The persistent disdain for the uninformed workers of the Left, who have not received a single vote since 1989

They are workers, paupers and the uneducated: hence they vote for the Nazis. Indeed, since it is the uneducated, the paupers and the workers who vote for the Nazis, it is clear that this is a failure of the liberal right; and whilst we’re at it, of the liberal economy as such, even in the not-entirely-liberal version of the social market economy. However, that is a separate issue: the essential point is that the workers – these paupers – vote for the Nazis. One might wonder why workers seeking a better life in a poor federal state do not vote for the left (Die Linke’s vote share has halved), but they do not: this is precisely the question that left-wing analysts and newspapers avoid raising. In the Saxony-Anhalt election, the AfD secured 44.6 per cent of the vote against the CDU’s 16.9 per cent. It also managed to win over 170,000 former non-voters who returned to the polls. According to reports, the far-right’s vote was boosted by men, workers, the poor and those with low levels of education.

We shall leave the finer points to the experts on electoral trends – such as noting that the AfD has siphoned off votes from all parties. But it is bizarre, to say the least, to suggest that 20 per cent of voters who previously voted for the CDU have now become illiterate – effectively ‘returning illiterates’. However, the combined findings of recurring analyses suggest that it was poor and uneducated (white!) male workers who voted for the Nazis. Marx called them the Lumpenproletariat, the ‘rag-tag proletariat’, and he had a profound loathing for them: an underclass devoid of education and awareness was unsuitable for revolution. In Italy, a few days ago, the grotesque Bonaccini-style revival of Marx’s – and subsequently Marxist – revulsion for the lumpenproletariat caught on. The chorus of condemnation against uneducated workers is unanimous, and goes hand in hand with criticism of the failure of the right and its social and economic model, announced ‘with subtle glee’ (as Sofia Ventura wrote) by left-wing intellectuals. The defeat of the CDU and of an entire economic paradigm: there you have it – by dint of free-market ideology, you have destroyed the poor, and now they are voting against you. There is even a professor of sociology (Italian academia remains the only place in the world where communist economics is still considered to be alive) who wrote in X that, to stop the right, we would need more socialist economics.

Apart from the relatively low level of free-market liberalism in Germany, and in the former GDR in particular, the big elephant in the room for the Left—which is crying wolf now that the workers have slipped through its fingers—is another: why on earth have all those downtrodden and exploited workers not voted for the Left now, and never done so before? Why has this not happened since 1989 (after all, the Linke has always been voted for by those nostalgic for the ancien régime and the former beneficiaries of socialism)? Just as in Italy, the left has been losing support among the working class and disadvantaged groups for decades. These votes are either going to abstention (though now that the AfD has seen a surge of 170,000 non-voters, winning back abstainers has ceased to be a progressive cause) or to the two populist parties, the Lega and the Five Star Movement. The institutional left, including the former ‘far left’, has moved from Moretti-style snobbery (‘with these leaders we’ll never win’) to a more cutting social condemnation: they don’t vote for us because they’re ignorant. This is not merely anthropological contempt – Minuz recounted the splendid anecdote of the Milan Metalworkers’ Federation, which was taken aback when, in 1978, it conducted a survey on the cultural tastes of its workers and discovered that in the evenings, instead of reading Il Metallurgico or L’Unità, they preferred Stop and TV Sorrisi & Canzoni and watched Il Rischiatutto. It is political incomprehension.

In the early 1990s, hordes of reporters outside Mirafiori could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the (unionised) blue-collar workers voting for Bossi’s Lega rather than the PDS at their polling stations. But this is not merely a matter of sociology; it is a problem of political alternatives that never materialised: has anyone on the left ever put forward a credible proposal to counter industrial decline? Have they ever been willing to discuss flexible contracts? Or real wage differences between geographical areas? Ideas capable of convincing the working-class electorate of their merits? Perhaps the workers of Saxony-Anhalt have all become Nazis. But probably because of a lack of alternatives. And this isn’t just true of Germany.