AfD | What the AfD is doing

The AfD collects dissatisfied people and directs their anger in a direction that stabilizes the system. Photo: dpa/Michael Kappeler The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is often accused of harming Germany, inciting people and thereby weakening social cohesion. This political accusation corresponds to the economic accusation that the AfD is harmful to the German economy because its rejection of migration and the EU affects investment conditions. This criticism underestimates the service that the party provides for the location. Because the AfD takes people's dissatisfaction and channels it in a way that is extremely cost-effective for the economy.

Social science provides a wide variety of findings on the connection between poverty, fears of economic decline and legal trends. Overall, however, it appears that the AfD is particularly popular among those who either experience material deprivation or fear it. These deprivations are the result of the policies of past decades, which made the competitiveness of companies and locations the goal and benchmark for government action.

This policy is currently being continued. This is shown by the mass layoffs at Volkswagen for the benefit of the return on sales, as well as the government's calls for extra work and the announced cuts in social benefits, which are likely to become more severe due to the costly upgrade. The government says there is no alternative to all of this, which is why it appeals to the population's willingness to make sacrifices: people should put their private material interests aside for the good of the location.

The AfD claims to fight for the disenfranchised, but in fact it has an extremely pro-business agenda.

In this situation, wage earners could now fight for their rights and income, i.e. against their increasing social insecurity - that would be the left-wing alternative, which the center says does not fit the times. Or they vote for AfD, a party that claims to be fighting for the disenfranchised, but actually has an extremely pro-business agenda - an agenda that relieves the burden on wealth to such an extent that economists doubt its financial viability.

In this way, the AfD gathers up the dissatisfied and directs their anger in a direction that stabilizes the system: against migrants and against everything that is somehow left-wing. It offers remigration instead of redistribution of wealth - AfD social politician René Springer names “home, family and achievement” as specific workers’ interests.

With this program, it is building itself up as a fictitious alternative to the "system parties" of the center and at the same time maintaining the belief that German class society is a single large community of entrepreneurs and workers for the production of national economic output, which actually benefits everyone - if it weren't for the foreigners and the politicians with their, according to the AfD, "inability to represent German interests." As if it weren't precisely these interests that create poverty, that of migrants as well as those of the native-born.

The “AfD paradox” is often complained about, i.e. the fact that exactly those people who would suffer the most materially from right-wing politics vote for the AfD. However, the right-wing achieves its socially pacifying effect in exactly this way: by using people's anger at the circumstances for a policy that leaves the wealth of the rich and its growth untouched and at the same time gives their voters the impression that they are helping to overthrow the old order. The effects can already be seen in the USA: corporate profits are currently at record levels, and the share of wages in total income has fallen to its lowest level since surveys began in 1947.

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