp-Karrenbauer, who called Merz’s remarks “a slap in the face” for all CDU campaigners who had countered the AfD’s “hate speech.”)

But a leaked AfD strategy paper on Merz showed that the far-right aren’t really that worried about him. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, all the characteristics that make him so attractive to old CDU party members also make him a liability in the fevered minds of the populists. His pro-Europeanism (he was once an MEP and recently criticized the German government for failing to respond to French President Emmanuel Macron’s calls for more European integration), his ties to big business (he is an executive at BlackRock, the biggest asset management company in the world) and his highly successful career as a finance lawyer (he would be the first German chancellor to own a private jet) mean that he can easily be dismissed as another elitist. The attack lines might be different, but Merz will present no less of a target for the AfD than Merkel.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Political journalists in Berlin often do a thing called a Hintergrundgespräch. This “background conversation,” as the English translation would be, involves gathering in an airless room of a ministry or a party HQ with a group of favored colleagues and some alpha politician, who then tells you what’s what. Or what’s really what. The mood is relaxed and pally, and the etiquette is: recording devices and photos are not allowed, and though notes may be taken, direct quotes can’t be used. Free drinks are provided. The first time I went to a Hintergrundgespräch, not very long ago, a heavy realization dawned on me: This is why people hate us. This is why people vote AfD. I’m not the only journalist who feels that the political class and the press in the capital have gotten used to their cozy arrangement. This exacerbates the impression that political journalists are being spoon-fed their stories by politicians.

For a country that guards stability so carefully, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is an electoral phenomenon. In its five-year life, this unashamedly populist and often ill-disciplined party has become the third biggest group in the German parliament, the Bundestag, and has put representatives into all state parliaments—the last one on October 28 in Hesse. And it’s not certain that they’ve plateaued. The AfD’s popularity has only ballooned since the national election breakthrough in 2017: more than 15 percent of German voters currently declare for the AfD, up from 12.6 percent in September 2017. The party’s stronghold is in eastern Germany, where it attracts nearly one in four voters.

The AfD is still fundamentally repugnant to all the other mainstream parties, who have ruled out joining coalitions with them (though the resolve of the Christian Democrats in Saxony, a bastion of right-wing politics, is beginning to crumble). This is mainly because it harbors open racists and flirts with revisionism about Germany’s remembrance for the Holocaust (a shrill dog-whistle to Germany’s big neo-Nazi scene).

A couple of obvious factors have helped the AfD get itself established in the German party system in the past year: weariness with Chancellor Angela Merkel after she formed yet another centrist government between her conservatives and the Social Democrats, coupled with exasperation that this new Merkel administration has done little more than lurch from one crisis to the next, tearing itself apart over the perennial problem of refugee policy. In fact, migration is almost never out of the news, even though the “refugee crisis” is now more than three years old, and Merkel has done all she can within legal limits to close Germany’s borders.

Florian Hartleb, political scientist and author of a book on European populism, thinks this last point is crucial. Ever since Merkel’s fateful decision in 2015, the media made things too easy for the AfD, first by relentlessly demonizing them, and then by keeping their most important issue on the front pages.

The media has done some soul-searching recently: a 2017 study by the Hamburg Media School and Leipzig University found that the majority of news outlets had taken on the government’s “slogans” on migration too uncritically. Merkel’s famous line “Wir schaffen das” (“We’ll manage that”) had simply been adopted, rather than scrutinized. “It was easy for the AfD to play the counterpart,” said Hartleb. “And the more we talk about migration, the more the chances are for the AfD.”

A Party of Pessimists

But the origins of the AfD pre-date 2015, and, if you believe the party’s strategists, the refugee crisis was simply the moment when 15 years of frustration with complacent German centrism finally crystallized around it.

“The refugee crisis broke the trust in established politics,” says Rainer Erkens, an AfD member who lives in Berlin. “For years politicians were doing things that they did not have a mandate for, which were not even remotely an issue in elections.” He goes on to list all the decisions made by successive German governments “over the people’s heads”: creating the euro, the Hartz IV social welfare reforms, abandoning nuclear power, abolishing military service, and bailing out Greece in the aftermath of the eurozone debt crisis.

This is what, Erkens believes, made Merkel’s decision to open borders in 2015 the last straw for many voters. “People realized that politicians were pursuing policies that had nothing to do with election campaigns. They were getting majorities in elections for policies they’re not even pursuing.”

But there’s another feeling that AfD voters share, according to Erkens: an all-pervading pessimism. “If you really want to understand why people like the AfD, then you have to see that people who vote for the AfD have a specific image of Germany. And this image is: Germany is going down the drain,” he says. Then comes another list: the images of Germany’s deterioration; the state of the Bundeswehr; the “energy transition” to renewable sources running out of steam; the debts of other EU countries; the alleged “Islamization” of German society; and, as Erkens puts it, “what does climate protection even mean, and how much will that cost us?” All these are the weeds creeping underfoot, destabilizing Germany’s economic power.

That’s why, as Erkens tells it, AfD voters are unaffected by the scandals that outrage everyone else. One of the more recent ones came in June, when party leader Alexander Gauland triggered a tsunami of outrage because of a speech describing the Third Reich as “a bird-shit in a thousand years of successful German history.”

The AfD voters’ pessimism supersedes all such scruples. “If you have the feeling that Germany is going down the drain, and if there is one party, the AfD, which is saying exactly that, then you couldn’t care less that Gauland uses the term ‘bird-shit’ when he talks about the Nazi chapter in German history,” says Erkens. “The AfD is much more important than one politician possibly talking nonsense. It’s in this context quite irrelevant.”

The Media Effect

More than this, the media’s fixation on such outbursts, and on dubious figures like Björn Höcke, who was almost thrown out of the AfD in 2017 for describing Berlin’s Holocaust monument as a “memorial of shame,” only pushes AfD voters into protecting their leaders.

That is at least what Ronald Gläser, AfD spokesman in Berlin, believes. “I think a lot of people in the AfD weren’t particularly crazy about that, but it’s not important enough—it’s forgotten about three days later,” he says. “Those outrage issues do accompany us, but they don’t harm us that much. And of course, when the media reports about us so hysterically, that is useful for us.”

And anyway, as Gläser acknowledges, the AfD needs Höcke to keep the party’s extremist elements on its side: “We can’t just throw a leading figure of our party out—or at least if we did, it would have a huge effect. Björn Höcke is an important figure for the AfD.”

Hartleb, the political analyst, says deliberately baiting the media is a calculated strategy. “There is this taboo-breaking logic: you make a bald provocation, then you say it was just a misunderstanding, then you go one step further,” he said. “It doesn’t help anymore to just blame the voters of the AfD. It doesn’t help to say that these are neo-Nazis. And it also doesn’t help to bring them into coalition—Germany can’t do this because of its past.”

So if you can’t beat them or join them, what strategies are left? October’s election in Bavaria showed that only the parties that are not divided over migration are winning—the AfD and the Greens. Either you’re for a diverse society or you’re against it. This, as Erkens says, is where the political debate in Germany is headed: “In the future there will be two big parties: the Greens and the AfD. Those will be the poles, and between them there will be three other parties crawling around, at 10 or 15 percent: the SPD, FDP, and the CDU … They will have a little more of one or the other side. It’s perfectly feasible that that will be our party system.” 

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