A new hope for europhiles? The 2017 German federal elections and the revenge of the pro-European mainstream

ABSTRACT

The rise of the right-wing populist and eurosceptic party, Alternative für Deutschland, in Germany, represents a significant shake up of the country’s pro-EU consensus. Spatial models of partisan behaviour predict that mainstream parties are likely to react to eurosceptic challenges by veering towards a more critical European position. A comparison of the politicisation of European integration in party programmes between the 2017 federal elections and those held previously shows that the reverse is true. In the face of a eurosceptic challenger, mainstream parties have adopted an adversarial rather than accommodating response, becoming more pro-European and increasingly vocal in their support for the EU. I argue that the europhile fight-back of mainstream parties is likely driven by increases in europhilia amongst mainstream parties’ supporters who move to rally around the EU when the polity is under attack from a eurosceptic threat.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicisation
• european integration
• mainstream parties
• challenger parties
• Germany
• Alternative für Deutschland

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Christel Koop, Rubén Ruiz-Rufino, Sara B. Hobolt and Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca for their rigorous critique and assessment of earlier iterations of this paper. I also acknowledge the helpful recommendations of the two anonymous peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This assumption is not without empirical critique. O’Grady and Abou-Chadi (2019) argue that claims of party responsiveness are often not substantiated, showing that party positions, across multiple dimensions, do not in fact mirror those supported by the public.

2. Green/alternative/liberal-traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson 2002). Also referred to as the transnational cleavage (Hooghe and Marks 2018).

3. Alternative measures of EU support such as De Vries’ (2018) regime and policy differential paint a similar picture, With both increasing substantively following the AfD’s success in the EP election (see Figures A6-A7).

4. I use the term ‘crisis’ here in line with uses elsewhere although it is worth acknowledging that referring to the arrival of refugees seeking asylum in Europe as a ‘crisis’ is politically charged.

5. Whilst die Linke has taken, at times, a critical stance of the EU (Hertner and Sloam 2012; Lees 2002), it has never taken a position of outright opposition to the EU or advocated for Germany’s exit from the monetary union.

6. The reliance on manifesto data is not uncontested (see, Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2009). One alternative is to rely on expert surveys (Polk et al. 2017) but these are problematic given that they don’t give a real-time measure of a position during a concrete election and are often prone to the stickiness of reputational associations which makes their use for temporal change problematic (Budge 2000). Replications of the analysis presented using CHES data shows little-to-no change in the positions of the CDU/CSU and the SPD between 2014 and 2017.

7. In their assessment of the electoral support of social democratic parties across forty-two elections, Abou-Chadi and Wagner (2020) show that adopting less liberal positions on the GAL-TAN dimensions, including specifically on EU integration, can be detrimental to social democratic parties’ electoral fortunes.

8. DeSio and Weber (2020) demonstrate this is electorally advantageous and show that focusing on policies with high issue yields actually increases a party’s vote share.

Additional information

Funding

This work received support from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/J500057/1.