Shift to the right among workers: You can change things up and down!

Is Germany at the beginning of a new fascism? asks the SWR radio journalist. Oh God, replies political scientist Philip Manow. Then he joins Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who in an essay in the FAZ recently spoke out against talk that simply transfers historical fascism to the present, usually with Weimar and 1933 analogies.

In this way, says Manow in the radio conversation, one signals historical sensitivity and concerned contemporaneity and, through the right or wrong use of words, promotes the formation of a camp: those who check it out against those who trivialize it and who do not speak of fascism.

Manow is a professor of international political economy in Siegen and has just published a book called “Division Lines” (C.H. Beck 2026), which can be described as the work of the hour. Because it shakes up anachronistic thinking, which is urgently needed after the AfD's brilliant election victory in Saxony-Anhalt.

Manow says succinctly: The distinction between left and right falls far short politically and is unsuitable for describing the changed conditions and political conditions in Western societies, let alone dealing with them in a future-proof manner.

In the past, poor workers voted on the left and well-off citizens on the right, the latter benefited from the circumstances, the former also wanted to get something or more. Today, workers are increasingly voting to the right, and the urban, well-earning, educated middle classes are voting more to the left. However, that's not entirely true, because Green is not left-wing, the propertied middle class tends to vote conservatively, and a few workers still vote for the SPD. In Saxony-Anhalt it was 5 percent, while the AfD won 61 percent of workers' votes. Why? Because the AfD and other right-wing populist parties are increasingly propagating left-wing distribution policies and right-wing social policies, i.e. national social policies.

There are left-wing populist parties that do the same thing, such as the BSW and Mélenchon's party La France insoumise. And there is a social democracy in Denmark that has won elections with it.

The decisive dividing line in societies is not “left” or “right”, but rather the division into real or perceived losers and winners from the liberalization of the past decades. From the perspective of the losers, the CDU and SPD are not alternatives, but parties of the “elites”, the Greens anyway. These “elites” are liberal democratic, European and Western-oriented. The new contrast is populist, illiberal, EU-sceptic, often authoritarian and tends to have an affinity for Russia - in the AfD, BSW and sometimes the Left Party.

What is not always clear to the classic educated civil left is that they see victims and perpetrators as two different categories, but they are actually the same people. In socio-political terms, they are sympathized with and verbal solidarity; socio-politically and morally, they are despised because they reject their left-liberal and open social project. In the rural areas in the east, these are especially young, educated and low-income workers who cannot find a wife and who are provided with the well-known scapegoats by the AfD: immigrants, Greens, Woke, women, Europe.

The rejection of the EU can be based on old thinking on the right or the left. It marks the difference between current winners and current losers of socio-economic and economic liberalization; the former are marked on the left (freedom, openness, minority rights), the latter on the right (“neoliberal” economy).

It goes without saying that the EU stands for the opening up of goods, finances and people compared to the nation state. We are increasingly seeing that these openings are reaching their limits. The EU is not to blame for the crisis in the German auto industry, that is national industrial policy, nor for the deficiencies in the pension system and regional inequalities here and in other EU countries. On the contrary: the EU can protect people, markets, industries and companies. It can most likely solve the central questions of the future that cannot be solved by nation states: security, prosperity, climate policy, demographics, social change.

But Europe and the future is a mix of openness and closure. The continued transition from a national to a transnational project is neither left nor right, neither progressive nor conservative, and is often contradictory. You have to deal with that. The idea that you can be super left-wing in terms of economic policy and socio-policy, i.e. protectionist and nation-state economics, and at the same time you can keep the borders closed to evil goods and companies, but totally open to all people who want in (including Islamists, exclusive racists, anti-feminists, billionaires), and thus create a fairer and more prosperous society, cannot be implemented politically in any system or in any society.

What can be achieved very easily and much more easily is an anti-European project. This is also what Saxony-Anhalt stands for. It may seem bizarre to a classic leftist, but basically the populists' central accusation against Chancellor Merz and the Union is that it is not German enough. If more and more people assume that it is not they who will have something of a European future, but only a European-oriented “establishment”, then the potential losers can easily be made angry and collected, called “workers” here, “the people” there.

The successful populist parties are basically all based on the anti-Europe platform, whether Le Pen and Melénchon in France, Nigel Farage in Great Britain or the AfD in Germany. For populists, Europe stands for “loss of control” through open borders, open markets, open societies. Brexit, in turn, represents the illusion of “taking back control” by ending openness.

Whenever a conservative or social democratic center party comes under real pressure, it is tempted to portray itself as being in resistance to the center, i.e. against itself. You could see this with the CDU in the election campaign in Saxony-Anhalt and now also with Manuela Schwesig in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Tenor: It's not us, the federal government is to blame. Even if that were to be true, the consequences in the current situation are disastrous.

Positioning yourself against the center was once the founding impetus of the Greens. If today they are accused from the left of being too centrist and from the right of being socialists - then this criticism is usually missing the crucial parameter: Europe. The Greens are the most convinced party of European openings. That is why they are particularly rejected or even hated by those who see themselves as losers from these openings.

What to do? As a European center, we finally have to say where and how we want to move forward with Europe, and how a balanced relationship between regulation and deregulation can ensure that economic inequalities become smaller again. And show how the advantages of the openings and necessary closures can ensure that the revolt of the parties from the left or right fringe against the European center is beaten back and does not spread to the (Eastern) Union after the election disaster in Saxony-Anhalt. The weaker the CDU, the tighter it becomes.

In summary: The fact that more and more people, “workers” are switching from the SPD to the AfD is not due to the fact that former leftists have suddenly “turned right”, are waging wars of aggression and want to put other people in camps. They also don't want to get rid of the state, as a few super-loud libertarian agitators claim. They rather want more nation states and less EU. Above all, they want to get something or more. To put it bluntly, one could say that these swing voters consider the AfD to be more left-wing than the SPD. Anyone who shouts: That's not true at all! hasn't yet understood that this is about feelings.

In the advanced state of an eroding liberal democracy, the European center is marginalized, for example in France, where the closed, national parties around Le Pen and Mélenchon are fighting for political leadership. The problem today is not the center, but rather when center parties and citizens allow themselves to be bullied; when they no longer know where the future is and what it is actually about. If the German and European middle is empty, then we don't have fascism yet, but we don't have a future either.