The Impact of European Integration on West European Politics by Luca Carrieri

Author:Luca Carrieri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030481032
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3.2 Germany

The German party system has apparently exemplified the transformative impact of Euro crisis, the major catalyst of change in this country. Since the post-war period, the German political and economic elite had been traditionally very supportive of the European project, expecting to gain advantages from the establishment of a common market area and to bring an end to the country’s political insulation (Bulmer and Paterson 2013). Before the crisis, this party system had constantly lacked in any important radical-right Eurosceptic entrepreneur, only presenting one radical-left actor, the PDS/Die Linke (Left Party), which only moderately emphasised these issues (Carrieri 2019). At the same time, the mainstream actors had not significantly highlighted the EU issues, maintaining benefits from a widespread permissive consensus on the deepening integration.

The Euro crisis impacted the German landscape, probably triggering long-lasting changes in the party-system format. With the German economy rapidly recovering from the crisis, the government took on the leadership role in the Eurozone, dominating the intergovernmental bargaining and endorsing bailout packages for the debtor countries (Schmitt-Beck 2017). This debate gave rise to unprecedented anxieties in the German population, who perceived the risks involving the fiscal transfers, awakening latent Euroscepticism grounded in the most radical interpretation of ordo-liberalism (Grimm 2015). In April 2013, a group of intellectuals and journalists founded a new protest party, the radical-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose platform reflected these spreading anti-European sentiments. In fact, the AfD had chiefly profiled itself as an anti-currency party, cueing the voters on getting rid of the euro (Reher 2017). AfD politicisation efforts were extraordinary (27.8), affecting the overall protest entrepreneurial index, which skyrocketed from 7.3 (2006) to 18 points (2014), mirroring the most important relative variation (+146.6%) in all of Western Europe (Fig. 4.9).

Fig. 4.9Average levels of EU issue entrepreneurship for mainstream and protest parties between 2006 and 2017—Germany

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