My talk at the inaugural conference of the European Political Science Society (EPSS) in Belfast took as its starting point the fact that Germany has long lacked a right wing extremist party in national politics. With the AfD this has recently changed. What role the issue of migration and its regulation have played in this change, however, is contested both politically and academically.
While many attempts to explain its rise focus on an alleged “shift to the right” by the German electorate, this paper takes a longer-term view by analysing data from the German Long-Term Election Study (GLES) from 2009 to 2025, looking at both voter preferences and perceived party policy positions on migration. While it finds some fluctuations over time in the former, it also finds a consistent absolute majority in favour of more restrictive migration rules.
Perceived party positions on the topic, however, favoured an easing of rules or maintenance of the status quo, but no increased restrictions, over most of this time, indicating a stable substantial representation gap. This only changed when the AfD moved to clearly favour more migration restrictions after 2015, providing an explanation for its electoral successes in the three elections since, especially since data do not confirm a “shift to the right” in German society or a risen salience of the topic of migration.