’Anti-Corona’ Mobilization in Germany: Friend or Foe to the Far-Right Establishment?

This article explores how Germany’s ‘far-right establishment’ reacted to changes in the protest arena during the Covid-19 pandemic. After years of mobilizing against immigration, far-right social movement organizations (SMOs) were suddenly confronted with a massive protest wave against the political responses to the pandemic. The emergence of ‘anti-corona’ mobilization posed both opportunities and challenges to Germany’s far-right establishment, now facing an issue even more salient than immigration, limited opportunities for street protest, as well as the appearance of new, partially ideologically close, political actors. We show that Germany’s most active far-right SMOs have successfully exploited the crisis as an opportunity to flesh out anti-governmental discursive frames, constructing a ‘danger to democracy’ while propagating constitutionality and civil rights. Moreover, they have devised novel protest repertoires, pursuing both online and adapted offline forms of collective action. In turn, they have rather failed at building mutually beneficial coalitions with the mushrooming anti-corona organizations: Ideologically heterogeneous, the anti-corona protestors adopted ambiguous positions towards the far right. As a consequence, the far-right field has seen both actor expansion and rivalry among groups. Beyond our important empirical insights, our article makes two theoretical contributions. First, we explore the concept of ‘extremism’ beyond political violence. While the study of the far right increasingly neglects extremism in favor of ‘populism’ and ‘radicalism’, we reevaluate the concept in the context of far-right protest during the pandemic, teasing out the tensions between overall peaceful street demonstrations and ideas questioning the legitimacy of the political system. Second, we discuss the organizational factors that explain varying responses among Germany’s established far-right SMOs. We point to the importance of agency for understanding their strategic decisions in contrast to dominant structural approaches in the field. Methodologically, we triangulate data collected through protest event analysis, (virtual) ethnography, and the study of social media.