Parties
Historian warns against exaggeration of AfD after European elections
An AfD election poster for the European elections. Photo
© Michael Bahlo/dpa
The AfD’s success in the European elections has alarmed many. Is the right-wing populist party really that strong? A historian puts the picture straight.
After the European elections, historian Claudia Gatzka warns against exaggerating the successes of the AfD. Through effective graphic representations in which all of East Germany is colored blue, the “will of the people is represented in a distorted way,” said the historian from the University of Freiburg to the German Press Agency.
“Here, the power options that arise from election results are cemented into concrete power relations.” Gatzka heads the research project “Political Representations of the ‘People’ in the Federal Republic” funded by the Düsseldorf-based Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Leipzig and Dresden: No strongholds
Gatzka cited Leipzig as an example, where the AfD became the strongest party in the European elections with 18.2 percent of the vote. “On the map, it now disappears in a sea of blue,” said Gatzka. “Is that supposed to be a stronghold in which not even one in five voters voted for the party that is considered the ‘election winner’?” In Dresden, too, the AfD became the strongest party with a good 22 percent, but that does not make the city a stronghold. With a view to the CDU/CSU’s electoral successes in the old federal states, Gatzka spoke of a “suggestion that a black-blue wave has washed over the Federal Republic, from which only a few green and red islands stand out.”
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the AfD received the greatest support with 21.7 percent in Gelsenkirchen. In the Ruhr region, the right-wing populists achieved their best results of between 16 and 18 percent in Duisburg, Herne, Bottrop and Oberhausen, among others. But nowhere in NRW did the AfD become the strongest force. Nevertheless, some cities in the Ruhr region are already being described as AfD “strongholds.”
Warning against the invention of traditions by exaggerating minorities
“Anyone who speaks of a ‘stronghold’ of that party wherever it becomes the strongest force risks inventing a tradition that is not one,” said Gatzka. Minorities are being turned into representative majorities that then appear to represent the constituency or even entire regions.
According to Gatzka, election reporting must become more precise in how it reads, interprets and depicts the will of the people. “Because if districts and cities or entire states are now coloured blue, black, red or green in the election graphics and other political self-descriptions, when only one in five voters stands for this colour, then blatant minorities are turned into representative majorities, which then appear to represent the constituency or even entire regions.”
In this context, Gatzka warned against a “tyranny of minorities”. How parties could form constructive alliances against the so-called strongest forces, which only represent minorities of voters, was a question that would gain importance in the future.