No longer just a protest party: more and more people are voting for the AfD out of conviction, including in Bavaria and Hesse. This is due to the current crises – but also to a gradual normalization.
Jörg Meuthen was wrong. In January 2022, the former AfD leader resigned from his party after losing the power struggle with the right-wing extremist wing. At that time, Meuthen did not predict a rosy future for the AfD – at best “as an East German regional party.”
Less than two years later, the AfD is now the second strongest force in the state elections in Hesse: 18.4 percent, its best result to date in a western German state. The AfD can also improve significantly in Bavaria, becoming the third strongest party with 14.6 percent behind the Free Voters and the CSU.
This marks the beginning of a new political era, said Bavarian AfD top candidate Katrin Ebner-Steiner at the party’s election review in Berlin. Next to her on the podium, federal spokeswoman Alice Weidel nods into the cameras and states: “The AfD is no longer an Eastern phenomenon.”
A turning point
In fact, the AfD’s election results in Hesse and Bavaria are a turning point for the party. Although it was able to increase to eleven percent in the state elections in Lower Saxony a year ago, it had previously been kicked out of the state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein.
For a long time, the AfD in the West was far away from poll numbers like those in Thuringia or Brandenburg. In Hesse and Bavaria, the party’s recently significantly increased nationwide poll numbers have now been confirmed for the first time. What has changed?
One answer: The issue of migration is back on the political agenda. The AfD was able to score the most points with its anti-migration course after 2015, and this is now being repeated. Dealing with refugees also concerns people in the western German states.
Pre-election polls from infratest dimap in Bavaria and Hesse showed: More than 90 percent of AfD supporters wanted to use their voting decision to put pressure on the government to change its course on asylum policy. Around every second person eligible to vote in Hesse was afraid of high levels of immigration. With this issue, the AfD was able to win votes beyond its core electorate.
Not a pure protest party
But it wasn’t just the issue of refugees that unsettled people: climate change, internal security and the economic situation also played an important role, according to election researchers. Almost all AfD supporters in Bavaria and Hesse said that the AfD understood this uncertainty better than other parties – at the same time a rejection of the other parties and especially of the federal government, which many AfD voters said they wanted to teach.
However, the AfD no longer wants to be perceived as a pure protest party, emphasizes co-chair Weidel when classifying the state election results. In fact, the surveys also show that more and more voters are now choosing the AfD out of conviction – even in the knowledge that some of them are considered right-wing extremist. 85 percent of AfD voters surveyed in Bavaria said it “didn’t matter, as long as it addressed the right issues,” while a similar number of respondents in Hesse agreed with this statement.
How can this be explained? On the one hand, various studies recently showed that some AfD voters themselves are right-wing or even right-wing extremist. On the other hand, researchers have been observing a gradual normalization of the AfD for some time.
Shared responsibility with the CDU and FDP
Political scientist Wolfgang Schröder from the University of Kassel also shares responsibility for this with the CDU and FDP, which recently decided, together with the AfD, in the Thuringian state parliament to reduce the property transfer tax. In this way, the AfD has become a normal party in party competition, said Schröder in an interview tagesschau24.
Surveys have long indicated that the inhibition threshold for voting for the AfD has also fallen in the West. In 2020, in a nationwide Insa survey, 74 percent of respondents categorically ruled out ever voting for the AfD – most recently it was only 55 percent.
There is much to suggest that the high poll numbers for the AfD in East Germany have also contributed to a habituation effect: a year before the state elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, the AfD is ahead of all other parties in the polls there, in some cases with scores of over 30 Percent.
The AfD in the West is still a long way from achieving this. However, the election results in Hesse and Bavaria make it clear that the often painted image of a protest party that is particularly successful in the East no longer corresponds to reality.