Why do Immigrants Support an Anti-immigrant Party? Russian-Germans, their Integration, and the Alternative for Germany

Reaching a vote share of 12.6% in the last federal election, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) recently ended Germany’s rare status as a Western European polity lacking a significant Populist Radical-Right Party (PRRP). While the AfD continues to enjoy considerable levels of electoral support, some of this stems from a social group usually not being suspected of voting for PRRPs: immigrants. More precisely, recent survey data points to support levels between 15 and 18 percent of ‘Russian-Germans’, i.e. immigrants from the Post-Soviet Union and her successor states, for the AfD in the federal election of 2017. What motivates these immigrant-origin voters to support an openly anti-immigrant party? We make the argument that this has primarily to do with Russian-Germans’ levels of economic, social, and cultural integration into German mainstream society. Deriving our hypotheses from both integration studies and electoral research on PRRPs, we make use of recent high-quality survey data to investigate the relationship between integration and AfD support. Our results indicate that especially Russian-Germans with low levels of social, but high levels of cultural integration favour the German Radical Right.