Fuelling Politicisation: The AfD and the Politics of Military Interventions in the German Parliament

ABSTRACT

In 2017, for the first time in more than 60 years, a populist radical right party, the AfD, gained seats in a Bundestag election. While the AfD’s stance against immigration and European integration is well documented, its preferences towards other foreign and security policy issues are less clear. To overcome this lacuna, I investigate voting records and introduce an original dataset of the legitimising rhetoric in parliament, to grasp the AfD’s position on military interventions vis-à-vis other parties in the Bundestag. The analysis of voting patterns and rhetoric reveals the AfD as a distinct outlier within the German party system. Studying the AfD’s positioning on security issues also contributes to the emerging literature on partisan ideologies, populism and foreign policy. Together with the Left Party, military intervention policies are now contested at both ends of the political spectrum. At the same time, the AfD introduced novel discursive frames for the German context based on the party’s distinct populist radical right ideology. While the AfD has voted in favour of some smaller interventions, it regularly opposes deployments in the Middle East. Furthermore, its nationalist rhetoric breaks with Germany’s traditional ‘civilian power’ role and fuels the politicisation of foreign policy decisions in parliament.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and suggestions. A previous version of this paper has been presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association 2021 at the panel on ‘The Party Politics of Military Deployments: Representation, Contestation, and Cleavages’. The author is grateful to Michael Bannert, Paul Daniels, Justin Massie, and Wolfgang Wagner for very valuable comments and feedback. Ina Schiedermair and Tina Pfalzgraf (both University of Kaiserslautern) provided excellent research assistance in coding the parliamentary records and preparing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To be sure, sceptics may doubt whether the ‘civilian power’ label still accurately accounts for Berlin’s post-Cold War record – given these frequent participations in military interventions and arms exports to authoritarian regimes (Eberle 2021).

2 Fundamental differences to this foreign policy consensus are viewed as the primary reason why a coalition between Social Democrats, Green Party and the Left Party remains unlikely, despite comparatively high agreement on domestic policy (see Tagesspiegel 2021).

3 In 1949, the first Bundestag included five members of the Deutsche Reichspartei, a radical right party.

4 See Henke and Maher (2021, 397) on the AfD’s opposition towards strengthening European defense cooperation.

5 See the review by Verbeek and Zaslove (2017), which also includes populist radical left parties.

6 The Agreement Index (AI) was introduced by Hix et al. (2007). The score ranges from 0 to 1. It equals 1 if all members of parliament vote the same way. The score equals 0 if one third each votes ‘yes’, ‘no’ and abstains.

7 Here, I coded SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and Die Linke as left, and CDU/CSU, FDP and AfD as right.

8 This rhetoric may reflect the comparatively large number of AfD members in the Bundestag with military experience. Fourty-three per cent of all male AfD Bundestag members served in the armed forces, including 11 as professional soldiers. Overall in the 19th legislative session, 36% of male Bundestag members had military experience (own calculation based on Bundestag records [https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/abgeordnete/biografien19#; https://www.bundestag.de/datenhandbuch]). An anonymous reviewer alerted me to this aspect.

9 See also Friesen’s statement that the nation-building efforts in Kosovo have failed (Bundestag, 2018-06-14).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Florian Böller

Florian Böller teaches International Relations at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. His research centres on parliamentary war powers, executive-legislative relations, military intervention policies and arms control with a regional focus on the US and Germany. Previously, he taught at Heidelberg University and held fellowships at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University. His research has appeared in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Contemporary Security Policy, European Political Science Review, International Politics and other journals.