Adam Tooze on Germany's Far-Right AfD Party (Plus: Eric Hobsbawm) | Ones and Tooze Ep. 259

Hi, Cam.

Yeah, just to underline my agreement with you that this is something of an earthquake. It is a small state, it is in East Germany, but this is sort of—I don't know—it has the force of, you know, Chronicle of a Death Foretold or something, like we've seen this coming. There has been a sort of sense of disbelief that this could actually happen, and now it has. That in and of itself, I think, the sort of sobering up from the realization that maybe people would just try not to believe in the possibility of this is significant. It's worth saying that the AfD has many faces, and your question points us to the most respectable face of the AfD. So it's worth underlining also that the AfD has many regional branches, and this one in particular, Saxony-Anhalt, has been labeled by the Verfassungsschutz, the German agency that's responsible for protecting the German constitution. The Germans have a very militant conception—West Germany developed this conception of the militant defense of the constitution, so they're not afraid to label people as enemies of the constitution. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt has been labeled as rechtsextrem, so right-wing extremist. And you only have to go on Twitter, YouTube, or your favorite social media channel to see videos of AfD in Saxony-Anhalt which show it as a party of skinhead thugs, of people blaring out openly racist rap songs using the N-word. It's a dirty party. Amongst the people elected to parliament include well-known far-right activists, porn producers, people with criminal records. It's playing in the dirty end of German society. But if you look online and look at its party program, it's extraordinary. It's really a night-and-day contrast. If you look online and want to take the time reading their program, I would describe it as deeply dry conservative. In terms of the old distinctions within British politics of wets and dries, this is a dry conservative version of German history and German politics. It's not populist, it's not plebeian, it's not MAGA. It isn't the crazy stuff that was coming out of Homeland Security in the US with super-macho, powered-up images of men defending the nation against alien invaders. The language is there, but the iconography, the style, is very different. It reminds me of the tone—I can't help thinking of conservative high school teachers that I knew as a kid in West Germany. It's very sort of a Gymnasialprofessor, sort of a lecture about restoring the core values of German national culture, right? So the argument is basically that the establishment parties are selling Germany out through climate policy, through migration policy, through a policy of history which is rejecting Germany's own history, through migration which is of course welcoming above all Muslim men who undermine the basic cultural values of German society. And so the program is a sort of point-by-point effort. And it says, "We're not even going to accuse mainstream parties of willfully trying to destroy the German nation—that would be polemic. What we're going to argue is somehow something's culturally wrong with them. They're victims of a declinist, degenerate culture. And so therefore, the project of the AfD, starting in this first state which we hope to govern, will be to restore the foundations of a national culture, on the basis of which then you can actually have a reasonable conversation about politics." It is very multi-layered. They've had some intellectuals at work on this program. If you dig into the AfD podcast/YouTube scene, you'll see there are people talking about Gramsci and hegemony. It's about that.

And then they have a 100-day program for their first 100 days in office, which is really pure culture war. It is immediate deportations as soon as we can get them organized. It is cutting funding for public broadcasting because they're systematically biased against us. It is re-evaluating the priorities of Saxony-Anhalt's government. Part of Saxony-Anhalt's claim to fame is it was home to one part of the Bauhaus modernist movement of Weimar Germany, and they want to replace a state-level program which was called "Think Modern" (Modern denken) by a program called "Think German" (Deutsch denken), which will involve raising the German flag outside schools and other public buildings—which in the US would be completely normal, but in Germany really isn't. And then it also includes things like a truth commission on the COVID era, which panders to another of the slightly more bonkers and unsavory elements of the AfD constituency, which is COVID skepticism. So, it's a very weird amalgam of different policies, very little that actually amounts to anything serious on the socioeconomic side.

Yeah, on the point of family policy, one area where they do actually advocate for more government spending is in support of families with kids. But anyone who's ever had kids knows that having a kid is not a recipe for improving your family's real income standing, right? Encouraging their average voter base, which in fact is lower-income, self-identified working-class—in many cases people who identify as having financial problems—to encourage particularly that group to have more kids is not a strategy for improving people's average welfare, right? So there's a real paradox here, which is that the data are quite unambiguous that AfD voting—and this is true of far-right parties across Europe in the current moment—AfD voting is associated with self-identified working-class status and people who self-identify as having financial difficulties, and it tends to correlate with areas of low income. So within Saxony-Anhalt itself, the tonier, fancy parts of cities like Halle voted solidly for the Green Party, which is the main cultural antagonist of the AfD. Forget the established parties, SPD or CDU; it's the Greens that they're really after—the true upper-middle-class, educated, ecologically minded party they're fighting against. And so there is a really strong association between various types of measures of social disadvantage and AfD voting. When you poll people who voted AfD whether they have economic worries, they'll tell you they have economic worries. But when you ask them why they voted AfD—not what their general view of problems is in the world, but why they specifically voted the party—they don't mention redistribution as their main reason, right? They mention dealing with foreigners, dealing with criminality, and establishing security (Sicherheit), which in Germany really doesn't have the connotation of social security in the United States, right? So they vote for the party because they think it's going to deliver a crackdown on foreigners, going to restore some sort of sense of national pride, and is basically going to put two fingers up to the establishment that they identify as having sold them out. And if you look at the AfD's program, no one with two brain cells who had any idea of what was going on at all would vote for the AfD instrumentally so as to obtain from the AfD concrete material benefits, because the AfD is more austere, more committed to the debt brake, more committed to slashing public spending, and more committed to reducing government debt than any party in the political spectrum. So it's to the right of the Autobahn-liberal FDP that caused so much trouble in the previous government in Germany; they're to the right of the CDU. If you were wanting to vote for a party that would do redistribution, that would promise you targeted welfare programs or even general welfare programs, of course there are Die Linke and the SPD, who stand for that kind of policy. Voters did to a certain extent support Die Linke, but their Social Democrat supporters crashed. So it just doesn't seem to me that you can construct a plausible hypothesis that this vote for the AfD is motivated instrumentally by the expectation that increasing the AfD's power, certainly if you think of them being in government, is going to deliver outcomes.

You might say that voters are playing five-dimensional chess in which they vote for the AfD as a protest vote and then expect the conventional parties to respond by playing the welfare, social security card. But I just think that's an implausible construction of what's going on here. So it's a truly complicated, messy kind of conjuncture, which is after all not entirely unfamiliar from the United States as well. We see similar patterns in the US. One way of reading this is prospective; in other words, this isn't just about current misery, it's about anxiety about the future. Those fears about the future are projected onto foreigners, and the AfD's promise to deal with that problem, quote-unquote, then becomes your substitute for a social policy. But I'm just finding it very difficult to reconcile the data and what we're seeing with any simple interpretation that way. Also, it's worth conveying to our audience, which maybe hasn't spent a lot of time in East Germany, that though these are left-behind regions, they're not left-behind like chunks of the outback of Florida, Louisiana, or Michigan where there's no clean water that you can drink. We're not talking about that level of deprivation. These are rough parts of the world, no doubt; they have relatively higher levels of unemployment. But the overall structure—the most dangerous thing going on there are right-wing thugs. The level of deprivation here is relative; it's real, and it's experienced as real. Also, memories of the GDR are in the past now, right? The vast majority of their electorate, which is middle-aged and young, have no real adult memories of the GDR. If you look at the age profile of the voters, it's actually older people who tend to vote against them. It's very interesting: in Germany, the age profile of voters is quite different from that, say, of the US, where we see a monotonous increase in Republican voting with age. In Germany, the core constituency of the Social Democrats are pensioners, and in East Germany, older people tend to vote against the AfD.

It's worth underlining this distinctive profile of xenophobia and racism in the AfD, which to an American audience will be different because anti-Black racism, for obvious reasons, is not essential. It's there emphatically and in really grotesque forms, but it's not the central motivator. The most manifest version is Islamophobia, and the AfD owes its surge in popularity above all to the refugee crisis in Europe of 2015 and the perceived betrayal of German national interest by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was supposedly of the right and from East Germany, and nevertheless pursued what is called an open-door policy. And then, exactly as you quite rightly emphasized, there is this in some ways surprising degree of resentment against the latest waves of refugees to come to Germany, who are as white and blonde as you could possibly ask for, but they're from Ukraine, and they are victims after all of a war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. And yet in the AfD's construction of recent political history, that is not seen in the common-sensical way that you might expect, of these people just seen as being victims, but rather Berlin and the rest of the West is accused of essentially a policy of warmongering. This is a very incoherent logic here; this isn't a coherent leftist critique of NATO or something like that, but there is a strong desire to push back against the standard narrative of the war as one in which Germany should squarely align with Ukraine against Russia, and the Ukrainian refugees are seen as representative of this misalignment of German policy. And if you look at the disposable element of German government funding, they're not wrong to say that that was a very large element of what was and remains a large element of what the German government has to freely spend beyond entitlements. But of course, as a share of the overall budget, it's relatively small. But this is one of the areas where they would want to redistribute. Yeah.

This is a really fundamental question to which I don't know a simple answer, and I'm not sure that anyone does, except that this has always been the argument, after all, of anyone from the true left wing: that collaborationist management, the co-management of the system, ultimately leaves you unable to address the profound grievances of populations of voters, of classes that feel, quite rightly, that they are systematically victimized by the existing system. And that's one of the reasons why some people say that the idea of holding the AfD out of power is misguided, because the easiest way, if you like, to contaminate them too with the opprobrium of running the system is to give them a chance to try and run it. But thinking about this logic, I realized something from a different domain, from New York City, that I hadn't really fully understood before in these terms. If you think about the way that Mamdani has emerged as this highly charismatic figure representative of a different kind of politics, he does this less with a sharp focus on cost of living issues—rental costs, childcare, public transport—but then he combines it with a powerful non-establishment value statement which is above all anchored in his open and frank speech about Gaza. I hadn't really quite thought through the logic of that in electoral terms, but thinking about what the AfD does and the way in which they almost welcome their stigmatization by the mainstream because it helps to establish their plausibility, their credibility—it's a commitment device. If you're willing to speak in a racist way and get labeled a racist, you have a kind of authenticity. And I think something quite similar is in play right now on the American left around Gaza. If you are willing to take on the Democratic Party establishment on this issue and challenge America's alignment with Israel, and especially Israel's current government, and to speak frankly about the violence and the horror being inflicted on the Palestinian population, and you're willing to take the knocks for doing that, it establishes this bona fides that nothing else really can, right? You can offer cheap childcare as much as you like, but it's the combination of the two things, especially of course in demographics and electorates like that of New York, which is massively diverse, where you're actually speaking to populations for whom this really means something—which is true also of the AfD's appeal to white Germans in East Germany. This gives you this element of credibility. People like Jeremy Corbyn had it in the UK. I think this move—it's clearly explosive, it's potentially dangerous, it can backfire, and of course in the case of the AfD it's absolutely obnoxious—analytically speaking, gives a second dimension or a third dimension to your politics that is quite crucial. To my mind, what's then interesting is to see how that particular issue has played out in Germany. Die Linke and the Sahra Wagenknecht party have both repositioned themselves on Israel, and it hasn't worked terribly much to their advantage, and you wouldn't expect it to in a place like Saxony-Anhalt. In Berlin, it might have a rather different kind—well, we know it already is causing huge eruptions in Berlin politics. So I think that that's my kind of provisional thinking on this at this point.