How a demographic ‘doom loop’ helped Germany’s far right

The Alternative for Germany party came in second in elections on Sunday, doubling its vote share from four years ago, in the strongest showing for a far-right party since WWII. Some segments of AfD have been classified as extremist by German intelligence. How could that happen in a country whose history has taught a bitter lesson about dangers of right-wing extremism?
Experts have pointed to the role of immigration, particularly the surge of Muslim refugees from Syria and other West Asia countries in the mid- 2010s, which has persuaded many people to abandon the long-dominant parties of the centre-left and centre-right.
But new research suggests an additional factor. AfD posted its biggest wins in the former East Germany, where young people have been moving away from former industrial regions and rural areas to seek opportunities in cities. Those poorer regions have entered into a demographic doom loop: a self-reinforcing cycle of shrinking and aging populations, crumbling govt services and sluggish economic growth, which has created fertile ground for AfD. And because the far-right party is strongly anti-immigration, its rise has created pressure to cut immigration levels – which further exacerbates the problems of a shrinking, aging population.
For years there has been a very strong correlation between the level of out-migration and the level of AfD support, particularly in the east, where the party came in first in most constituencies Sunday. In the decades after the country was reunified in 1990, much of the population in eastern Germany began to leave for cities and wealthy western regions that offered better opportunities. Many people from East Germany also expected a post-unification peace dividend that never materialised. “People with human capital left, and the people who stayed behind were left behind, literally,” said Thiamo Fetzer, an economics professor. The people who moved away from those regions tended to skew younger and female, and were more likely to have advanced degrees – all characteristics that also, statistically, make people less likely to vote for the far right. Those who remained were disproportionately from the demographics most likely to support AfD.
But it’s not all that’s going on. A new paper found that as emigration reduces the quality of life in “left-behind” regions, the local population tends to blame the national govt and mainstream parties for the decline – and turn even more to the far right in response. Hans Lueders, a fellow at Hoover Institution, has found that mainstream parties campaign less in left-behind regions and recruit fewer candidates there.
AfD explicitly blames immigrants for Germany’s problems. It has demanded limits on new immigration and has called for the “return” and “repatriation” of immigrants. Experts, however, say immigration is one of the few solutions to the growing problems of aging, shrinking populations. So the success of AfD threatens to create a self-perpetuating cycle, in which the political reaction to problems of left-behind regions ends up making those problems worse.
Over the long term, that could make all of Germany start to look more like the left-behind regions: an aging, shrinking population struggling to maintain public services and economic growth. Limits on immigration make it harder to find the workers needed to provide essential services like health to shrinking and aging populations. “It’s precisely the places that would be most benefiting from immigration that are the ones that seem to be most opposed to this,” Lueders said. And while the divide between former east and west makes that issue especially stark in Germany, a similar process is playing out across much of the developed world. NYT