Populism in Germany declines sharply, says Bertelsmann study

Populism in German politics is on the decline after peaking in 2018, according to a study released Thursday by the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Around 20% of registered voters in Germany are considered to have a “populist mindset,” which is a drop from the 2018 figure of 33% of voters who had such a view, according to researchers.

Read more: German far-right political scandal reflects rise of Europe’s populists

“The trend toward an increasingly populist political climate in Germany has been turned around,” said co-author Robert Vehrkamp in a statement.

Bertelsmann’s “Populism Barometer,” developed in cooperation with YouGov Germany, asked 10,000 voters in June whether they agreed with eight populist statements about the function of state and society.

Populist attitudes in the study include viewing politicians as part of a self-interested “corrupt elite,” rejecting compromise or supporting direct sovereignty through referendums. The study also analyzed populist attitudes “within the dimensions of anti-pluralism, anti-establishment and homogeneity of the people.”

What does it mean for German politics?

According to the study, the turn away from populism is being supported primarily by voters from Germany’s political center. In 2018, this segment of voters showed the greatest increase in populist attitudes.

Read more: Opinion: A disgrace for Germany

“The political center, in particular, is proving to be able to learn and to be robust in dealing with the populist temptation, and is thus proving to be the cornerstone of this change in public opinion,” Vehrkamp said.

“Liberal democracy has responded to the populist mobilization with a democratic counter-mobilization — especially in the political center,” he added.

AfD is for ‘extremists’

The wave of populism in German politics in recent years has corresponded with the rise of anti-establishment parties like the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Traditional political camps, including parties like the center-right union of Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union and the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), were shedding voters to the AfD, and in response partially adapted their platforms toward populist sentiment.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alexander Gauland

  Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team’s defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch – but people would not want “someone like Boateng as a neighbor.” He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: “We can’t be blackmailed by children’s eyes.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alice Weidel

  Alice Weidel generally plays the role of “voice of reason” for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians “pigs” and “puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Frauke Petry

  German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must “use firearms if necessary” to “prevent illegal border crossings.” Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Björn Höcke

  The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year – leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Beatrix von Storch

  Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts – but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. “People who won’t accept STOP at our borders are attackers,” the European lawmaker said. “And we have to defend ourselves against attackers.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Marcus Pretzell

  Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote “These are Merkel’s dead,” shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andre Wendt

  The member of parliament in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andre Poggenburg

  Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to “get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus” — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alexander Gauland – again …

  During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be “disposed of” back to Anatolia. The German term, “entsorgen,” raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  … and again

  Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD’s youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a “glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andreas Kalbitz

  The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. “Der Spiegel” had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of “14 neo-Nazis” who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of “curiosity.”

  Author: Dagmar Breitenbach

According to the study, the slide of Germany’s traditional political parties into populist voter segments has been stopped.

“The temptation of the CDU/CSU and the FDP to follow the populism of the AfD, to imitate it or at least rhetorically adapt to it, is losing its electoral appeal,” said co-author Wolfgang Merkel from the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), which also participated in the study.

The shift of centrists away from populism also means that the AfD is increasingly developing into a party dominated by right-wing extremist voters, according to the study.

“The party landscape in Germany is showing itself to be significantly more resistant to populism in the year before the 2021 federal elections than it was before and after the 2017 elections,” said Vehrkamp.

wmr/sms (AFP,dpa)

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/populism-in-germany-declines-sharply-says-bertelsmann-study/a-54798440?maca=en-rss-en-ger-1023-xml-atom