Germany: Right-wing Populist Failures and Left-wing Successes

Abstract

In Germany, unlike most other countries in Western Europe, organized right-wing populism has so far made little impression on party politics. While parties like the French Front National, the Flemish Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang), the Lega Nord in Italy, the Danish People's Party and the Norwegian Party of Progress have established themselves and are now permanent and prominent features of the party-political landscape in their respective countries, the parties of the far Right in the Federal Republic of Germany remain in the shadows. The only major national success of challengers from the Right was in 1989, when the Republicans won 7.1 per cent of the vote in the European Parliament (EP) elections. For a comparable performance in a general election, we have to look all the way back to 1969, when the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands --- NPD) won 4.3 per cent of the vote, just short of the threshold for representation in the Bundestag. Its success at that time was part of the so-called `second wave' of right-wing extremism in Germany, which brought the NPD further spectacular successes in state parliament elections, but quickly ebbed again during the 1970s.