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

128 Twenty-First Century Populism
support of the other mass party, the CDU and CSU began to acknowledge
the reality of a society that was absorbing immigrants and thus stopped
regarding the term ‘integration’ as a mere fig leaf. On this basis, and after
long and arduous negotiations, the first reasonably up-to-date Immigration
Act was jointly adopted in 2004. As far as the opening of new immigration
channels and the legalization of existing residence qualifications are concerned,
the law is still extremely restrictive. In conjunction with the relaxed
naturalization conditions and improved integration measures, however, we
can see a paradigm shift in the policy towards foreigners in Germany, which
could present the parties of the far Right with new opportunities in the
future. Firstly, we can assume that conflicts over the recognition of other
cultures become pandemic and give rise to counter-mobilization in cases
where immigrants are under heavy pressure to assimilate, as the French situation,
for example, has demonstrated. Second, right-wing populists can
exploit the fact that the anti-integration positions which once underpinned
the aliens policy of the CDU and CSU, and which secured them the support
of numerous xenophobic voters, have been superseded in Germany and that
their proponents are increasingly isolated in today’s party system.
Organizational and political failures of right-wing
populist players
The fragmentation of the far right
The party-political fragmentation of the far Right in Germany is symptomatic
of the inability of right-wing populism to assert itself. While success has
been achieved in other countries by pulling together various strands of rightwing
extremism and reorganizing them in a populist form, these threads are
still frayed in Germany in the shape of various parties seeking to poach each
other’s voters. In such circumstances, floating voters generally tend to support
the party that is believed to have the best prospects of success. When
each of those new right-wing populist parties that have emerged, proved,
without exception, to be a flash in the pan whose remnants swiftly faded
into political insignificance, the main beneficiaries were the far-right DVU
and NPD. The success of these parties in several state elections was not primarily
due to their populist characteristics, which were rather underdeveloped,
but to a combination of an existing protest mood and a long-term
regional strategy. The latter had enabled the NPD in Saxony to build up a
core voter base over many years and to consolidate its electoral strength.
In organizational terms too, the far Right has been catching up. Whereas
the DVU members of the state parliaments in Saxony-Anhalt and
Brandenburg, to which they were elected in 1998 and 1999 respectively,
looked like incompetent amateurs in parliament, the NPD cadres in Saxony,
most of whom were brought in from the West, initially acted in an uncommonly
professional manner. This not only presented the established parties