Right-Wing Populism and Neoliberalism in Germany: The AfD’s Embrace of Ordoliberalism

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the ambiguous relation between right-wing populism and neoliberalism in Germany. It concentrates on the connections between and convergence of right-wing populism and ordoliberalism, a specific type of neoliberalism that was developed by the Freiburg School since the late 1920s and which the new right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) explicitly focuses on in its economic programme. In its attempt to analyse the affinity of the AfD to ordoliberalism, this study relies on Michel Foucault’s account of ordoliberalism in his book The Birth of Biopolitics and his concept of governmentality. It was found that the AfD wants to bring ordoliberalism into service of an authoritarian project in Germany and beyond. This economic approach combines neoliberalism with authoritarian forms of government through the governmentalisation of the state. Ordoliberals prescribe a regulatory framework for the economy which is centred on the creation of a competitive order. It is meant to produce and justify social differences. Right-wing populists connect the economic differentiation system provided by ordoliberalism with the differentiation systems of nation, race, religion and culture. Thus, the neoliberal principle of competition is used not only to justify inequality among German citizens but also among European countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative for Germany (AfD)
• right-wing populism
• neoliberalism
• ordoliberalism
• authoritarian liberalism

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Corrigendum

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ralf Havertz is Associate Professor of International Relations at Keimyung Adams College where he works since 2008. He is holding an M.A. in Political Science from Aachen University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Free University Berlin. His doctoral dissertation on the New Right in Germany was published in two volumes. He is on the editorial board of the Korean-German Journal of Social Science and academic advisor to some other journals in Germany and South Korea. His main research interests are in International Political Economy, European Politics and German Politics.

ORCID

Ralf Havertz http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2232-1350

Notes

1 For the analysis of left-wing populism see: Laclau 2005; Errejon and Mouffe 2016; De La Torre 2 016; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; and March 2 017.

2 In March 2017, the AfD got 6.2 per cent of the votes in the elections in Saarland. When the people of North Rhine-Westphalia voted for a new parliament in May 2017, the party made it barely over the 5 per cent-threshold with 5.4 per cent of the votes. In the same month, 5.9 per cent of the voters of Schleswig-Holstein cast their ballot for the AfD (Returning officer of Saarland, http://www.statistikextern.saarland.de/wahl/internet_saar/LT_SL/; returning officer of North Rhine-Westphalia, https://www.wahlergebnisse.nrw.de/landtagswahlen/2017/aktuell/a000lw1700.shtml; Statistics Agency North, https://www.statistik-nord.de/wahlen/wahlen-in-schleswig-holstein/landtagswahlen/informationen-zur-wahl-des-19.-schleswig-holsteinischen-landtags/).

3 Within the first month after the election, two representatives left the AfD (one of them Frauke Petry, who co-chaired the party since April 2013), reducing the number of elected representatives of the party to 92 (Bundestag, https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2017/kw41-bundeswahlausschuss/527456).

4 The denial of guilt is what is repeated over and over in the statements and writings of AfD representatives: Björn Höcke, the party chairman of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, called the Holocaust memorial site in the center of Berlin a ‘monument of shame’ (Meisner and Hofmann, 2017). Hohmann (2003), who once represented the CDU in the Bundestag, debated in one of his speeches whether Jews could be seen as ‘people of perpetrators’, which resulted in his expulsion from the party. Since September 2017, he is representing the AfD in the Bundestag. Henkel (2012, 156) complained about Angela Merkel’s trip to Moscow, where she participated in the official commemoration of the end of the Second World War. Henkel claimed that she was celebrating German defeat. Gauland (2015) expressed his frustration that no military base in Germany is allowed to be named after Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s favourite generals in the Second World War.

5 Weidel is also a member of the Hayek Association (Hayek Gesellschaft), a neoliberal think tank with headquarters in Berlin (Riedel and Pittelkow 2017).

6 Spelled with transliterated umlaut (oe for ö).

7 This statement falls short of grasping the real nature of the clearing system: (1) It exaggerates the risk of a default on these claims. (2) The system clears a considerable amount of money transfers that are not trade-related. Some economist explain the imbalance in the clearing system as a result of capital flight (Bindseil and König 2012; Buiter, Rahbari, and Michels 2011).

8 Ideologeme: an ideological element.

9 Competitive populism as it is explained here should not be confused with competitive populism as it used in India, where it refers to the competition among different populist parties and movements (Jha 2008, p. 17).

10 Critical reviews of his work have shown that Sarrazin’s use of data is rather careless and that his conclusions are biased (Foroutan 2010; Herrmann and Wierth 2010).

11 It appears that this has happened in the US with Donald Trump’s denigration of immigrants and the disparaging of the economic competition in Mexico and China. There are also indicators that there are elements of competitive populism in Geert Wilders rhetoric concerning Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. This would be in keeping with Bebnowski and Förster’s approach insofar as the US is a hegemonic country in its own right, and Netherlands can be seen as part of the hegemonic bloc of the EU that is led by Germany.