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

130 Twenty-First Century Populism
new Right, modelled on the French Front National, however, proved impossible
to realize in the face of fierce opposition from the party rank and file, which
rebelled against the chairman’s authoritarian leadership style and ultimately
deposed him (Winkler and Schumann, 1998).
Under Schönhuber’s successor, Rolf Schlierer, the Republicans sailed into
calmer waters. The return to the party’s roots, however, was a bad move in
electoral terms, since it robbed the Republicans of their populist impact.
Their last major success in a state election came in Baden-Württemberg in
1996, and in the general election of 2005 the Republicans won 0.6 per cent
of the vote, well below the 1.6 per cent obtained by their far-right rivals, the
NPD. Just like the voters, party officials also began to jump ship, a trend that
culminated in the defection of the entire Hamburg state executive of the
Republicans to the NPD. Signs of meltdown have subsequently appeared in
other regional associations, and these are likely to plunge the party into an
even steeper downward spiral, probably resulting in its imminent disappearance
from the German political scene.
Besides the Republicans, a number of other new parties have tried their
hand at various forms of populism. The failure of any of these groups to
make a political breakthrough was due in part to their concentration on a
narrow range of issues. While the Republicans’ fixation with the immigration
issue mirrored the agenda pursued by the new right-wing populist challengers
in other European countries, the one-off successes of the Statt-Partei,
the Free Citizens’ League and the Schill Party were based on a specific localized
and/or ephemeral set of problems and were not easily transferable to
the national political stage (Decker, 2004: 151 onwards). While the Hamburgbased
Statt-Partei (‘Instead Party’), a centre-right voters’ association founded
in 1993 by a CDU dissident, Markus Wegner, focused primarily on the politics
of democracy and called for reform of the traditional partyocracy, the
Free Citizens’ League (Bund Freier Bürger), launched in the same year by
Manfred Brunner, former chairman of the Free Democratic Party (Freie
Demokratische Partei – FDP) in Bavaria, campaigned against the creation of
the single European currency. The Schill Party, named after the former local
court judge Ronald Schill, was also formed in Hamburg and devoted its 2001
electoral campaign entirely to the issue of law and order. Since the need to
fight crime overshadowed all other political issues in the campaign for election
to the Parliament of Hamburg, Schill captured 19.4 per cent of the vote,
the best-ever performance by a newly formed party in any state election.
The fact that this party of the centre-right, known officially as the Law and
Order Offensive Party (Partei Rechtsstaatlicher Offensive) was able to rally considerably
more voters to its cause than the Statt-Partei and the Free Citizens’
League before it was due not only to the support it received, particularly
from the Springer press group, which is particularly influential in Hamburg,
but also to the fact that Ronald Schill, unlike Wegner and Brunner, possessed
charisma and knew how to strike a chord with his populist pro-