A study of AfD voters suggests a way to win them over

Berlin. Far from being neo-Nazis: AfD voters in the former East Germany are largely staunch conservatives with nowhere else to turn politically, whilst the truly subversive elements – described as ‘authoritarian right-wing radicals’ – account for ‘only’ 20 per cent of the party’s supporters. If the study conducted by the Berlin-based sociologist Céline Teney – who interviewed thousands of German voters, including over 800 AfD supporters – has one indisputable merit, it is that it does not stop at appearances. Speaking to the Tagesspiegel, Teney, who holds a professorship in Macrosociology at the Freie Universität Berlin, is absolutely certain: 67 per cent of AfD voters can be described as “hardline conservatives”, but their views do not warrant labelling them as “authoritarian” or “radical”. Finally, the remaining 13 per cent are ‘moderate conservatives’.

This is a thesis that the academic developed after analysing the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), based on the results of the February 2025 Bundestag elections. Let me be clear, she explains: two-thirds of AfD voters hold ‘very restrictive’ views on migration, but score significantly lower on measures of authoritarian or anti-Semitic attitudes. Anti-democratic tendencies, of course, do exist, but, as Teney explains, studies on authoritarianism conducted by the University of Leipzig (Leipziger Autoritarismus-Studie) have indicated since 2002 that such tendencies have never completely disappeared, whilst the GLES suggests that the risks to the democratic system posed by 20 per cent of AfD voters “must be taken very seriously”.

According to 67 per cent of respondents, sovereignist voters are in fact ‘old-school’ conservatives, much like Helmut Kohl, who, upon becoming Chancellor in 1982, developed an Ausländerpolitik (policy on foreigners) based on three pillars: the integration of foreign workers already residing in the country and their families, the restriction of further immigration, and the promotion of voluntary repatriation. “There are currently over 4.6 million foreign nationals residing in the Federal Republic of Germany. We are aware that we owe them a debt of gratitude (…)”, reads his government’s policy statement issued on 4 May 1983. This was immediately followed by a strong stance on illegal behaviour: “We shall carefully assess whether political extremism and crime committed by foreign nationals can be combated more effectively by expanding the scope for deportation.” And then came the promise that “the Federal Government will do everything in its power to prevent the abuse of the right to asylum” in order to offer protection to the persecuted and to refugees from all over the world.

Today, anyone who thinks this way and votes for the AfD, explains Teney (who does not quote Kohl), is labelled a neo-Nazi, with the paradoxical result of strengthening the alignment between the voter and the AfD leadership when “the electorate as a whole is significantly more moderate than the party itself”. It is true that numerous sovereignist leaders are pushing the envelope of extremism, “but our research shows that the AfD electorate is not a statistical bloc of extremists”, insists the sociologist. On the contrary, the 43.8 per cent secured by the AfD on 6 September in Saxony-Anhalt “can no longer be explained solely by a radical electoral base”. These are figures typical of a mainstream party, not a subversive movement: votes ‘stolen’ from other parties, whilst never forgetting that the AfD ‘manages to mobilise a very large number of people who have never voted before’. This is evidenced by the turnout in the Bundestag elections, which reached 82.5 per cent – the highest level since 1987 (and the same occurred in the most recent regional elections). If anything, he adds, it is in the west that the AfD’s electorate remains anchored to the extremist spectrum. A phenomenon, we might add, overshadowed by the electoral surge in the east.

The academic then admits that “there are as yet no scientific studies on the recent regional elections”, but she notes that the most recent media interviews reveal that many voters in Saxony-Anhalt cited poor-quality schools, crumbling infrastructure and economic problems to justify their vote for the AfD; a party, it should be noted, whose regional branches in the five eastern German Länder are described as “extremist” by the domestic intelligence services.

Having established that not all sovereignist voters are extremists, Teney offers guidance on how to win them back to more mainstream parties. Firstly: former abstainers who now vote for the AfD “should not be won back, but reached out to with a new approach”. Secondly: labelling them all as neo-Nazis and turning one’s back on them is counterproductive because “precisely where people feel that traditional parties at local level are now almost entirely absent or do not pay much attention to their practical problems, a vacuum in representation can arise”. Branding all sovereignist voters as radicals would nip any chance of persuading them to vote for another party in the bud. This hypothesis appears to have been confirmed by the 20 September elections in Mecklenburg: there, the outgoing Minister-President Manuela Schwesig – so deeply rooted in the region that she did not even use her party’s (the SPD’s) symbol on her election posters – secured a solid 35.3 per cent, losing just 4.1 percentage points, whilst the AfD surged by 21.5 points to 38.2 per cent.

What traditional democratic parties should do, therefore, is to nurture the differences that exist within their own ranks. “Those who ignore them do not even understand why people vote for the AfD.” Parties should therefore show a willingness to engage in dialogue with those who think differently – just as Schwesig does – and take their concerns seriously, without downplaying them. Moreover, as Teney further observes, “if certain issues are addressed exclusively by one party, voters may get the impression that only that party talks about them”.