Demographic anxiety and the middle-class vote for the AfD

Milan. “In Italy and France, the leaders of far-right parties, Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen, have managed to achieve success by toning down their rhetoric, opening channels of dialogue with the centre and positioning themselves as credible, conciliatory leaders. In Germany, however, with Alternative für Deutschland, the opposite is happening: the more radical the AfD has become, the more its support has grown,” Oliviero Angeli, a lecturer at the University of Dresden specialising in the study of the European right and, in particular, the AfD, tells Il Foglio. “The AfD has managed to coin a relatively new language within the European party landscape. A language that is aggressive, steeped in conspiracy theories and violent expressions such as ‘ethnic replacement’ and ‘remigration’. These are not new concepts in European politics, but they are new in the rhetoric of parties that are enjoying electoral success. The AfD has managed to overcome the stigma that had always surrounded the far right in Germany”.

But whilst it is a fact that the AfD has managed to break through the glass ceiling and turn taboos such as Nazism and remigration into topics of common discussion, it is also true that it did not do so alone. Immigration in recent years has acted as a catalyst. “There is a direct correlation between immigration and the rise of the far right,” continues Angeli, who points out, however, that it would be simplistic to view the link between immigration and xenophobic radicalisation as some sort of law of political physics: “It’s more complex than that,” he says. On the one hand, there are cities such as Berlin where immigration is very prominent and widespread, yet the far right does not dominate, even though it is on the rise, as demonstrated by Sunday’s vote, with 16.3 per cent of the vote, compared to 9.1 per cent last time. On the other hand, there are smaller towns, with significantly lower immigration figures, where the xenophobic far right is, however, gaining support. This apparent contradiction can be explained in two ways: on the one hand, in cities there is an urban middle class which, due to its culture, education and social milieu, is resistant to the rhetoric of a party such as the AfD; on the other hand, in cities it is more common for different ethnic groups to come into contact, intersect and mix, something which clearly does not happen in small towns, where social groups remain more tightly segregated. It is there that what Angeli calls ‘demographic anxiety’ has taken root.

Demographic anxiety, Angeli explains, occurs in regions facing a decline in population: there are no longer any children, no longer any heirs. But to compensate, immigrants have arrived, bringing with them a new kind of society which, inevitably, is perceived as a threat to the kind of society in which one has grown up and which one has come to know. This demographic anxiety, closely linked to the transience of things and, above all, of oneself, has triggered a deep-seated fear. A personal one. And for this reason, no statistics on the economic necessity of immigration and immigrants have ever managed to dispel it. Because they tackle, with rational arguments, an issue that is, in fact, personal. One that has to do with oneself, rather than with society.

“There is also a paradox at the root of the success of extremist parties. Economic issues, though pressing, seem to have given way to social and cultural issues. And this has led us to identify two key aspects of the AfD’s success: the first is that, since the main differences between the traditional parties – the SPD and the CDU – lie in their economic rather than cultural approaches, this has led the electorate to perceive them as part of the same political bloc. The second is that a vote for the AfD is no longer a vote cast by the marginalised or a protest vote. On the contrary – and the figures prove it – it has become a middle-class vote. To dismiss a success such as that of the AfD as a ‘protest vote’ would be short-sighted. With these characteristics, the AfD has all the hallmarks of a political phenomenon destined to endure, rather than fade away as a flash in the pan.”