Moderate in Power, Populist in Opposition? DIE LINKE’s Populist Communication in the German Länder

Since the end of World War II, the vote share of populist parties in Western societies has constantly been growing, reaching a new high in the last decade. Consequently, the number of populist parties in power has been growing, too. In Europe, populist parties in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, and Poland have recent government records. Although some research has been carried out on the impact of populists in government on policy output and democratic quality, there is still little scientific understanding of the effect that the transition from opposition to government, and sometimes back to opposition, has on the usage of populist communication. Previous studies have argued that populism is much easier to articulate from an oppositional perspective and is incompatible with governing. Implicitly, this means that when populists enter government, they would be expected to tone down their populist rhetoric. Germany provides an interesting case for studying populism. With the Alternative for Germany (AfD), right-wing populism has recently established itself in Germany, relatively late compared to other European countries. However, from the long-term historical perspective, left-wing populist Die Linke is Germany's most successful populist party. The party established itself after German reunification in Germany in East Germany as the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS) and entered the Bundestag in 1990. In 2007, the PDS party merged with the West-German Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) under the new name Die Linke to attract more voters outside East Germany. Although no populist party has ever been part of the Federal Government in Germany, there is considerable variation at the level of states. While the AfD has never been part of a German state government, the PDS supported a Red-Green minority government as early as 1994 in Saxony Anhalt. Four years later, the PDS joined the state government in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania; in 2002, the party also came into power in Berlin. In 2019, the party joined for the first time a state government in West Germany, Bremen. Nevertheless, Die Linke still faces many challenges in West Germany, as the party is currently not represented in six West German state parliaments. Although there is little doubt that Die Linke is economically the most left-leaning party in the Bundestag at the federal party, some state branches are considered to be more centrist. In Thuringia, where the state parliament elected the first state prime minister by Die Linke in 2014, some commentators have openly discussed where the party can be considered centrist after the party was leading the government for five years. The following article takes this recent discussion as a starting point and analyzes to what extent the varying relative power positions by Die Linke’s state branches, ranging from extra-parliamentary opposition to leading governing party, are linked to their level of populist discourse. The analysis will cover four years of Facebook communication by Die Linke’s accounts in the 16 states. Populism will be measured by using a multi-word populism dictionary, recently developed based on German social media data.