This recent polling data will come as a surprise to many.
Like many of the “new right” parties in Europe, the AfD began as an anti-immigration party. Its support began to rise in direct response to Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to admit over 1 million Syrian refugees. But like many of these other new right parties, it has become a vehicle for the expression of generalized disaffection with government and with the previously dominant two major parties. As this polling data shows, it is now the most popular party among those under 50 in Germany (and one of the two most popular parties for those under 60).
Germany’s mixed-member, proportional representation election system has generated increasingly dysfunctional governments. Its most recent elections led to a government cobbled together out of three parties, which formed a governing coalition that is incoherent from a policy perspective. The internal tensions have led to constant fighting between the parties and an inability to make major policy decisions to address Germany’s major economic and political issues. The government recently collapsed and Germany has been forced to hold new elections.
This illustrates a dynamic I’ve written about over the last decade. Many democratic governments across the West appear incapable to large segments of their societies to deliver effective government on the issues people care most about. That alienation and disaffection leads voters to abandon the mainstream, traditional parties and turn to more extreme options. The proportional representation systems make this dynamic worse; they are more likely to generate multi-party governing coalitions that then find it difficult to address the concerns of citizens. But that’s not to say all is well in the first-past-the-post democracies, like the US and the UK, either. For the data, hat tip to @OwenWntr.
