The revenge of the village? The geography of right-wing populist electoral success, anti-politics, and austerity in Germany

Abstract

This paper discusses the geography of the electoral successes of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the national election to the German parliament in September 2017. Unlike other studies that reduce the electoral pattern to differences between “the city” and “the country,” we do not accept the empirical observation of an urban-rural divide as a sufficient explanation. By doing so, this paper proposes a theorization of the urban and the rural as social relationships that can be dialectically differentiated through the all-encompassing urbanization process and which materialize through space. This approach draws on Henri Lefebvre’s work on urbanization and his understanding of “the urban” and “the rural” and integrates it with Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of “the provincial” to better characterize “the rural” as a form of social relationship in which the culturally familiar, authenticity, and a lack of difference and reflection dominate. Recent theoretical discussions of anti-politics—understood as both a mode of making political claims and a political strategy that negates arguments, negotiations, and compromise, starting instead with absolute, non-negotiable positions— inform this paper as well. Based on this theoretical foundation, we argue that the rural is the breeding ground for anti-politics and AfD votes. A discussion of three places where the AfD was particularly successful supports our argument: the more peripheral, small-town administrative district of Western Pomerania-Greifswald and the two large-city districts of Mannheim-Schönau and Pforzheim-Haidach.