Contested Identities as Fuel for Right-Wing Populism? Survey Findings from Eastern Germany.

The emergence of a German branch of new right-wing populism within the last four years which became apparent in anti-immigration and anti-Islam protests as well as the rise of the AfD party, has brought much national and international attention especially to the country’s Eastern parts. A wide range of possible explanations for the recent success of populism in Eastern Germany have been discussed so far. On the one hand, they have referred to socio-economic disadvantages that lead to collective feelings of deprivation, fear and anger. In this context, Eastern Germans seem to be more prone to negative perceptions of processes of globalisation, social change and cultural differentiation. On the other hand, many scholars have referred to the heritage from the socialist era in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) pointing to a supposed lack of political education and experience with democratic institutions among Eastern Germans as well as their suspected authoritarian and xenophobic imprinting. In these explanations, however, relatively little attention is paid to the impact of collective identities on Eastern German’s increased support for populist, anti-pluralist and even anti-democratic positions. Building up on the findings of own qualitative and quantitative research about the subject (1), in this paper, we analyse survey data (CAPI, n=1.006) from summer 2017 representative for the population of Saxony, Eastern Germany's most populous state which is also considered as the centre of Germany's new right-wing populism. While exploring the relative impact and role of a challenged Eastern German identity, which is expressed by certain culture-rooted, social-psychological variables and patterns of interpretation, we simultaneously test competing explanations for populist, anti-democratic, xenophobic attitudes among the respondents in stepwise multivariate regression models. Findings are presented and discussed in relation to previous research and, finally, open questions, future research needs, and policy implications are sketched. Here we, for instance, argue that the hostility towards political, media and cultural elites which in today’s right-wing populist politics in Germany is expressed with slogans like “lying press”, “journalist rabble” or “traitors of the people”, could in part be explained by existing lines of identity conflict between Eastern and Western Germans - conflicts which in a small scale may also help to explain current political tensions between Eastern and Western European countries in the EU. (1) See, among others, Herold, Maik/Schäller, Steven/Vorländer, Hans, 2018: PEGIDA and New Right-Wing Populism in Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming) and Kunz, Franziska/Schlinzig, Tino/ Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert (eds.), 2017: PEGIDA – Rechtspopulismus zwischen Fremdenangst und »Wende«-Enttäuschung?, Bielefeld: transcript.