THE RISE OF RADICAL RIGHT IN GERMANY: ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY, POPULISM AND DEMOCRACY

Due to the 2009 Eurozone crisis, EU’s intervention into German domestic politics, rise of refugee crisis in 2015, increase in terror attacks and the German people’s effort to protect their own identity, there has been a rise of populist radical right in Germany. Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland – AfD) succeeded in gaining representation in the German Parliament as the first radical rightist party since World War II. AfD, follows anti-EU, anti-refugee and anti-Islam policies, and won 12.6 percent of the votes, making it the third largest party in the parliament after the September 2017 general election. This rapid rise of AfD has raised concerns among German public regarding deconsolidation of German democracy. This article aims at analyzing AfD’s populist policies under the framework of Cas Mudde’s (2007: 22) three components of populism, which are populism, nativism and authoritarianism, in the framework of democratic deconsolidation. By referring to the AfD party program and discourses of AfD politicians, the article will analyze AfD’s populist policies, which polarize the people as “us” and “others”; its nativist policies that claim that Germany should be reserved for Germans alone; and also its authoritarian policies, that propose authoritarian legal arrangements to expel the immigrants and refugees from Germany. While the article argues that AfD poses a potential challenge to German democracy in the context of political pluralism, civil liberties and political rights, it also points out that the German constitutional safeguards and the political culture would prevent this challenge ever being realized.