‘A Horseshoe in Crisis’ - To what extent do German populist far-right and far-left parties converge in times of crises?

Abstract

As the world began seeing light at the end of the tunnel with lockdowns ending and a global recovery in sight, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 catapulting the world into the next crisis sending shockwaves worldwide. The war crimes committed in Ukraine, have forced the European states to act internationally, as well as domestically. Considering the presence of such crises, this paper provides an insight into the strategies and policies national populist parties adopt. In doing so, this study focuses on the German populist far-right party AfD and populist far-left party Die Linke, comparatively measuring their agreement on a variety of policy topics surrounding the 2022 Ukraine War and comparing it to those of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. A comprehensive theoretical framework discusses the main concepts, and the objectives of this study based on previous literature. The collected data consists of segments of parliamentary speeches members of the German parliament across 17 to 33 months. The methodology comprises of 3 instruments including a stance analysis of speech as primary method. The use of manifestos from the MARPOR database serve the measurement of the concept populism and an analysis of legislative roll call votes as an additional step to identify consistency between stances from speeches and stances from legislative voting. While this study expected causation between the presence of crises and populist party stance convergence, findings were limited to minor similarities, displaying insufficient convergence across both crises. The paper nonetheless contributes to a wider understanding of populism’s relationship to crises and the strategies it warrants for populist parties to employ in times of societal turmoil.