Episode 1: Kai Arzheimer on the Success of Germany's Radical Right

(upbeat music) - Hi and welcome to the Political Science Podcast, no problem at all. In this podcast, we want to talk to political scientists about their research in the context of bigger developments in society and politics. We will have one guest for episode and we base each episode around one or more papers that lie at the core of our guest's research interests. Us, that is the co-host Julius Kertzer and myself, Victor Woogie. Hi Julius, welcome to the podcast. - Hey Victor, welcome to the podcast. We are gradient students of political science based in Kiel and Zurich and the idea of this podcast is to provide a platform so that insights of political science can reach a broader audience. - Exactly, and our guest in the first episode is Kai Artsheimer. He is a professor of political science at the University of Mines and one of the most renowned researchers in the study of ready-correct parties and the far right in general. - In today's episode, we talk to him about the electoral success and the recent search of the far right party alternative for Germany. In a latter part of this episode, we specifically talk to him about why the AFT performed so strong in the states of the former GR, but not so much in Western Germany. Enjoy the podcast. - Okay, so it's great to have you on the podcast. Welcome Kai. Welcome to political science, no problem at all. - Thanks for having me. - So we are currently witnessing very high poll ratings for the far right AFD in Germany. In January, it became public that the party was involved in right-wing extremist plans to deport large numbers of Germans with a migration background. And this led to mass protests against the AFD in Germany. And then there was also lots of international attention after that. Generally, I would say the party has made strong gains in past state elections in Western Germany and could become the biggest party in this year's state elections in East Germany, which is why the AFD is currently seen by many observers as a growing threat to the German democracy. Perhaps we should therefore start with the first question, why is the AFD currently so successful? - I think the AFD vote like the vote of any radical right party in Europe is driven by concerns about immigration. And with the outbreak of war in Ukraine or rather Russia's renewed attack on Ukraine, of course, a lot of people start moving west. So we have very high numbers or had very high numbers of arrivals. That's one part of the answer. But I think more importantly, immigration was back on the agenda. Since 2018 roundabout, this issue had drifted into the background. Now it's come back with the vengeance. And of course, that helps the AFD. I think that's one very important part of the answer to your question. There must be other parts, but I think this is the main focus. - So then we like talked about the AFD a little bit, but coming to the second part of your answer basically. Let's talk a little bit about more general factors also for the success of far-right parties and other European countries. - Yeah, I think it's fair to say that the other part of the success of the radical right is backlash against all kinds of transformations that are perceived as threatening by parts of the electorate. So immigration obviously is the big issue here, but there's a whole host of other issues like transforming European economies to deal with climate change, but also globalization more generally. The influence of other cultures on Western Europe, stuff like that. Everything in this domain that is perceived as threatening traditional lifestyles in Western Europe contributes to the success of the radical right. Because the radical right loves to mobilize on these issues and loves to frame itself as a defender of. I wouldn't even say traditional. They like to frame it as normal lifestyles in Europe. - Okay, so as you know, in academia, but also in the German public, there's still a lot of debate on the causes about why people actually vote for the AFD. And there are some dominant explanations out there. You already mentioned some of them. And I would say there's still sort of this ongoing clash between economic explanations and more cultural explanations. So on the one side, you have arguments that highlight the role of labor market transformations and economic decline. And on the other side, maybe like, argument that focused on cultural changes and the social hierarchy and concerns about immigration. So if I understand you correctly, you would say that this. this separation between economic and cultural factors is not really that fruitful in explaining support for the right, for the far right. - Yeah, I think it makes sense analytically to say there is, on the one hand, perceived economic threat and on the other perceived cultural threat. But perceived is doing a lot of work here. So it's not just the one-to-one translation from immigration to declining employment, which is not true anyway. In brackets, my main point is that empirically, these things tend to cluster and coexist in people's minds. So it's not just worries about the immigrants taking away our jobs, it's also worries about the immigrants changing our style of life, threatening our position in society, as you've said. And it's all mixed together in the minds of most voters. So yes, analytically separate and empirically strongly correlated. I think that's the short answer to your question. - There's always this term of status loss in the literature. Could you explain a little bit about that in terms of, as you said, like economic status loss, maybe perceived economic status loss or cultural status loss? - Yeah, sure. European societies, there is a clear hierarchy of groups. So at the very top, traditionally, you had the white male, somewhat educated people who dominated European societies in the post-war decades, really. So if we talk about Germany, if you had a job in car constructions, for instance, you were sort of qualified, you were not just the worker, you had a high social status, you had some qualifications that you needed to enter this job, you had very good income, good pensions, stuff like that. It was clear that your son and maybe even your grandson would have the same opportunity as you. Now, on the one hand, immigration and on the other hand, decline of the German car industry or the German economic model more generally, you feel a certain threat, not necessarily for your own position in society, but you're worried about people like you and especially you're worried about the next generation, which will have it harder, whose welfare is threatened by all these developments. That's basically the mindset we're talking about. The hierarchy between different groups in society, which is not just about class, but also about ethnicity. That's the problem here. And if I may add that, it's also about hierarchy of genders. So people who support the radical right tend to be male and quite often they feel threatened by feminism too. So it's not just the immigrants, it's also the native females who do not longer conform to this sort of natural order of things in quotes. - I mean, you already touched a bit on this topic. So to what degree is this feeling of status loss, we just talked about really objectively manifested and to what degree is it just a subjective or maybe perceptional thing. So as you know, there's always still this image that AFD voters are so-called globalist youngs for leaders or in English people left behind by globalization and some people still believe that AFD voters are on average low income and poor person. So as the status loss, we talked about more subjective thing or really reflected in an objective decline. - Yeah, I think for Germany, it's mostly subjective things. So if you look at AFD voters, they do not have very low levels of education. They have medium levels of education, which would have given them an acceptable social status decades ago, but now this has come sort of into disrepute. It's not a problem for them, but it might be a problem or it might become a problem in the future. Right now you're fine. If you have middle-hour iPhone, whatever these degrees are called, you're fine, you're settled in your job. They're not exactly poor and they're not often unemployed. So if you look at those segments of society who are already at the bottom, the unemployed, uneducated, unqualified workers, usually they do not work at all. - Okay, sorry, voted or that makes more sense, okay. - Okay, so maybe we can then talk a bit about this whole protest voter idea that is sort of still very popular and according to which most of the AFD voters are just mostly dissatisfied by the other mainstream parties and that really ideologically convinced. - Yeah, that very much depends on what you mean by protest. So if you say I'm a protest voter because I'm unhappy with all the other parties, I'm unhappy with the way democracy works in this country, then I would say protest is very important, but this protest is not non-ideological. It's grounded in political convictions and here again, immigration is incredibly important. So you would be very hard pressed to find an AFD vote who's not concerned about immigration, but the other thing is not true. You find very many people in this country who are worried about immigration, they're still not voting for the AFD. So yes, in a sense they're protest voters, but this protest, this opposition against the government and even against the mainstream Christian Democrats is driven by political ideas. Talking about this link of protest, like ideological protest, voting and then maybe certain societal groups in which this is particularly prevalent. There is this idea also in literature that basically the radical right nowadays, radical right parties are competing with social democrats over the manual working class, which has manual main working class, especially which has lost their status, as you said earlier. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? And yeah, I could, I try. First, it's important to note for Germany that the manual working class does not belong and did not belong to the social democrats. So historically, large segments of this group have also voted for the Christian democrats. So this alleged realignment or this realignment of last decades has brought losses for both center parties in Germany, both for the social democrats and Christian democrats. Second, what if this has already happened in the past? We've seen this in the 1990s in Austria, it happened in the 2010s in Germany so that the current electorate of the AFD disproportionately used to vote for the Christian democrats, for the social democrats, or had given up on voting completely. So part of that story is not just the AFD luring away voters from the mainstream or more mainstream center parties, but also mobilizing people who had defected from these parties in previous elections were now available. And I think this logic of availability, that's a very important piece of the puzzle. People gave up or lost their party identification years and decades ago, so they became more volatile. And then they emerged a new player in German political space, something modeled along the lines of other successful radical right parties in other West European countries that began to soak up this potential that was willing to experiment with the vote and turn their back on political traditions that had been in place for decades. Is that nonsense to your question, or am I just wrong, League? No, no, that is an answer to the question, but of course, no, I'm interested in knowing more about why a radical right parties can attract former non-voters. Yeah, first, as I said, those voters are no longer tied to their traditional parties. They have become available for new mobilizing forces. And second is really about immigration and about these other cultural issues where those voters positioned themselves rather on the right of this specific conflict at the same time, and I think this is something that gets overlooked sometimes. Those voters still might have preferences for redistribution, but redistribution within their own ethnic group, which is not offered officially by the Social Democrats or any other party. But these more economic preferences are less important than this feeling of the threatened lifestyle, a threatened position in society, change that is coming too fast or going into the wrong direction. And so what the radical right office to these voters is a-- you could say a return to a radicalized form was normal in the past, or was perceived as normal in the past, the past being 20, 30 years ago, perhaps. So you already said a bit about the role of immigration concerns. And I think there's also growing literature that highlights that voters of the radical right are really motivated by so-called nativism, right? And I wonder what we can understand under this term and how it helps us to understand support for the far right in general. Yeah. Nativism is a concept that was made popular by Karls Muder in his famous book in 2007, I think, where he said this is what really sets the radical right apart from more mainstream forms of rightism. Nativism is a mixture of, on the one hand, nationalism and on the other hand, xenophobia, the idea that foreign elements are somehow a threat to the nation state. And the tricky thing here about the foreign or strange is that it is often framed in an ethnic framework. So people who have different beliefs, who look different, who have a different religion or different customs are perceived as a threat for Germany, because in their minds, a Germany has always been white and sort of Christian, Christian in a sense of identity. So they are undermining our idea of what Germany should look like. It brings us back to the whole debate, whether, say, Islam belongs to Germany, whether there is a culture-- sorry, go back to this cultural thing-- whether there is a cultural threat from those immigrants that they pose because they have different values and customs really. That's the core of nativism. And that is so important for the radical right. I mean, one question that is sort of related to what we just talked about concerns how manifest that the electoral support for the AFD actually is, because I mean the AFD at the German party of the radical right is often seen as a relatively new thing, and Germany is often perceived as a country where the success of the radical right only emerged very late. But if we look into history, you always had some voter potential for the right and right-wing extremist parts in Germany. There were always some levels of nativist attitudes in the German society, a society that could mobilize. And in the 1960s, we saw success of the German far right and extreme right in German state elections, right? Like the NPD in the '60s and also the people began in the 1990s. So I'm wondering how much of the electoral support for the AFD was really based on those far right core voters, which hold really strong nativist and authoritarian anti-democratic beliefs. And what the AFD electorate looks beyond this core voter group. Yeah. First, a bit of terminology. So radical right part is bringing together nativism and authoritarian views. But they're not necessarily openly anti-democratic. And that is important for the German case, because what makes plain the lack of a successful radical right party in Germany is that actors at the far right have always been beholden by national socialism. So they never stopped talking about the post-war borders and how glorious the German army was. It was stepped in the back and whatnot. And that was not very attractive for would be far right voters. The NPD, I think, is really crucial here. They never stepped apart from that brief period in the late 1960s. And even then, they had some quite dodgy characters playing on their side. But the NPD from the 1970s on was always associated with this old style grand par fascism. And that was simply no longer attractive from the 1970s on for a segment of society which had nativist views. But they want to be associated with the extreme right, with the openly anti-democratic right. So that's one part of the story. Failure of, on the far right, to modernize, to follow the example of more successful radical right parties in the 1990s and early 2000s that could be seen operating in other European countries. The other part of the story is, of course, the Christian Democrats, because the Christian Democrats and two degree, even the social Democrats, managed to tie those voters who would later support a radical right into the more mainstream sector of the German party system. And this is first because the Christian Democrats are a really broad church. They bring together all brands and flavors of center right to quite rightist political ideas. And they had this party identification thing going for them. Once that declined, it became more difficult for them to safeguard, if you wish, the right flank in the German political system. OK, but I mean, coming back to the question, this is certainly true. But there are studies that look into a special persistency of far right support in Germany. And they find that the AFD really performs strongly in places where other radical right parties in Germany scored high results before. So again, I'm wondering how much of the AFD support is really built around this old far right voter segments and how much of the rest of the AFD lectured looks like. And then there's maybe less nativist and then interviews. Yeah, first, it's a difficult question. And so I'm going to dot it a little bit. But secondly, it's a perfectly valid question. And I think what we can say is that the AFD managed and still manages to mobilize, basically, all of those who in the past supported the NPD or the Republican or whatever was operating at the very, very right end of the political spectrum. They have simply soaked up the electorate of the NPD, which was six, seven, eight percent of the vote in some parts of Eastern Germany at least. But on top of that, obviously, they attracted voters who perceived the NPD as beyond the pale or simply not effective because they hardly stood a chance to end up in parliament and had never any chance to actually affect policy. So I would say those 10% that the AFD got in 2017 election. These are people who would vote for the AFD no matter what. And many of them probably voted for the NPD in the past. On top of that, the AFD, because they also have this liberal conservative wing, those professors or former businessmen, and we don't have to gender here because it's really mostly men. Those very respectable characters clearly belong to the German elite. And that attracted people who in the past would not have considered voting for the NPD, but they would have abstained or voted for the Christian Democrats or maybe the liberal Democrats or the social Democrats perhaps. - Okay, one last thing regarding that. - Of course. - I think the picture you're painting is quite fitting my imagination because I always imagined the AFD electorate as sort of an onion, right? So you know where you have a strong, radical, solid core. And over that, you have more loose and fluctuating layers of voters that are not so strong. - Yeah. - And rooted in natureless far-right ideologies. So yeah, but Victor, you had another question. - Yeah, exactly, because like talking about the onions, how can we now explain the more medium term and short term factors that explain like the recent high, for example, I'm not just the reason, but like the ongoing high for the AFD in the polls. The party, I mean, we have to remember like, they were quite performing quite poorly during the pandemic. And now after the pandemic, they're coming out, scoring like 20% and higher. How is that possible? - That's actually a bit of a puzzle. So yes, the party found very difficult to mobilize during the pandemic. I think the same was true for other opposition parties. Some people expected the AFD to get boost from the pandemic, but it didn't really happen because they tried to mobilize on the corona measures. They tried to mobilize on the vaccination issue, but those people were already in their camp. So it didn't help them to mobilize beyond this core of the onion if you wish. And that didn't really change immediately after the pandemic. I think what really helped them was the attack on Ukraine because it gave them another issue because they could now mobilize on fears, anxieties, perhaps even sympathies for Russia and stuff like that. Plus, there was a major economic crisis. We tend to forget the fact that last year around this time, we were afraid that we would shiver in the dark because we would have no electricity. We would have no natural gas. We would have no heating in our flats. Plus, there was inflation in double digit territory. And of course, that allowed the AFD to mobilize a wider segment of the electorate that was worried. The first about what the government was doing and second, not really convinced that the Christian Democrats were such a brilliant alternative because the Christian Democrats also support supporting Ukraine, if you wish, whereas the AFD offered a radical alternative. And I think that gave them at least some talking points and probably also some support in the somewhat wider electorate. What is really puzzling me is that already in 2017, we knew a lot about the right wing extremist connections of the AFD. Herker published his book in 2000. I think it was 2019 where he basically explains that he wants to expel millions of people from Germany. There have been these revelations about chat groups in parliament. There is a former Bundestag MP for the AFD and a former judge to boot who was involved in a coup against the government and who has been held on terrorism charges for I think almost a year now. So the information was already there, but it didn't hurt the AFD. That's the fascinating thing. Or I'm talking too much, Victor. - Man, you're not. I was just thinking about the follow of question because when we talk about right wing extremism, the elephant in the room in the case of Germany is the former GDR, the states of the former GDR in the East. And also where Herker is leading, leading figure. So you've recently published an article about why the AFD performs so much more strongly in the East than in the West. And we're really interested in like hearing a little bit more about the factors there. In Germany, that's multi-dimensional. And there is a lot of plausible and possible explanations which difficult to separate empirically. But first you're right. Since 2013, the AFD has been much more successful in the East than in the West. And I think we can think of bundles of possible explanations. And perhaps the most obvious one is the way in which Germany was unified and the fallout this had for the Eastern States. To the present day, the Eastern States are doing worse in terms of the economy. They had higher unemployment for a very long time. People are poorer in the East. And many of them feel that the terms of unification have been very unequal. That they are basically the losers of unification have been treated very poorly by their Western relations. So this economic shock, but also a shock to their status and a shock to their whole circumstances of life may be a possible explanation that explain at least backlash against the government but also backlash against further transformations. Of course they say, we've already suffered so much. We already have that many changes in our lives. Now we want some sort of stability and we want things to go most slowly. So that is one popular narrative. Now I think this might be part of a bigger explanation, but it's certainly not the only factor. Another factor that is often overlooked in Germany is simply sorting. So if you look at people moving from the East to the West and in the West basically the urban centers, you see that those who moved away or still moving away are disproportionately young, well-educated, female, probably also more open-minded and so on and so forth. So we know which factors are associated with support for the radical right and we see that those who are left behind or choose to be left behind in some, especially the rural parts of the Eastern States are simply more inclined to support the radical right because of these characteristics there there whereas those who move away would not have supported the radical right in the first place. Then and I'm going to stop soon. There is an ongoing tradition of far-right organizing and far-right ideas in many parts of the Eastern States and this started even before unification. Officially GDR was an anti-fascist state that was even written into their constitution. So if you wanted to rebel against the system, if you wanted to bring forth the ultimate insult to those in power, you turned Nazi because then you were officially an enemy of the state and we know that there was an emerging neo-Nazis scene in the 1980s already, but it really became rampant in the 1990s. The NPD moved the headquarters to the east in the 1990s because they felt that there was something that would resonate with their ideology. It was very little enthusiasm on behalf of the authorities to challenge and curb this emerging scene in the 1990s and so networks have emerged especially in areas such as the Attskburger, found Dresden and stuff and parts of the country like that. We have one or two generations growing up in surroundings where it is more or less normal to see swastikas, where it is more or less normal that people sitting on the village council have extremist views. And that I think explains part of the persistence and it explains part of the support for the NPD in the 1990s and early 2000s that were then sort of inherited by the AFD. What plays a relatively small role is actual deprivation. So if you look at objective factors, as I said, the GDI still or former GDI still doing worse than the former federal republic. But even if you control for that, there's a real difference in support for the radical right. And I think this has also something to do. And this is the last, the last pass I want you to look at with identification and support for the more mainstream parties, which were often perceived as Western as belonging to the old federal republic in the GDI, which never had quite such a broad membership and which are simply less rooted in society than they used to be in the federal or the old federal republic. This is also changing in the West. But the changes are coming from a much higher level of support for the party system of what is sometimes called the Bonneux Republic, the old federal republic. - I guess this also relates to the stuff we talked previously about. So if you look at the recent success for the AFD in different low collections and when there's a penalty level, if you look at the towns where the AFD now won their first mayor races, these are places where the NPD and DFAO, for example, had their strongholds and state elections in the 1990s and the early 2000s. So it's not out of nowhere that the AFD is particularly successful there. Also what you said regarding the role of economic trauma in Eastern Germany, it's quite fitting. I mean, the recent study is showing that the democratic satisfaction of Eastern German people is much more sensitive to economic transformations, which is again partially explained by the fact that the democratization in Eastern Germany was silent by major economic breakdown. - Yeah, there's one more thing maybe talking about the ease and the role of persons in politics. You've already mentioned Bianhecke, probably most prominent, very far right wing actor in the AFD. Can we talk a little bit about how important is a personal, the attraction of political personnel compared to the others, more social structural factors? - Yeah, I think that was a very big issue in the 1990s in terms of research that was done on the radical right. And for a time, we had this idea, we collectively as a profession that you need to charismatic leaders, someone like Jörg Hyder. I think this is not really much debated in the literature anymore, because these parties have become more normal. They are less seen as an exception. So yes, leaders are important. They might be especially important when you try to build coalition that could support such a party. I've already mentioned that voters need to be available and that means they have, in the beginning, they have no party identification. They may be swayed by issues and they may be swayed by personalities and by people who talk about these issues. Having said that, I don't think it's a major factor or that the role of personalities and leaders is so different from other parties nowadays. And also, that's quite interesting about the AFD. It's a very fragmented and highly federalised party where many activists are not ready to accept the dominance of one single leader. It's very unusual, of course, because it doesn't fit our stereotype of a very authoritarian, tightly-run ship. But in this respect, the AFD is not comparable at all, let's say, to the PVV in the Netherlands, which is clearly dominated by the leaders. It's also not comparable to the Freedom Party in Austria and the Hyder. It's rather a party of many voices, many different streams and strands of far-right ideology. And I think for a long time, that was the secret of their success. They offered many things to many voters, but also to many activists. And it explains this ongoing war between different factions within the party. And talking about the supply side now, so what parties offer to the voters. And before that, we talked a lot about the demand side. From the voters' perspective, now talking about the parties' perspective, if you will, what other factors come to mind there? What other factors besides being anti-immigrant and pro-German car industry? Or what do you mean, exactly? Emile, when we talk about political campaigning, maybe, social media work. Yeah, I think social media is very, very important for the AFD. As for many of the Reddica-Ride parties, both in their external communication, but also in their internal process of building strategy, and campaigning effectively. This is quite well-documented for the first five, six years of the party when it was basically a Facebook party. It had the strongest following on Facebook, much bigger than any other party in Germany. And if you read this excellent book of Francesca, I think she's Francesca Schreiber, who used to be an AFD insider and then left the party. Now she's almost made a profession of being a former AFD member. She explains in detail how important those endless discussions on Facebook were for the party and for who got what done inside the party. And this has, of course, later on, shifted to telegram. This is something that happened during the pandemic, I think. And now there's much talk about the party being the biggest player on TikTok, which personally I find apparent, but which is important, of course, because it gives them a channel to reach a younger segment of the electorate and basically to appeal to students and even to school children more or less unfiltered. So yes, the AFD is very good with social media. Yes, social media is important because what they call the mainstream media have become more critical of the party and do not offer them the same kind of platform they had in 2013, 2014, maybe even later. So that's one factor of their success or precondition for their success, you could say. What might be also interesting to talk about is the role of the mass protest that are happening all across Germany right now, after links between the AFD and these right-wing extremist deportation plans were revealed. So suddenly the German public has realized that the right-wing extremist party actually wants to do right-wing extremist things. So what effect might the current protest have on the support for the AFD and what mechanisms might drive this effect? - Yeah, first against a brilliant question, but it's also a difficult question. And another preliminary yes, the German public has realized we have a party in all parliament that has excellent connections to what's additional extreme right and that wants to deport people from Germany, shock surprise in many quarters. But it's not the first time that the German public has come to this realization. There have been huge scale protests against the far right in I think it was 2018-19. There was this untied by a network that is being reactivated now and there is a history of rather large-scale mobilization against the far right in Germany going back all the way to the early 1990s. And of course, this network has been dormant for a long time. Perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was normalization. I don't know what. It's coming back with a vengeance. It's probably the largest wave of untie far right mobilization since at least the early 1990s. So we have to go back two decades at least to see similar figures at that. But it's not something completely new. It's something that was dormant now comes back because these revelations about the deportation plans really show the problem in a nutshell in a way that was accessible to the broader public. Something that is really easy to understand what's going on here. In terms of the facts, there is some research mostly from France and Italy showing that in localities where they have been rallies against the far right, the far right is doing less well in subsequent elections. And this is not a huge surprise, of course. And it's also very difficult to separate the causal effect of these street demonstrations and mobilizations from the fact that probably to have large scale demonstrations you need people who do not like to far right. And I'm not going to vote for the far right. So showing that one thing is driving the other is really difficult. Having said that, this has been on national news for weeks now. Every weekend we hear reports about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of ordinary Germans taking to the streets. These demonstrations have all the markings of a successful mobilization against the far right, which needs to include a broad coalition of democratic actors from the center right to at least the center left, perhaps even the far left. And that might make a dent in support for the AFD. I'm not sure if we have any chance of a course leverage in this case. So I can't think of a hypothetical situation where we have this ongoing conversation about what the AFD wants, what the AFD stands for, without the mass mobilization. And conversely, we can't have the mass mobilization without this ongoing conversation about the AFD. So at the end of the day, we can do only so much as researchers. But it's important, obviously. Speaking of winning back voters from the AFD, there is a new actor now in the German political landscape, B.S.W. the lion Saravagnet. And there's been talk about this new party attracting-- potentially attracting authoritarian voters, anti-immigrant voters. So like that they share a potential electrode with the AFD there. How do you see their role? Yeah. That's one to watch, as they say. So we had this scientific debate about the gap in the German political spectrum, also in the spectrum of many other party systems. Because the AFD is on the right, on the very far right, in cultural terms. But it's also quite right in economic terms that didn't hurt their appeal to those voters who should, in a sense, support a party that is anti-immigrant, but more to the left. So a little bit skeptical about this idea of there being a gap. I think in most European countries, the far right or radical right has done quite well by blurring their economic position, by not really taking a stand or even by getting away with rather righteous views, as they are prevalent still in the AFD. Because it simply didn't matter that much to their voters. Similar to the situation in the United States, where he would be, or actually, billionaire appealed to factory workers. He said, I'm one of you. I'm eating burgers. We all hate immigrants. And they ignored the fact that his policies were not actually supporting their economic position. It's much the same with the far right in Europe. So if this is really a game changer, I'm not so sure about that. Having said that, Zahavagnächt is enormously popular in Germany. And she's quite well known. So apart from the fact that she's offering something new, she might simply appeal to parts of the AFD's electorate, because she's a very gifted speaker. She's on the telly all the time. She knows how to come up with rather provocative statements. And she still appears to be somehow leftist in economic terms. So it could make a dent in the AFD support. That's one discussion that we're currently having, those three percentage points drop, which is not a huge drop. It's a drop that we have observed the last 10 days. So is it really demonstrations? Is it people realising what the AFD really wants? Or is it just a new player who appeals to a similar constituency? We do not know yet, I think. Yeah, obviously very difficult to identify causal relationships there. Absolutely, yeah. So lastly, this podcast already coming to an end. But we'd like to hear one more thing from you about legal actions against the party. Right, it's been discussed in the public, German politics. There are maybe some means, some leverage in German politics or for court to act against the AFD. Do you think anything of this is actually realistic or what is your take on that, basically? Yeah, I'm really into minds about this whole thing. So on the one hand, we all know that it would probably take years to assemble the evidence, to deposit them at the Federal Constitution Court. Federal Constitution Court would probably try to speed this along, but I think it might still take years to come to a conclusion. And then there's a real chance because the court has been super reluctant to ban parties in the past that they would say, hey, look, this is a terrible party, but still a curbing competition is not good for democracy. So five of us want to ban this party, but the sixth and the seventh person on the court and the eighth person sitting on the sand, they didn't agree. So it's five to three, and that's not enough for a ban. And then the AFD would be super happy because they would say, we have the Federal Constitution Court's seal of approval, if you wish. And on the way to getting to this point, they could probably mobilize on being suppressed by the evil elites, the state working against them and whatnot. There was a poll last week, I think, yeah, last week, that I think 40 to 45% are reluctant to say the least of the German population, reluctant at least with respect to banning the party, because it doesn't look good in democracy to ban a party. So a very high risk of public backlash and a very high risk of not getting the party convicted if you wish. On the other hand, the party is already classified as right wing extremists in the three states. I expect that other states will follow. You could argue that there is a clear and present danger to democracy from the AFD. And if you agree to this point of view, it makes you wonder, wouldn't the government be remiss in its duty to the Constitution and to democracy in Germany, not at least to ponder this issue, not at least to prepare for moving on with such a ban? I don't know what the best course of action is, really. So maybe the last final question for my side, it's not really a question, but if you had to make a prediction about exactly where the AFD would be in a year's time, so in February 2025, what would it look like? I'm usually wrong with these questions. So I didn't expect the AFD to rebound towards 20% in the polls. I expected them to be stuck between 10% and 15% for the time being, didn't happen. The one thing I'm sure about is that the party will still be quite entrenched in a year's time. They have rather large delegations in all state parliaments. I'm sure they will do well in the European Parliamentary election. I'm sure they will do rather well, 30% plus X in the Eastern state elections. And I think we will still debate whether we should ban them or not or try to ban them or not in the East time. OK, thank you for this outlook, Kai. And thank you for being on the podcast. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Bye. Cool. Bye-bye. This was the first episode of No Problem at all. If you're interested in Kai's work, you can read his papers or follow him on Twitter. If you enjoyed this episode, please share the podcast and consider rating it on Spotify or wherever you listen to this. This helps us to promote the podcast. We are also happy to receive feedback, so consider following us on Twitter via the links in the podcast description. Thanks for listening and see you next time. See you next time. Bye-bye.