Old Ideologies and New Strategies. German Right-Wing Populism

The essay aims to explore how revisionist positions on Nazism and Shoah, expressed by members of the German New Right, influence the public debate on the construction of a new German national identity, migration policies and Euroscepticism. The essay analyses right-wing populism in Germany (Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Pegida, and Identitarian Movement) by exploring its ideological roots, its communication strategies and the political implications of its historical revisionism. The ideological profile of the Alternative für Deutschland party is heterogeneous, as it brings together völkisch neo-conservatism, 19th-century pangermanism, anti-modernism of the "Konservative Revolution"against pluralist democracy and liberal society, Euroscepticism, neo-liberalism, ‘nativism’ as an aversion to the extension of political and social rights to foreigners, Islamophobia and racism. A further source of inspiration is Antonio Gramsci's concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ as a precondition for the assumption of political hegemony. Populists and Right wing extremists adopted positions that had traditionally belonged to the Left: the demand for a more direct democracy, opposition to the establishment, criticism of capitalism and bourgeois society, ecological sensitivity, defence of the poorer strata (but in opposition to immigrants). New forms of communication allow the German New Right to reach wider sections of the population, especially the young. The mode of expression is aggressive and simplistic; pathos-laden language fuels feelings of fear and resentment. AfD uses language politics as a means of mobilisation to convey an ethnic concept of national identity and spread ultra-conservative conceptions of society, family and role of women. The polemical target of the German New Right is the remembrance culture focused so strongly on the Shoah that it becomes a ‘culture of guilt’, which hinders the pursuit of national interests. The intellectuals and politicians of historical revisionism (Thilo Sarrazin, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Björn Höcke) are therefore united by the desire to put an end to the reworking of the national-socialist past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) in order to promote a politics of history that increases national pride. Historical revisionism goes hand in hand with the rejection of the European integration project, seen as a process of progressive erosion of national sovereignties and identities. The defence of German national identity implies a polemic against the integration policies of immigrants (especially Muslims), which constitutes a threat of ‘ethnic replacement’, and against multiculturalism, which represents a ‘deliberate self-destruction of European and Western culture’.