A RESURGENCE OF VÖLKISCH NATIONALISM: THE CASE OF THE AFD IN GERMANY

Date

2026-7-27

Author

Usta, Tunahan Ali

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

21
views

0
downloads

Cite This

The World has witnessed the electoral successes of Right-wing populist parties and to a lesser extent, the Far-Right parties in recent decades. This rise in the parties and their electoral successes is widely discussed in literature but the specific German context, that being AfD and its ideological underpinnings are largely missing in literature. This thesis aims to analyze the ideological make up of Alternative für Deutschland and put under the lens the relationship between the AfD and ideologies of New Right movement, Völkisch Nationalism and Populism. Unlike its counterparts in Europe, the AfD successfully exploits a nationalistic history in which nationalistic forces strove to gain political power within Germany starting from the days of Prussian Empire in 19th century and remains to do so today. Despite their differences, the AfD, like its European counterparts utilizes New Right ideology such as Hegemony and Populist rhetoric to avoid facing political backlash from German public and survive and even thrive in an environment which punishes any open rightwing extremism. In this Thesis this alliance between the three forces will be explained by using a historical analysis that will attempt to demonstrate that those same three forces are united under the political banner of AfD. iv The thesis will also be utilizing qualitative methods in order to better accommodate the nature of phenomena it observes.

Subject Keywords

völkisch nationalism, Germany, populism, new right, democracy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119992

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis