Becoming Member: Female Participation in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in East Germany

With some notable exceptions, female activists have received little attention in research on political participation in European populist radical right parties. Radical right activism has always been perceived as a primarily masculine domain and following traditional gender roles, which relegate women to the private sphere. Studies have less focused on rational reasons of women to join right-wing parties and instead, have underlined other factors that portray women activists as passive victims rather than as rational actors. With the rise of female leaders and prominent women activists of European right-wing parties during the last years, assumptions of women as passive followers of radical right ideology have been challenged. The study aims to uncover gendered patterns of populist radical right activism in the German party Alternative for Germany (AfD). Focusing on the east German state Saxony, the article underlines the importance of research on east Germany not as a deviant of its western counterpart, but as a case study on its own. In order to examine women’s trajectories and activism in the AfD, I conducted life-history interviews with AfD members of different positions within the party (male and female) from different parts of Saxony in 2019 and 2020. The results suggest that, although socialisation works as a facilitating driver of far-right activism, it is anti-establishment sentiments and euroscepticism in combination with trigger events such as the refugee crisis in 2015 that have led to the decision to join the AfD. While the principal incentives regarding the decision to join the party do show strong gendered patters, it is the motivation behind those reasons that diverge between male and female members. The results confirm the relevance of research on how gender can mediate social and political life. It also shows the undeniable impact of the GDR regime as well as of the specific context of Saxony on individuals’ decision to join the AfD.