Seven months before the election, what’s up with the Alternative für Deutschland? I’ve kept repeating this since the Alternative für Deutschland’s ascendancy in the polls began in late 2015: the AfD’s electoral popularity depends on a) steering away from open right-wing extremism, which has frustrated previous attempts to establish a right-wing populist party in Germany, and…
Before Christmas, I had yet another chat with the journalist Yardena Schwartz, who covers Germany for various outlets in the US. Parts of our conversation re-surface in a piece she wrote for Politico on Germany’s Far Right: [contentcards url="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/germanys-far-right-rises-again-214543"] She also published an article on how the Far Right tries to capitalise from the Berlin…
The good folks over at the LSE (which, apart from running one of the most vibrant Political Science blogging sites on the planet also happens to host a university) have kindly asked me to look ahead at the likely outcome of the German Federal Election in September in general and the role of the Alternative…
I recently had a lengthy chat with Yardena Schwartz on the AfD’s significance for German politics, and their likely trajectory. One thing that came out of it is a CJR article on the (mis?)representation of the AfD and their voters in the German media. I don’t agree with everything she writes, but it is certainly…
This week, I had the opportunity to talk on the Nuffield Politics Seminar about my current project on citizens’s preferences on Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) and how they differ from what lawmakers decided. The feedback I got was amazing, though not always practical (“If you could go back in time and vary about 10 experimental conditions…
I’m enormously flattered that the good people over at Nuffield College have invited me to their Political Science Seminar Series. I’m talking about a current project of mine that looks into the extent of the gap between citizens’ and legislators’ preferences on bioethical issues in general and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) in particular. Here is the…
The right-wing website Breitbart, one of the key allies of the Trump campaign, has told Reuters (link to the article is below) that they want to expand their network to include sites for France and Germany. Breitbart already has a site in the UK, which was an important part of the pro-Brexit network. Allegedly, they have…
The #AfD’s leadership is highly fragmented. Regional figures play an important role for the ideology and image of the party. The national executive has not one, but two party chairs. While Frauke Petry is the more prominent and visibly radical of the two, co-leader Jörg Meuthen, an academic economist, has long refused to be sidelined…
This week, as part of their “New Right” lecture series, I was kindly invited to the University of Copenhagen to give a talk on the AfD and Pegida. Here are my slides.
The good folks over at CEMES are running a lecture series on the “New Political Right in Continental Europe“. What’s even better: they have kindly invited me to talk about Germany. Here is the abstract of my presentation: For decades, Germany has been a tough ground for the Radical Right. Support for right-wing parties such…