#2: The German AfD and right-wing authoritarianism: Three acts with a dramatic ending

The rise of right-wing authoritarianism across the Western world is one of the biggest challenges the liberal constitutional state has faced during the last decades. This blogpost will discuss the political and institutional dynamics connected to this challenge. It will discuss especially the German right-wing party AfD, but will try to equally show that right-wing authoritarianism can be analyzed from three different perspectives, or in three acts, shared across national settings. In what follows, I try to briefly sketch how each of these elements operates and the connections between them.

1. Political discourse: xenophobia

The first act of current right-wing authoritarianism can be fundamentally explained through the notion of xenophobia, which, derived from Greek, connects xenos, stranger or foreigner, with phobos, hatred or fear. This, of course, is indicative of the political platform on which many right-wing extremist parties have been campaigning and thriving over the past few years, but also operates as an accurate descriptor of the currency with which political discourses have come to function over the last years, precisely under the influence of right-wing extremism: fear. Indeed, fear of foreigners or strangers and minorities in general. The AfD in Germany is one very clear example of precisely this development. The way in which the right-wing discourse operates follows local particularities, but a common core can be identified, according to which strangers or foreigners are not only those who do not belong, but also those who put us in existential danger: Whether immigrants are responsible for crime, terrorism, for taking nationals’ jobs, lead to a loss of control over borders, or pressure the housing market and general budget, right-wing extremism uses foreigners as an explanatory key for circumstances that put our most valuable goods – safety, self-support, and basic needs – at risk, and thus confronts us with their loss. As Emma Shortis has written for the United States, “Trump understands just how politically effective it can be to target minorities and vulnerable people, shifting blame for big structural problems onto outgroups such as immigrants or transgender people”. Social media and its operative model based on engagement and thus an emotional responses rather than factual accuracy only fuels this type of political discourse and dynamic further.

2. Institutions: ‘Warre’

Few thinkers have extracted the political consequences of fear as masterfully as Hobbes in his Leviathan. There, he famously claims that “(…) it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man”. Right-wing authoritarianism is actively trying to exploit the political potential of a discourse operating with fear in Hobbesian terms. There is, however, one significant difference: For right-wing authoritarianism, fear is not used to justify the creation of a “common power” to keep us all in awe, as in Hobbes, but the systematic concentration of power in one of the state branches. Typically, the concentration comes at the expense of constitutional checks and balances and targets the only non-political branch: the judiciary. This concentration, the second act, can be seen as a core feature of right-wing extremism, shared across different jurisdictions: Hungary and Poland have sadly become classic examples of it. And while the explanations for judicial overhauls or captures also vary locally, a typical feature of right-wing authoritarianism is to justify them, precisely, in the alleged need to face existential threats, that is, the first act. In that sense, there is probably little need to further comment on the ways in which Donald Trump is attacking the US-American judiciary – for example, and unsurprisingly, by claiming the need to free himself from institutional restraints to deport alleged Venezuelan terrorists. In Germany, the AfD clearly follows the same path: In its political program, it states that “National security is increasingly on the decline in Germany. The reasons for this are manifold. In order to improve the National Security and Justice situation, changes are necessary in the police force and the judiciary”.

3. International cooperation: Right-Wing Authoritarianism’s Valentine’s Day

The speech US-American Vice President Vance held on February 14^th before the Munich Security Conference was shocking for different reasons. One of them certainly is the clarity with which it showed that the first two acts of right-wing extremism can no longer be seen as national, internal phenomena to be, perhaps, compared with one another. It showed that right-wing authoritarianism operates as an international network, actively trying to consolidate the conditions for its own success: the dysfunctional political discourse is defended in the name of free speech and the hollowing out of constitutionalism and rule of law in the name of popular sovereignty.

The ideological substance of right-wing authoritarianism operating at the international level has been trying, for years now, to block as much as possible within the European context, and is now poised to further shatter alliances built on a shared vision of a liberal, democratic state and common values that had managed to withstand political differences and crises for decades. This is dramatic on its own terms, but the worse consequences might still lie ahead of us in Europe. Indeed, additional worrying dynamics are, on the one side, that the very notion of a reliable European alliance that could fight the momentum of right-wing authoritarianism has become increasingly difficult in a context in which, with international support of the right-wing network, the political weight of the first act looms large. The trend was easily observable for Germany’s past election. In democracies, decisive influence over public discourse can translate into political power, which is a constant threat for countries that, as of now, are leading the resistance against right-wing authoritarianism. On the other, the extremely close connection of right-wing extremism with Russia adds a geopolitical, military dimension to the growing tensions.

This, the final act, is precisely the dimension in which right-wing authoritarianism appears as a force trying to undermine not national political discourses or institutional frameworks, but to fundamentally redefine the current world order and its ideological foundation. One can be profoundly discontent with the way in which many dimensions of the current world order function currently, and still share Leonard Cohen’s wise warning: We are probably not going to like what comes after that what the United States of America stood for.

Conclusion

The multilayered challenges posed by right-wing extremism to the constitutional state can hardly be exaggerated. Critically, they confront it with the need to justify itself not just morally, but politically. In other words, they confront our institutional frameworks with the need to demonstrate not only its axiological value, but its practical ability to bring about, in the words of Sieyes in “What is the Third Estate?”, an association whose object is the “common security, the common liberty and, finally, the common welfare”. One can only hope his message still has, a quarter of a millennium later, the strength to resist the current version of the threats against freedom, equality, and fraternity.