Germany is voting on Sunday, and with Angela Merkel widely expected to win another term, the one big question is how the right-wing AfD, Alternative for Germany, will do. Support for the populist, anti-immigrant (and anti-Muslim) AfD took off with the 2015 refugee influx into Germany. If the AfD does make it into the Bundestag, which basically requires 5% of the vote, it will be the first time a right-wing party has been in the German parliament since the 1950s.
What is most interesting to me about the AfD, however, is where it started and how it changed into the kind of party it is today. The AfD did not start out because as a nationalist, anti-immigrant party. Rather, according to The Financial Times:
“The AfD was formed in 2013 in protest at the eurozone bailout of Greece. ‘I was outraged at how it was implemented over the heads of the European parliament,’ says Konrad Adam, a former senior editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and one of the party’s founders.
Led by Bernd Lucke, a professor of macroeconomics at Hamburg University, [the AfD] quickly established itself as an economically liberal party with a strongly Eurosceptic bent. It name was telling: Merkel had said there was ‘no alternative’ to the Greek bailout. Lucke and his fellow professors insisted there was and created a party to prove it.
Initially, it attracted upstanding conservative burghers who felt the EU was breaking its own laws. One early convert was Michael Seyfert, a 65-year-old retired radio journalist from the sell-to-do Berlin neighbourhood of Wilmersdorf. ‘There is the Maastricht treaty, which says that no country will have to pay for the debts of another country, and this was broken,’ he say.”1
But the party also attracted supporters with a nationalistic leaning, and with the refugee surge in 2015, they took over the party, switching the AfD’s focus from concerns about the EU to a populist, anti-immigration stand. As the influence of right-wingers in the party increased, more moderate members, the people who started the party out of concern for the Greek bailout and rule of law, started to drift away.1
Which makes me think of what has happened to the Tea Party-brand in the United States. The Tea Party, like the AfD, started out because of a bailout. Instead of Greece, it was homeowners. In February of 2009, the Obama administration announced a plan to bailout homeowners who were facing foreclosure because of the fiscal crisis – and, perhaps, their own actions. The next day, Rick Santelli of CNBC went on his famous rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, ending up with a call for another tea party.
He hit a nerve. People who saved their money and played by the rules didn’t think they should have to bail out those who hadn’t:
“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand.”
But it was more than just that. It was also this:
“I'll tell you what, if you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.”
People were tired of the federal government taking over more and more things. The Constitution didn’t seem to matter anymore.
But then, as Daniel Henninger wrote earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal:
“A year later, the Obama IRS began the destruction of that movement [i.e., the original, small, citizen-driven Tea Party groups], and the small groups collapsed under federal investigations.
After that, the remnants of the original citizen antispending movement were taken over by larger operators who absorbed the tea-party brand and turned conservative political activism into a sophisticated business model.
Rage at Washington – the original and genuine tea-party idea – became a commercial political meme. They created and endlessly repeated stirring phrases such as ‘the donor class’ and ‘the establishment.’ These were anger triggers – clickbait for donors.”
In American politics, there is money to be made in getting people mad. Get them upset and they will send you $10 or $20. Get them more upset, and they will send you more money. Professional organizers took over many of the Tea Party groups and began using them to make money as opposed to getting things done. Compromising to get legislation passed doesn’t bring in contributions. Accusations of betrayal do.
And so, both the AfD and the Tea Party have changed. In the United States, the original Tea Party brand has been taken over by money-raisers who seem to be more interested in themselves than any cause they may be pushing. In Germany, the AfD has changed from a “professors’ party” objecting to what it saw an illegal bailout of Greece and concerns about the EU to a nationalist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant party.
The Tea Party has lost its legitimacy in the United States. On Sunday, we will see something about the future of the AfD in Germany.
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1 Guy Chazan, “Return of the German Right,” FT Weekend, 9/10 September 2017.
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