Women's Involvement in Anti-System-Parties in Eastern Germany: a Comparison of the AfD and dieBasis

After around 400 people attempted to storm the Reichstag during an anti-corona demonstration in August 2020, the peculiar alliance of right-wing extremists, conspiracy theorists and left-wing alternative opponents of the corona measures gained the attention of movement research. The AfD soon joined the protests, while a new grassroots democratic party emerged from the Querdenken movement (dieBasis). This protest coalition was interesting not only because of the different political backgrounds of its supporters - radical right on the one hand, left-wing alternative on the other - but also because the two parties attracted very different supporters in terms of gender: while the AfD is the party with the lowest proportion of female members and voters, very half of dieBasis' members are women. In research, however, the gender dimension is a desideratum for both radical right-wing parties and new micro-parties, particularly due to the difficulty of accessing the field. Following on from a comparative research project (in Austria, East Germany, Estonia, Hungary, and Slovakia) by the International Republican Institute, this paper compares the narratives of active female and male members in the radical right party AfD (officials) and anti-corona party dieBasis (office candidates) in Eastern Germany (and, for comparison, in the CDU). Since what the two parties have in common is an anti-establishment stance, this paper uses the concept of anti-system parties (Mattia Zulianello), i.e., that consider themselves a fundamental alternative to the established parties in important policy fields (metapolicies) and that do not cooperate with established parties. The case study is based on 34 semi-structured interviews, most of which were conducted face-to-face between late December 2021 and April 2022. The interviews are analyzed with regard to a) the different motivations for becoming politically involved, b) their recruitment paths, c) the obstacles that the interviewees faced in their political careers or the factors that promoted their political involvement and, d) their self-conception. Surprisingly, although AfD and dieBasis members are very different in their sociodemographic composition, they do not only share common beliefs toward the Corona Pandemic and Russia, but also toward family, social and economic policies, converging in a joint anti-Genderism that has a yet unfold mobilization potential beyond their protest’s salient topics.