The Alternative for Germany party came in second in federal elections on Sunday, doubling its vote share from four years ago, in the strongest showing for a German far-right party since World War II. Some segments of the party, known as the AfD, have been classified as extremist by German intelligence.
How could that happen in Germany, a country whose history has taught a bitter lesson about the dangers of right-wing extremism?
Many experts have pointed to the role of immigration, particularly the surge of Muslim refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries in the mid-2010s, which has persuaded many people to abandon the long-dominant parties of the center-left and center-right.
But new research suggests an additional factor. The AfD posted its biggest wins in the former East Germany, where young people have been moving away from former industrial regions and rural areas to seek opportunities in cities.
Those poorer regions have entered into a demographic doom loop: a self-reinforcing cycle of shrinking and aging populations, crumbling government services and sluggish economic growth, which has created fertile ground for the AfD. And because the far-right party is strongly anti-immigration, its rise has created pressure to cut immigration levels — which further exacerbates the problems of a shrinking, aging population.
Similar trends have the potential to play out in much of the developed world.
The left-behind regions
For years there has been a very strong correlation between the level of out-migration and the level of AfD support, particularly in the eastern part of the country, where the party came in first in most constituencies on Sunday.
(The chart below shows data from 2021, but Sunday’s results largely followed the same trend.)
In the decades after the country was reunified in 1990, much of the population in eastern Germany began to leave for cities and wealthy western regions that offered better opportunities. Many people from East Germany also expected a post-unification peace dividend that never materialized.
“I studied in eastern Germany, so I’ve seen that firsthand,” said Thiamo Fetzer, an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England and the University of Bonn in Germany, who studies how austerity measures and cuts to local services trigger support for far-right populist parties.
Unlike other Eastern European economies like Poland, which had a few years to adjust their economies before joining the European Union in 2004, eastern Germany got the equivalent of “shock therapy,” he said. “People with human capital would leave, and the people who stayed behind were sort of left behind, quite literally.”
The people who moved away from those regions tended to skew younger and female, and were more likely to have advanced degrees — all characteristics that also, statistically, make people less likely to vote for the far right. The people who remained were disproportionately from the demographics most likely to support the AfD.
If that sorting effect was all that was going on, it might not actually make much of a difference in a political system like Germany’s, which is designed to be strongly proportional: The parties are represented in the German Parliament based on their percentage of the national vote, so it shouldn’t matter too much whether a party’s voters are clustered in cities or distributed evenly across the country.
But it’s not all that’s going on. A new paper found that as emigration reduces the quality of life in “left-behind” regions in Europe, the local population tends to blame the national government and mainstream political parties for the decline — and turn even more to the far right in response.
“There is a sense in a lot of left-behind places that the government is not taking care of them,” said Hans Lueders, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who is working on a book about internal migration and German politics.
He has found that mainstream parties campaign less in left-behind regions and recruit fewer candidates there, further diminishing the sense of connection between local issues and national politics.
“That feeds into this whole far-right populist narrative that the mainstream parties are abandoning those areas,” Lueders said. Far-right parties, which tend to position themselves as populists standing up for ordinary people against a corrupt or co-opted elite, are well placed to appeal to people who have lost faith in the status quo.
The ‘doom loop’ kicks into higher gear
The AfD, like other far-right parties, explicitly blames immigrants for Germany’s problems. It has demanded limits on new immigration and has called for the “return” and “repatriation” of immigrants.
There have been proposals to improve the quality of life and economies in the left-behind areas. But most experts say that immigration is one of the few solutions to the growing problems of aging, shrinking populations — not just in Germany, but across the developed world. So the success of the AfD and other far-right parties threatens to create a self-perpetuating cycle, in which the political reaction to the problems of left-behind regions ends up making those problems worse.
Over the long term, that could make all of Germany start to look more like the left-behind regions: an aging, shrinking population struggling to maintain public services and economic growth. Limits on immigration make it harder to find the workers needed to provide health care and other essential services to shrinking and aging populations.
“It’s precisely the places that would be most benefiting from immigration — in terms of getting help for elderly care, child care, you know, any other care work and service-sector jobs — that are the ones that seem to be most opposed to this,” Lueders said.
And while the divide between the former east and west makes that issue especially stark in Germany, a similar process is playing out across much of the developed world.
“This is true in Europe and in the U.S. and in many other advanced economies. In these peripheral regions, across these countries, working-age people are departing,” Rafaela Dancygier, a professor of political science at Princeton University and the lead author of the new paper on the consequences of internal migration, told me last year. As in Germany, the trend is fueling the rise of the far right and causing mainstream parties to take anti-immigration stances in an attempt — usually unsuccessful — to win back those disaffected voters.
“The doom loop continues,” she said.
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