Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and commentator who now is a member of the Bundestag, is ebullient, affable, opinionated, voluble and excellent company at lunch. But because his party is Alternative for Germany, one wonders whether he is representative of it, and whether he is as congenial politically as he is socially.
AfD is a Rorschach test for observers of German politics, who see in it either a recrudescence of ominous national tendencies or a healthy response of the political market to unaddressed anxieties. It was founded in 2013, two years before Chancellor Angela Merkel impulsively decided to welcome almost a million asylum-seekers. The nation was abruptly challenged to become a melting pot at a moment when there was increasing interest in recapturing a sense of Germanness.
Politics usually is grounded in grievances, and Hampel nurses AfD’s originating complaint, which was that Germany’s role under the EU’s common currency has been to bail out slothful, spendthrift Greeks and other southern Europeans. In this, AfD resembles America’s tea party movement, which was a spontaneous combustion in response to TARP.
AfD is strongest where resentments are deepest — in what was, until 1990, East Germany. There, change has come fast and hard, and incomes are still significantly below those in the rest of Germany. AfD has populism’s hostility to the disruptions and homogenization that accompany globalization. Hence AfD partakes of populism’s failure to will the means for the ends it wills: Globalization is not optional for any developed nation, least of all Germany, which on a per capita basis exports roughly four times more than the United States and 10 times more than China.
