Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

120 Twenty-First Century Populism
in elections to the Parliament of Saxony. The party was unable, however, to
repeat this success in subsequent state elections and, in the early national
election of 2005, the total share of the vote for all representatives of the far
Right remained as marginal (2.2 per cent) as it had been in 2002 and 1998
(1.0 and 3.3 per cent respectively).
More surprising than the absence of far-right electoral successes, however,
is the lack in German politics of a more moderate right-wing populist force
of the sort that we find in Italy, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian
countries. When the Schill Party, which took its name from Ronald Schill, a
former local-court judge, registered the best-ever result achieved by a new
right-wing populist party, obtaining 19.4 per cent of the vote in the election
to the Bürgerschaft (state parliament) in Hamburg, journalists and academics
feverishly speculated that the relative failure of Germany’s right-wing parties
might be coming to an end. The attempt to establish the Schill Party
nationally, however, was almost as miserable a failure as the efforts to launch
a federal version of the Statt-Partei (Instead Party), which had also emerged
in Hamburg a few years previously. Meanwhile, other new parties such as
the Free Citizens’ League (Bund Freier Bürger) and the Pro D-Mark-Partei,
formed in defence of the deutschmark, never left the starting blocks.
How can the relative weakness of right-wing populism in Germany be
explained? If the rise and electoral success of far-right and right-wing populist
parties is regarded as the product of a modernization crisis within society,
as most writers tend to argue, then it must be assumed that there is also
a breeding ground for right-wing movements and parties in Germany. If we
look at the eastern part of German society, where many sections of the population
were hit by social insecurity after the overthrow of the Communist
regime and now regard themselves as being on the losing side of political
and economic changes, the potential for a right-wing party of protest in this
area of Germany would actually seem to be above average. This is not only
suggested by developments in other former Communist countries, such as
Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, where right-wing extremist and populist
parties feature just as prominently as they do in western Europe, but is also
demonstrated by the high incidence of acts of violence inspired by rightwing
extremism and/or xenophobia. Whether there is any link between the
level of violence, which is higher than in most other countries, and the relative
weakness of right-wing extremist and populist political parties in
Germany is a question, however, that has not yet been explored in any great
depth by researchers. Explanations for the lack of success of parties of the
Right must therefore be based on the same categories that are applied in
other countries to describe the transformation of the party system. These
will therefore provide the skeleton of this chapter.
As is customary when analysing the party system, a fundamental distinction
must be made from the outset between structural factors and the agency
of political players. As far as the former are concerned, the institutional