The New Cultural War on Gender-inclusive Language in Germany: Shift to the Right Through Symbolic Politics?

Recently, Germany witnesses a new round in the cultural war against gender-inclusive language: In the wake of rising support for the oppositional right-wing party AfD who is a staunch supporter of the self-declared ‘anti-gender’ camp, more and more states file bills against gender-inclusive language. To date (Nov., 2023), Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein have rules, which order teachers in public schools to prevent the use of gender-inclusive language among pupils and in the communication with parents. In Thüringen with its red-red-green minority government, the oppositional majority of CDU and AfD jointly passed an appeal in 2022 against „grammatically incorrect gender language“ in the public service. The CDU Thüringen (supported by the AfD) now plans to transform this toothless appeal into a law. After the elections in Hesse in 2023 were the AfD gained 18,4% of the votes, the CDU/SPD-coalition to come (CDU: 34,6%, SPD: 15,1%) announced similar measures to prevent gender-inclusive language in schools, universities, and in public broadcasting. Thus, it seems that political positions of the AfD, though in the opposition, increasingly influence policy debates in the highly symbolic field of gender-inclusive language. These developments are considered as a success by ‘anti-gender’ activists mostly, but not only from the political right. Survey data show that large parts of the general public approve these measures. Based on data from a media analysis of German news outlets such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Spiegel online, we hypothesize that this has been made possible by ongoing critical debates on gender-inclusive language in the public media that increasingly blurred the boundaries between right-wing/anti-gender discourses and moderate/liberal segments of society during the last decades. By claiming to ‘defend’ the German language, the far right not only constructs an alleged unifying cultural identity as a programmatic offer of patriotism to the educated middle class, who rejects sheer nationalism. Rather, the cultural war against gender-inclusive language can be regarded as a discursive bridge, built from two sides: the far right, mainly represented by the AfD, and educated conservative and liberal middle classes.