This episode explores the recent German elections and related social, economic and cultural issues. How did welfare measures, migration and history play a role in the elections' outcome? And how might universities serve as models for democratic engagement and outreach? Listen also to hear how the establishment of citizen councils could help to restore rational debate, a sense of efficacy and the spirit of tolerance needed to cultivate democracy.
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GLOSSARY
Traffic light coalition (p. 2 in the transcript, 08:14)
In German politics, a "traffic light coalition" (Ampelkoalition) refers to a governing alliance comprising the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and Alliance 90/The Greens. The term derives from the parties' traditional colors—red for the SPD, yellow for the FDP, and green for The Greens—which correspond to the sequence of a traffic light. This coalition model was implemented at the federal level following the 2021 German parliamentary elections. The SPD, Greens, and FDP agreed on a coalition contract titled "Daring to make more progress—an alliance for freedom, justice, and sustainability," leading to the formation of the government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz. However, in November 2024, the coalition faced significant challenges. Disagreements over budget policies culminated in Chancellor Scholz dismissing Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the FDP. This decision led to the resignation of all FDP ministers, effectively collapsing the coalition and leaving an SPD-Greens minority government. The "traffic light coalition" concept has also been applied in other political contexts, such as in Austria, to describe similar alliances. source 1 source 2
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome back to a new season of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies around the world are facing today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy Graduate Institute, Geneva.
Since 2021, he's also been a member of the Berlin based Expert Council on Integration and Migration. His research focuses on questions of inequality, the moral economy of welfare states, migration, and the sociology of borders. He's provided policy advice to various German foundations, federal ministries, and also political parties, among them the Social Democrats and the Greens. He's received numerous awards, among them the highly prestigious Leibniz Prize in 2021, in 2023 the Schader Prize and the Prize Against Forgetting for Democracy, as the prize is called. This year, the German Sociological Association has awarded him its prize for outstanding achievements in the field of public sociology.
Among his many monographs, I'm going to mention only a few that are available in English. “Social Transformation: Lifeworlds Beyond the Nation State”[i] in 2010, “Inequality, Marketization and the Majority Class: Why Did the European Middle Classes Accept Neoliberalism?”[ii] It's an early monograph from 2015, but I am going to go back to some of its arguments. And more recently, in 2022, “Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of Borders in the 21st Century”[iii], this is also going to be a focus of our discussion. His books in German on the transformation of the Lütten Klein[iv] housing estate in the city of Rostock, East Germany, where he grew up, was a bestseller, as is his latest book, “Unequally United” would be the English title, “Why the East Remains Different”[v], which is now in its fifth edition.
We'll begin by discussing some key questions about the recent German elections and some challenges they pose for liberal democratic politics in Germany and Europe. The traditional mainstream parties of the center left, the Social Democratic SPD, and the center right, the CDU/CSU alliance, have defined the political landscape of the Federal Republic of Germany until now.
The popularity of both parties has been shrinking because many Germans hold them responsible for the poor state of the economy and the so-called migrant crisis. Paradoxically, this weakening will now force them again into a grand coalition government. But it may be a relatively weak coalition due to a small majority, which will not provide a very stable government, as it will have to contend also with several acute social, economic, ecological, and also geopolitical crises.
With a voter turnout of over 82 percent, the highest since German reunification, German democracy is certainly robust. But this time around, there's been a spectacular rise of the right extreme alternative for Germany, the antiestablishment and the anti-EU party, which has finished second. Though the party is pro-Russian and anti-American, curiously, it has been strongly supported by Elon Musk.
In the weeks before the elections, many feared that CDU's chancellor elect, Friedrich Merz, may even break the post war taboo of German politics, transgressing the so-called firewall separating the far right from the rest of the political party establishment. While a potential alliance with the Alternative for Germany has been unequivocally rejected for the time being, The discourse of harsher anti-immigration policies has nevertheless undergone significant mainstreaming.
We'll talk about the significance of these major shifts in German politics, epitomized by the rise of the Alternative for Germany, the AfD, as well as the relative decline of the mainstream center right and center left parties by relating it to structural issues, such as the economic downturn and rising inflation.
A puzzling question that I posed to Steffen, drawing on his earlier research, is why the Social Democrats have been incapable of capitalizing on their traditional focus on issues of social justice and redistribution. We'll discuss the apparent paradox of the mobilizing potential of anti-immigrant rhetoric in a country that has heavily relied on migrant labor for its economic success and still needs it in a large measure.
I will also ask him to explain how extremist parties such as the AfD successfully exploit potentially divisive trigger points and a politics of affect to win over a large section of young voters. What is the significance of generational differences, as well as of persistent regional cleavages between eastern and western German regions?
Though politically united for over four decades, the two parts of the country remain apart. economically, but also culturally. What is the role of geographical mobility within the country in sustaining or changing these ideological, cultural, political differences between the regions? I'll conclude by inviting Steffen Mau to reflect on the role of universities as sites where democracy as a way of life could be freely exercised and invite him to talk about how collective deliberation and civic engagement could be furthered as a potential antidote to the false promise of direct democracy that has been peddled by extremist political forces.
Steffen, welcome to the podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you as my guest. Thank you so much for making time to join me today.
Steffen Mau (SM): Thanks for having me, Shalini.
SR: The snap elections held on 23rd of February have in a sense ushered in a new era. The CDU/CSU, the Christian Conservative Party Alliance, has come out on top, but its vote share has fallen to a mere 28.5 percent. The Social Democratic Party and the Greens, members of the incumbent government, have both lost large parts of their voters as well, while their former coalition partner, the Liberal Party, has dropped out of Parliament altogether. With around just 16 percent of the vote share, this was the worst ever showing for the Social Democrats since the party was founded at the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, the far right AfD, Alternative for Germany, with its embrace of Nazi slogans and symbols, has almost doubled its vote share to 20.8 percent compared to the previous elections in 2021. So, Steffen, let's begin with your assessment of these results. What were the key debates and campaign themes that eventually led to the poor showing of both mainstream parties who, despite their lackluster performance, will together form the next government?
SM: Thanks for your question, Shalini. Overall, I would say there's a shift to the right in the German political landscape, but it's not as strong as in other countries. The CDU just gained four or five percent, although the Traffic Light Coalition lost 15 percent. So, we have stronger margins in the German political system. The left party was revitalized. That means that on the right side, but also on the left side, we have very strong political parties, and we have a center party coalition that is much smaller than in the past. Usually when we talked about the grand coalition, we thought this 60 or 65 percent of the overall vote share, but this has now declined to a much smaller number of about 45 percent.
There was a lot of voter dissatisfaction due to the economic downturn, but also due to the large debates on migration. And some of the right-wing politicians claimed that migration is the mother of all problems. So, this issue has moved up the public agenda where it hasn't been before. Because in all surveys that were done over the last years, migration was one major issue.
But it came fourth or fifth in the overall ranking from November onwards. It went to the top due to some events. So, terrorist attacks in Germany with knives or on the Christmas markets, the events in Magdeburg in December. They all played a role. And then obviously also Friedrich Merz move in the German Bundestag end of January, where he put forward a bill and a resolution on migration and said, I will not ask other democratic parties to join and I will not look for a compromise, but I'm simply putting it up and if the AfD is willing to support it, then it's fine with me. The CDU initially started with an electoral campaign that was directed towards the economy and the economic crisis. And they have the greatest, so, competence attributions in that field. But at the very end, they have decided to take over the migration topic from the right wing, and I think, to a disadvantage.
SR: So, let me turn to two of the points that you made. Let's first look at the Social Democrats, who were somewhat paradoxically the leading party of the defeated Traffic Light Coalition, but they will also be a junior partner in the new ruling coalition with the CDU/CSU, the Conservatives.
The SPD has suffered a blow, as I just mentioned. Of course, we may recall that there was a veritable global wave of reaction against incumbents in the super electoral year of 2024, and the Social Democratic Party's defeat follows this pattern of voter discontent. In the present conjuncture, marked by an economic downturn, rising cost of living, high inflation, the question, however, is why were the Social Democrats unable to capitalize better on the party's traditional focus on distributive social justice?
It was the Linke, the radical left party, which has surprised everyone by garnering almost 9 percent of votes and by shifting the agenda to questions of redistribution, affordable housing, higher pensions, etc. And despite the increasing inequality of both income and wealth in Germany, the Social Democrats seem to have lost sizable parts of their traditional voter base.
Now, you have made a very interesting argument in a book of yours published in 2015, which I mentioned earlier, about how and why neoliberal ideology was embraced by large sections of the German and the European middle classes. It would be important to revisit your research in the light of current shifts in voter preferences.
What you seem to suggest is that even workers have internalized the myth of individual success, the neoliberal ideology, so that they find it easier to blame welfare recipients or migrants rather than question why the rich are paying such low taxes.
SM: I think there may be three answers to the question, and one is a structural answer. The electoral basis of the social democrats has transformed fundamentally. The working class is shrinking in terms of the share of the population or of the labor force. It has diminished over time and we have a growing service sector where the trade unions are weaker and the links to the social democratic parties are much weaker.
The AfD has taken over a larger number of people, and some even say they are the new working-class party, because if you compare it in terms of working class members who vote for the AfD, it goes up to 38 percent, whereas the Social Democrats gain less than 20 percent among the working class. The second argument which one could put forward is, of course, that they have been in power. And being in power makes you subject to certain types of criticism. And in the policy areas where they are strong, they could deliver partly. But, people were still not satisfied, so we have an increase in the minimum wage. They did something in the health sector, also for pensions. But overall, this has had not such a strong impact.
And they were very much restrained by their coalition partners, in particular the Liberal Party, which was not willing to raise social expenditure. So, these things obviously play a role. And then, of course, they also got pressurized by the migration issue and we know from our own studies that although the attitudes towards migration have not shifted fundamentally over the last 30 years, they play out more strongly in relation to voting decisions, not among the higher educated or the well-off people, but mostly among the lower educated.
And the final argument that you mentioned that came out of my book is that the social democrats are to some extent victim of their own historical success. Some people say the 20th century in the Western world was a social democratic century, at least in the second part, with a lot of gains in wealth in social status, in social security, but also less working hours and so on. And so many people who belong to the lower classes moved up into the middle class. And with this upward mobility, they are less tied to the social democratic program because they are less dependent on redistributions, they can build up their own assets, their life insurances, they buy maybe their houses and that makes people more skeptical of redistribution, more skeptical of progressive taxation and so on.
And this is a long-term story, the broader the middle class. And the less well organized the state services are and the public protection, the more people may turn to private solution. So, it becomes a do-it-yourself social policy where they invest in private education or they look out for their own private pension funds where they buy additional health protection.
And the more people do it, the less willing they are to pay for collective welfare. I think this is a trend that you can observe in many Western European countries, so that the success of the social democratic program of the 70s and 80s made people less dependent. On the state, in the long run, of course, it works to their disadvantage, but in first place, they might turn to other solutions which are more attractive and financially rewarding.
SR: So let me now turn once again to the issue of migration, which, as you have said, was not trending as one of the crucial topics until recently. But then came several serious fatal attacks carried out in some German cities by Islamist refugees or asylum seekers in the last few months, which changed the public mood and the public debate.
What I've noticed is that in the German public debates since decades, immigrants and refugees have always been lumped together indistinguishably. And in statistical terms, the fact is that the share of the German population born outside of the country has reached almost 20 percent, up from 12.5 percent just a decade ago.
Now the AfD has gone as far as advocating re-migration, even for foreign born German citizens. So, if the attitude to migration has remained relatively constant, why do more than half of the German citizens see immigrants as a crucial problem, despite the fact that the country has such a serious shortage of both skilled and unskilled labor?
What, in your view, are the structural obstacles to the successful integration of migrants, even in the second or third generation, into the labor market and into German society in general? What seems to be the case is that governments have also adopted a rather disingenuous approach to the question of labor migration and integration.
So, for example, the Social Democrat led government that has just been voted out of power had a memorandum with the Indian government for bringing in 90,000 Indians into Germany, a memorandum that was concluded very recently. But instead of telling the electorate about the real need for this kind of skilled migration, but also unskilled migration, all political parties have jumped on to the right-wing bandwagon of singling out immigration as a real problem.
SM: You're right, there are two very different political moves. On the one hand, we have a liberalization in terms of labor migration. There's a new law for not only skilled employment, but for many people who could come, even for job searches, to fill the gaps in the German labor market. And due to the demographic transformation, it's increasing over time. We have now very large cohorts who go into retirement. The largest cohorts in the German history, basically, or after Second World War. And so, all these working places cannot be filled with people just from Germany. So, Germany urgently needs migration.
Some economic institutes, they say, 300,000 to 400,000 per year, a very large number, and we also have a liberalization in terms of naturalization law. So, it becomes easier to get a German passport. On the other side, you have a very critical and sometimes even hysterical discourse about asylum seekers and refugees with a strong expectation of the public to close borders. These people are already here. Why don't we change their status from being an asylum seeker into someone who becomes a labor migrant. But the government is unwilling due to the assumption that this will be more pull factor, more people would come because they know they can stay on. And so, there's a discourse about re-migration and deportations, more readmission agreements with other countries.
There's a very strong expectation that the Merz government will find more countries willing to take people back. In particular, in East Germany, I think there's a very strong skepticism towards migration. It's not so much related to the actual level of migration, because fewer people with a foreign passport or migratory background live in East Germany, but it's the speed of change.
If you look at a small county like Gera, for example, in East Germany, it had 30 years ago, 100,000 inhabitants. Now it's down to 70,000. Over the last 10 years, the number of migrants moved from 2 percent to 10 percent, but they are all mainly in one age group. So, the overall number is not high, but it's concentrated in a particular social or age related group.
And very often people say: I'm not against foreigners, but I feel like a stranger in my own country because people look different. They speak differently. East Germany, one could say, cannot survive without migration. In Thuringia, for example, you have 100,000 people leaving the labor market and 50,000 people coming in. So, if I would be an entrepreneur or investor, I would not go to Thuringia because it's a demographically suicidal situation. So, they urgently need people for the labor market, but in particular, those communities and localities where you have a very strong demographic decline and depopulation, are more hostile towards migrants.
Migration is basically the key also to economic success and the flourishing of the labor market. But of course, as you said, there are preconditions to that. I would not say that all Germans are racist or chauvinist or ethno-nationalist. Most people say “Yes, migration is okay and we have become a country of immigration”, but this is conditioned upon successful labor market integration, integration into the culture and integration into the educational system.
And here we have a lack of state capacity. There are a lot of problems where things do not work as they should due to badly working administration, lack of digitization and also complications of the legal system. And we also have the rule that migrants are taken to specific places, they are assigned to places according to a specific formula. And so, they sit sometimes in a very small community where there is no labor market and they simply wait and they are not free to choose the place where they want to live. We have a very bureaucratic system of distribution across the country where the labor market plays no role.
Now they can enter the labor market after half a year. Even this is too late, I think. So, you should do more. But the assumption is always the asylum seekers have no proper entitlement to stay. And therefore, we do very little to integrate them. But the longer it takes, the more Problems will arise and the more difficult it will become to have successful integration. And this is where it's partly ideological. So, if you look at it from a very unemotional, just analytical point of view, you could easily see where Germany could do better.
SR: So now I want to take you to the emotional story that you have also worked on and talk a little bit about your book, “Trigger Points”, where you had pointed out that there is a concern about migration, diversity, but there's also a concern about inequality and climate in Germany. And yet you made a very strong dual argument, which I'd like you to explicate. You say: “Germany is not a highly polarized society. In fact, most people don't seem to have very strong political passions. It's the margins that are extreme, are highly vocal, and their voices have been overrepresented and amplified by social media and the press.”
The second argument, which you make in the book, is about the politics of affect. You say that Parties like the Alternative for Germany have managed to turn things around by taking the attention away from real conflicts about taxes or fair wages and to concentrate on what you call trigger words, tempo limit, how fast can you drive on the German autobahn, or the question of gendering in speech, quotas for trans people, but also on focusing attention against those who receive social welfare, the so called hard sphere recipients. So, it's a culture war that triggers a lot of emotional reactions that take away from facts, from evidence, and from some of the structural issues, which get then sidelined in the political discourse. Could you say something about this? And then we come to the question of East Germany, which does interest me greatly.
SM: I mean, as in many other countries, there's a big debate about polarization. Everybody thinks we are moving. towards a more polarized society. We are not moving to a two or three camp society where you have more marked differences between either social classes or even electorates. So, if you just look at their policy specific attitudes, it's rather stable. But at the same time, you read the newspapers, conflicts become more fierce. People are less able to find a compromise. And the question was, what are these debates about? What we did also empirically, by observing people, we tried to tease out situations where discussions turn from a very rational discourse into a highly emotionalized discourse, where people are less willing to compromise, where they are less willing to accept different opinions.
And we saw that this is very often not the substantive core of a policy issue. If you talk about taxation, redistribution, migration, as I did before, or climate change. In Germany, for example, we have no strong opposition between those who say climate change happens and that's a big problem. And on the other hand, there are deniers of climate change saying this is just an invention of some leftist people.
More than 90 percent say climate change is there. They share the same problem description. But at the same time, we have conflicts, fierce conflicts in the climate arena, but these are mainly time conflicts. Some people say it's already too late. We have to change our production system, our way of life, everything basically overnight in order to counter climate change. Some other people say, please not overnight. Let's do it step by step. So, it's more of a conflict on the time scale. Not on the overall policy objective or the idea of the direction of policy change, but still, we have a high number of publicly visible conflicts and very often they arise around very specific themes.
They are connected to some moral assumptions and some sense of justice, which people share, or even a kind of common sense understanding of what's normality. How things should be run, what is believed to be just, and in the book “Trigger Points”, we develop a taxonomy, different trigger themes. People are very often triggered if you put some behavioral expectations, if people are expected to change their routines, habits, the way things are organized or things they are accustomed to. If some norms of justice are violated, for example, we ask people, what do you think about trans persons? And all the people were extremely tolerant. They said, I have transpersons in my circle of friends, that's fine. And they should live as they want, and they should have equal rights.
And then we put up a kind of headline where it said, opening hours for transpersons in public swimming pools, Friday afternoon for two hours. This was a policy proposal. And then these tolerant people became totally upset. And you could say they are transphobic. They have problems with trans people, or you could say it's also a justice issue, because they see an overcrowded swimming pool.
We can see that the electorates, not of the Greens and not of the Alternative for Germany, but of all other parties, have moved closely together in the arena of migration, in the arena of climate. in the arena of diversity and identity politics. And that makes it very difficult for politicians to appeal to their electorates because they are undistinguishable and what politicians under these conditions do, they simply observe the public discourse and look for these kinds of trigger themes where people are really engaged. And this is one opportunity for them to reshuffle the electoral structure, they play these kinds of emotional cards. They do more in terms of politics of affect. There was a very interesting interview with people from the AfD who are responsible for the party strategy and they say, we are not doing much, we simply observe the media debate. And then we look where people are becoming upset and engage in that debate. And then we look at the position of the Greens and we take exactly the opposite side. So this is a strategy and it's a very good way to arouse people in a public debate.
SR: So, let me turn to the AfD with a couple of questions, which I want you to address the question of the mainstreaming of not only their agenda, but the normalization of AfD as a political party.
The German intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has warned that a faction of the Alternative for Germany at least represents a clear extremist right threat, and three quarters of Germans also consider it to be an extreme right party. Many were discussing also whether it should be banned, and whether such a ban would be counterproductive or not.
However, interestingly, the AfD's own supporters see it as a centrist party that can be trusted to act against the elites, against the establishment. Do the AfD's rather libertarian fiscal and economic policies garner so much support from ordinary Germans who would hardly benefit from them? And also paradoxically, how is it that the party has received such full-throated support from the American right, especially someone like Elon Musk, who is speaking at their party rallies in the electoral campaign, although the AfD is rather pro-Russian and anti-American and anti-Western.
SM: I think there may be two different parties within one party. One is for small people with a small income, low education, very often in manual work, and they have a kind of nostalgic feeling. This is kind of feeling the stranger in the own country attitude. And very often they are against any kind of cultural or political modernization.
This is basically the backlash thesis. And then it's interesting also for me to observe that we have now this kind of libertarian ideology, where disruption is a key term, where basically everything should be changed. We have done empirical studies on something we call change fatigue. Social change is accelerating. And a larger part of the population, about maybe 30 or 40 percent say, I cannot catch up anymore. It's becoming too much for me. I do not want that kind of change anymore. And these people are very much oriented towards the alternative for Germany. There's a very strong correlation with the voting preferences.
People with change fatigue are also very often driven by anger, political anger. They're extremely dissatisfied. They think everything is unjust. They fear status losses over time. They are also attracted by the idea of a strong man, not being bound by a legal system or a constitutional system, but also by the idea of disruption because if you feel you have little control over your life, you have a very low level of self-efficacy and a very high level of dissatisfaction with the inability of the political system to develop a coherent program to reorganize the society very often makes people then d turn to this kind of disruptive ideologies where everything is overthrown, even if that works to the disadvantage. So if you look more closely into the program of the AfD, it's basically a redistribution from the lower classes to the upper classes, so they cannot gain anything economically, but still they believe due to frustration with the last government that there's a political party here and in some way they take care for us and they make things better.
SR: So, let's look at the East West divide, Steffen, which has been one of the latest foci of your own empirical research, and let's look at some more general issues of identity formation, but also at the AfD in this context. This ethnonationalist, ultra-right populist party won 34 percent of the vote in the East German regions, almost doubling what it won in the Western side of Germany.
How would you explain this East West divide? What structural features, but also cultural features, which you have emphasized in your work would explain these differences? And then I have a historical question. As you've also pointed out, there are historical antecedents to some parts of Eastern Germany, which used to be strongholds of racism and xenophobia, going back to the years of National Socialism, where we see unbroken continuity for this kind of ideological preference.
Everybody. had expected that with decade after decade passing by after German reunification, there would be a common German identity. And what your work has shown, very interestingly, is that there's a strengthening of an Eastern German identity rather than its weakening. But what you also point out is that support for a right-wing party like the AfD is strong in Eastern Germany at its strongest, it's at 40 to 44 percent, but that's even still less than half the population of Eastern Germany. So actually, what we also need to look at is the internal division within Eastern parts of Germany, where there is also a lot of opposition. to this kind of right wing ideology. Could you talk about both the formation and the strengthening of East German identity over the years and also the internal divide, which most of us who are looking from outside of Germany often fail to take into account?
SM: So, history matters, of course, and not only the history of the GDR as a totalitarian state, but also the time before. If we look at historical data, then the NSDAP was very strong in Thuringia, for example, so in parts of East Germany. They gained power for the first time also there. They had the first ministry there. So, history matters. And we also have this. discourse on being socialized in dictatorship in East Germany, whether this leaves an imprint on people's mentalities or attitudes or political preferences. Though one needs to say that the AfD is strongest among the younger people. So, it's basically not those who have experienced the GDR most of their life. It's rather those who were born after the GDR ceased to exist. I believe that East Germany as a whole is not as resilient against the rise of right-wing populism or extremism as the West, because civil society is much weaker. You have more people from the lower classes, you have a demographic decline, outward migration of the young people, of the flexible people, skilled people.
Those who remain are more likely to vote for the AfD. We also have a very interesting gender divide in terms of right-wing voting. So, the younger women are the winners of cultural liberalization. They gained more opportunities in self-realization and emancipation in autonomy, whereas men turned to right wing ideologies.
The likelihood to vote for the AfD, where you have a very masculine society, is much higher than in those where you have equal share of both sexes. And the third aspect that needs to be mentioned is, of course, the low entrenchment of the party system, the parties who came from the West. Many members were there, but they were very weak in the East.
And still, if you look around, so how many members does the CDU, or the SPD have in East Germany? It's much lower, less than half than in the West. So, they do not really play a big role for the local political culture. So, it's related to history, but it's also related to the history after 1990, the transformation experiences with e-industrialization, mass unemployment, also a lot of political dissatisfaction.
Many East Germans feel a second-class citizen in socioeconomic terms. And we have very few East Germans who made it to the German elite in the West. Media and the economic sector and the legal system at universities, wherever you look, there are very few East Germans at the top positions. But as you said, we should not, consider this as only an East-West divide.
It's an internal East-East divide because we have now maybe 40 percent or so of people voting for the AfD, but we have 60 percent voting for other democratic parties. And here we have also in East Germany a very strong urban rural divide. So, people in Leipzig, Rostock or Jena or Dresden, they vote markedly differently than people in the rural areas or in the small and mid-sized towns. If you have a city with a university, that makes a big difference. And we also have a very strong age gap in voting behavior in East Germany, who votes for the AfD, the young people and the middle-aged people between 30 and 45 or so, not the elderly people.
SR: Let's turn to one really interesting aspect, which you discuss in your book.
What you show is that those East German university students who are assigned by the centralized pan-German university system of admissions to West German universities change their social and their political views and are likely to turn away from right wing ideologies. It's not as if all East German students are extending West German universities out of choice, many may have been forced to relocate, yet in end effect, it doesn't therefore seem to be so much about identity or political socialization in family, neighborhood or schools, but rather it seems to be the current location of these young students that determines their political views. Socialization in different milieu as a young adult is thus able to change political orientations and voter preferences as your data shows, even when some of them have been forced to move.
So geographical mobility, for example, especially in universities in the western part of Germany, seems to influence positively the cultivation of a more liberal. democratic ethos. What are the conclusions that we should be drawing from this?
SM: This study you mentioned looks at people who go to Western universities or remain in East Germany, and there is a very different trajectory.
So, the context matters. I have now looked at the data and you see context matters, even for West Germans. So, West Germans who go to the East become more like their East German counterparts. So, people adjust to their environment. And that is an interesting finding. It's not that you lose every legacy and every imprint of your own biography, but it becomes weaker.
SR: Let me conclude our conversation, Steffen, with a question that follows from your observation that context matters. You and I are both university professors, so I'd be interested to learn about what kinds of university curricula could make a difference. How does the university shape a sense of liberal values, inculcate ideas of an open society, and of democracy as a way of life? Is there something that educational institutions, schools, universities could contribute directly towards what in German is called politische Bildung, political or civic education? The main suggestion you make in your work, however, is to establish what you call Bürgerräte, citizens councils or local assemblies.
You advocate that a deeper participatory democracy needs more deliberative democracy, more direct mechanisms at the community level of civic participation to get people more engaged politically. These would give ordinary people a chance not only to be just more engaged in politics but also familiarize themselves with liberal democratic norms of consensus building across divisions in political attitudes and ideas.
How would these citizen assemblies counter the politics of affect, of frustration, of resentment that we've been discussing? Would they be able to counter the disinformation spread on social media by right wing parties like the AfD, which has, for example, used very cleverly AI generated nostalgic videos of the good old times of an ethnically pure Germany? Or would these community level forums only end up mirroring the biases and prejudices fed in such media campaigns?
SM: As I said before, for East Germany, the university plays a very big role. You also have Fachhochschulen, technical higher education institutions in mid-sized towns, and they play a very big role because they are the only actors who bring in something different, where new people come every semester, where they organize events, where they take part in civil society activities.
I think it's very important that universities consider themselves not as political, but as civil society actors within the larger environment and to have a public voice. I think it's also very good to have that kind of mission internally as part of your academic training, because this is not only about the dissemination of subject specific knowledge, but it's also related, of course, to personality building and also political socialization.
When I talk about this kind of Bürgerräte or deliberative forums or mini publics, then of course in the back of my mind is John Dewey's understanding of democracy as life form. Every day people should have a self-understanding of a kind of public responsibility for the community they live in or even for the wider society. What is missing in East Germany also due to the weakness of the party system is a context where people really engage in a discourse and form a political understanding or even a political consciousness. People have opinions on every single issue, sometimes very strong opinions. And the AfD says Bürgerräte are very very bad.
These kinds of mini publics are very bad. We want to have direct democracy. What is direct democracy? It's when you aggregate individual voices and people are in favor or against something. This is totally different to what a democracy means, because a democracy means informed public discourse, being able to exchange arguments.
And I think in these kinds of public or deliberative forums, you develop a discourse with people being selected via a lottery and discussing political solutions for specific problems very often in their community. They learn how politics works. Because you need a tolerance for different opinions, you have to listen to arguments, and you have to find a common ground and to build up a consensus.
And that kind of learning process is something completely different than having dissatisfaction, going out on the streets and demanding the governments to do A, B or C to your own benefit. These kinds of public or deliberative forums help you to understand that people with their biographies, with a social experience, with a social position, see the same problem somehow differently.
And this is legitimate. I do not know whether this will weaken the AfD in the long run, but it would at least be a counter structure against the widespread feeling of political alienation and deprivation, because there's a very low level of political self-efficacy. People simply think they have no say in politics. They are left out. The people on the top do what they want. And here you would really give them an opportunity to engage in decision making to make up their mind.
Shalini: Thank you very, very much, Steffen, for this really wide-ranging discussion into not only the election results, but also some fascinating insights into the structures of German society, German politics, which will affect the future of democracy in the country, and suggestions for how to deepen it.
SM: Thanks for having me.
SR: Compared to previous episodes last year devoted to elections, our conversation today has highlighted important social, economic, and cultural issues related to the outcome of German elections instead of primarily analyzing political party agendas and results. Steffen argued that the defeat of Germany's Social Democrats should not only be viewed simply as an anti-incumbency vote. Instead, he suggested that the post war success of social democracy in creating a more equal society and establishing a strong welfare state has meant that many of its traditional voters have moved out of the working class. Ironically, they now oppose the mechanisms of redistribution that they themselves have benefited from.
They are against generous welfare measures in pursuit of ever greater promises of individual material success. However, those who were left behind, especially in East Germany, have increasingly turned to far right parties that blame structural problems on immigrants and refugees. Jeff explained why local resentment towards the uneven distribution of refugees across the country prevents not only a rational discourse about the economy's increasing reliance on migrant labor, but a bureaucratic system of centrally organized placement of refugees has proved to be counterproductive, for it also makes it impossible to efficiently integrate them into the labor market.
The far right has bundled together migrants and refugees into one single category, holding them responsible for unemployment, housing shortages, deteriorating public health care. Most politicians have simply been afraid of openly admitting Germany's dependence on immigration amidst this atmosphere of anger and resentment. Instead, they've given this anti-immigration discourse of the political right a new legitimacy while easing on the one hand naturalization and also entering into agreements with various foreign governments to attract different categories of immigrants. Drawing on his own empirical research, Steffen has compellingly shown that parties such as the AfD are skillful manipulators of affective politics. They search for potentially polarizing subjects, so called trigger points, to amplify these divisive issues, to position their party in sharp contrast to mainstream parties. Speaking of the AfD's voters, Steffen emphasized a few key demographic determinants such as the East-West divide with its specific historically path dependent legacies in Germany, but also age group and gender differences.
History matters. It matters in multiple ways, as he pointed out, whether we consider precursors in the Nazi period or the weak presence of mainstream parties and civil society after reunification in Eastern German regions. The economic hardships after reunification have also led to disappointment and anger, large scale out migration of the young and better educated to western parts of Germany. The resulting underdevelopment of many eastern regions has left their residents perceiving themselves as second class citizens, deprived of welfare that migrants and refugees are receiving unfairly in their view. Yet, as Steffen has reminded us, geography is not destiny, as even in Eastern German states, the majority of citizens is opposed to the right wing AfD. And there is considerable variation in terms of gender, age groups, or the urban rural divide. Moreover, his studies of educational mobility have interestingly shown that regional identity differences are in fact malleable and amenable to change in a different context. More generally, the very presence of universities or polytechnics in a city can have a positive influence on people's outlook as they bring in diversity and also new people into an area. Universities are sites of free discourse and of self-cultivation.
They can serve as models for democratic engagement and outreach. Steffen has also suggested the establishment of citizen councils, or what he calls mini publics, to restore rational debate, a sense of efficacy, and a spirit of tolerance and compromise so necessary to cultivating democracy as a way of life. These might represent a genuinely democratic alternative to the siren song of direct democracy. Which far right populist parties and their rapidly growing allies in Germany and elsewhere have begun to offer to their followers.
This was the second episode of Season 10. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks’ time when I talk about some of the cultural politics and contradictions of contemporary Iranian society with Nacim Pak-Shiraz, Professor of Cinema and Iranian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed and do let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
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[iii] Mau, S. (2021). Sortiermaschinen: Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert. C.H. Beck.
[iv]Mau, S. (2019). Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Suhrkamp Verlag.
[v]Mau, S. (2024). Ungleich vereint: Warum der Osten anders bleibt. Suhrkamp Verlag.