Everyone votes AfD – why?
Everyone votes AfD – why?
The AfD doubles its electoral result and becomes second strongest force; for the bourgeois-left press, the answer to why more and more people vote to the right is:
They are stupid, or have a “low educational level”.
Although the success of the AfD is nothing more than a logical conclusion based on the material conditions of East and overall Germany.
An objective analysis of the AfD’s success.
Reminder: The words marked in red are links to corresponding critical articles.
This article is part of several analyses on fascism, how it functions and is misunderstood, we recommend the following:
“The Contradiction of the Foreigner” – About the contradictory relationship Musk and Co. have towards foreigners.
“Reversed Anti-Fascism” – About the futility of banning the AfD.
“Deportations and Refugees” – About the fundamental contradiction behind deportation.
The early federal election is over, the AfD has won.
Not only is the AfD now the second strongest force in the Bundestag, but it is also the first party in the history of the Federal Republic to replace the CDU or SPD as the second strongest.
And as with every new, continuously growing result the AfD achieves, the outcry from bourgeois-progressive circles is unmistakable:
“A tangible and all-German democracy crisis” writes the TAZ, “Indignation is not enough, one must be ashamed” appeals the BDR to the citizens of East Germany.
Interesting is a comment under the election result post of Tagesschau:
“Experiment East has failed, let’s get rid of it again,” writes a user, “If you had experienced 45 years of communism, you would think very differently now” responds another.
The liberal common sense cannot comprehend the success of the AfD – For residents of West German big cities, the success of the AfD can only be a result of “lack of political education” and an overall “low educational level”. (RND)
Although it should not be too difficult, based on the fact that about half of all East Germans again voted for the AfD in this election, to see what lies behind the overall German success of the AfD.
Nationalism and East Germany
In 2013, the AfD was formed as a group of economic-liberal and conservative academics around Konrad Adam, Bernd Lucke, and Alexander Gauland, with the latter two having been members of the CDU until then.
The AfD was not a ghostly apparition but more or less a direct successor organization of national-liberal associations like the “Friedrich A. von Hayek Society” lobby group and the “Bund Free Citizens”.
The legitimacy of founding the party was based on the Euro crisis, i.e., the Euro rescue packages, for which Germany had spent nearly 130 billion euros before.
The Euro rescue measures, especially aimed at saving the euro via the Greek state crisis, resulted from the contradiction between wealthy EU states like Germany and France, which drove poorer EU countries into deep sovereign debt through highly profitable trade surpluses.
The “2013 Electoral Alternative”, from which the AfD emerged, stated in its founding call: “The Eurozone has proven unsuitable. Southern European states are impoverished under the Euro’s competitive pressure. Entire countries are on the brink of insolvency,” and Germany should “no longer guarantee the debts of other states with the Maastricht Treaty” and exit the euro.
From the realization that the EU is a deeply contradictory and crisis-prone institution, the Hayekian Gauland and his followers concluded the solution should be to simply leave the EU (but of course retain all access to European free trade) – concretely; Germany withdraws from the consequences of its trade surplus but continues to enjoy the benefits for domestic capital – Hayek style.
In its founding year, the AfD participated in its first federal election and narrowly missed entering the Bundestag with 4.7%, but achieved the strongest result of a new party at the federal level since 1953.
Interestingly: 60% of AfD voters said they voted “not out of conviction, but out of disappointment with the other parties”.
Over the following four years, the AfD received 7.1% in Europe, 9.7% in Saxony, 12.2% in Brandenburg, 10.6% in Thuringia, 11.9% in Hesse, 15.1% in Baden-Württemberg, 12.6% in Rhineland-Palatinate, and 24.3% in Saxony-Anhalt. – meaning the strongest results from the very beginning were in East Germany.
In the 2016 state elections, nearly 30% of all workers and unemployed in Baden-Württemberg, and around 33% in Saxony-Anhalt, voted for the AfD.
In 2016, 35% of AfD voters “worried about their own economic situation”.
Interestingly, already in 2018, 78% of AfD sympathizers agreed that “the West treats Russia as an enemy again, as during the Cold War”.
By the time of the 2017 federal election, the AfD had already entered all state parliaments and most local councils.
In the federal election, the AfD more than doubled its previous result with 12.6% of votes.
The AfD performed more than twice as well in East Germany as in the West: In Saxony alone, it became the strongest force with 27% of the votes.
The only constituency where the AfD received less than 5% was Münster, a university city.
The largest voter groups in both East and West were middle-aged men.
Leipzig sociologist Holger Lengfeld does not attribute this to an individually unsatisfactory economic situation but rather to a “cultural alienation” with a fatigue for changes due to globalization.
According to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the AfD received 28% of the votes in the socially precarious milieu in the Bundestag election, its strongest result among all social groups.
In the “bourgeois middle,” the party obtained 20%.
Compared to the previous federal election, this was an increase of about 15 percentage points, while CDU and CSU lost about the same amount.
Almost two-thirds of all AfD voters come from and still come from milieus that are rather skeptical of modernization.
In the 2019 state elections in the East, the AfD was the second strongest force in Brandenburg (23.5%), Thuringia (23.4%), Saxony (27.5%), and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (18.0%),
thus replacing the Left Party as the “protest party”.
The Left Party, with its various government involvements, was perceived by many no longer as more than an “anti-establishment” force.
A study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology in October 2019 by the universities of Bielefeld and Münster found that the AfD was most successful in regions with high unemployment during the 2017 federal election.
In these regions, more hate crimes, i.e., attacks on refugees and refugee shelters, were registered.
The study also shows significant regional differences concerning the foreigner share.
It was found that in all of Germany, regions with a high foreigner share have fewer hate crimes, but the opposite is true in East Germany.
Similar differences were observed regarding the relationship between the foreigner share and the AfD’s success.
In regions with a high foreigner share in the East, the party is less successful, while in some Western regions, the opposite was observed.
Before the 2021 federal election, the Bertelsmann Foundation published the results of a YouGov survey of AfD voters (n=10,055).
The results showed: 29% of voters held a “manifestly far-right extremist” attitude, 15 percent supported a right-wing dictatorship, 13 percent downplayed National Socialism, 13 percent held anti-Semitic views, 54 percent chauvinistic, 65 percent xenophobic, and 8 percent social Darwinist positions.
Despite this, the AfD still lost 2.2% of all votes in the 2021 federal election, remaining the 5th largest force in the Bundestag with 10.4%.
The most votes were lost, interestingly, to the SPD (-260,000), followed by the FDP (-210,000).
The explanation is quite simple: on the one hand, the internal party disputes within the AfD, between the moderate and the far-right wings (i.e., Meuthen vs. Höcke), deterred many potential voters, but especially the perception of the 2021 election as a “fateful vote” due to the end of Merkel’s 16-year period made the “protest vote”, which was still an important factor in 2017, seem tactically unwise (TÜD).
By the 2021 election, the so-called “refugee crisis”, as the bourgeois press likes to call the years from 2015 onward, was already several years in the past, making the shock factor that drove many to vote for the AfD and its upward trend in 2017 less relevant.
In Saxony (24.6%), Thuringia (24.0%), Saxony-Anhalt (19.6%), Brandenburg (18.1%), and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (18.0%), i.e., all East German states, the AfD achieved its strongest results in 2021.
The 2025 Federal Election
At the latest after the election results in the East in 2024, it was clear that the temporary low of the AfD in 2021 would not be repeated.
In September last year, the AfD became the strongest party in a state parliament in Thuringia with 32.8%, with a blocking minority.
In Saxony, it achieved 30.6%, only 1.3% behind the CDU, and in Brandenburg 29.2%, only 1.7% behind the SPD – both with a blocking minority.
After the Ampel coalition broke apart in November last year due to internal contradictions, the early federal election was scheduled for February of this year.
Result: The AfD doubled its share from the 2021 federal election, now with 20.8% it is the strongest force in the Bundestag.
Due to the AfD’s coalition taboo, a leftover from the days of the Brandmauer-idealism, the AfD will further increase its result in the next Bundestag election and undoubtedly become the strongest force.
What is striking so far, with the exception of the 2021 federal election, is that all of East Germany votes blue (except Berlin and Jena).
For bourgeois political science, this is still a sign of the backwardness of East Germany.
In the “psychology” section, sociologist Raj Kollmorgen answers the question why right-wing populism is so popular in the East, with the thesis that people in the East only know protest voting because they only protested during their DDR politicization (no joke):
“At the same time, the syndrome of the citizen or citizeness of second class arose. This is still the case for 30 to 40 percent of East Germans today. (…) Many East Germans, who joined parties or protested after 1989/90, had the impression after two or three years: ‘It doesn’t matter what I do here. The fundamental unification policy doesn’t change at all.’ This drove them into distance from democratic institutions and was preserved as an attitude and stabilized. (…) It was followed by crises, which led to Agenda 2010 and the introduction of Hartz IV. These measures hit East Germans particularly hard because unemployment was much higher here.”
But why? What is the content of these statements?
Every bourgeois political analysis of the AfD voters in the East concludes: The people in East Germany don’t want bourgeois democracy because they are poorer and have a DDR trauma.
“There is nothing that can simply dissolve this cultural imprint – in sociology we also call it the ‘habitus’ – these are attitudes, perceptual and judgment patterns that are long-term shaped.” (see above)
Bourdieu is turning in his grave: cultural imprinting doesn’t come from nowhere, it develops through constant confrontation with specific social conditions. Why does the East have different social conditions than the West?
The majority of people under 25 in the East voted for the AfD – these people are not DDR-socialized, why do they vote AfD?
Any answer to these questions leads to conclusions that only raise more questions – if you follow the bourgeois logic behind the AfD long enough, it seems there are apparently two different human races in Germany.