Old Roots, new Roots? The Influence of Former Far-Right Support on the AfD’s Electoral Success in the 2024 European Elections

Abstract

Despite ongoing legal proceedings and the classification as right-wing extremists by state domestic intelligence services, the AfD was able to make considerable gains in Germany’s last European elections. Although the party’s 15.9% is the highest result ever achieved by a far-right party in a national election, the deep-seated foundations of right-wing radicalism in Germany trace back across prior decades. Already in the 1990s and 2000s, the presence of a spatially rooted right-wing authoritarian and nativist voter reservoir expressed itself in electoral support of radical and extreme right parties such as the DVU, NPD, and the Republikaner. In this article, we examine the extent to which the geographically varying electoral support of the AfD in the 2024 European elections can be explained by the earlier support for prior far-right and right-wing extremist parties. Alongside an analysis at the level of the 400 districts and independent cities, we specifically examine Saxony and Baden-Wuerttemberg at the municipality level. The results show that the AfD receives significantly higher support in regions where radical right-wing parties performed above average in previous periods. However, unlike in previous elections, the AfD hardly made any significant gains in these places. This could indicate that the AfD has now exhausted its right-wing authoritarian and nativist voter reservoir. Furthermore, the regression results particularly suggest that a high share of employees without academic degrees has a substantial effect on the increase in electoral support for the party.