Business as Usual in the Face of the Populist Challenge? The AfD’s Entry Strategy and Mainstream Parties’ Responses to It

This paper examines the Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) entry strategy and subsequent party repositioning in the German political space from 2013 to 2021. Integrating the demand and supply side of politics, we employ the spatial theory of party competition and data from the German Longitudinal Election Study. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on predefined dimensions, we derive the dimensionality of political space empirically through computational text analysis of party manifestos. Our findings confirm that the mainstream parties’ disregard for the salient asylum and immigration issues facilitated the AfD’s rise in 2017. We show how the AfD used the dimension of national sovereignty rather than GAL-TAN to enter politics. Despite its entry, political turbulence and party realignment in the AfD’s favour were limited, as incumbents either maintained their positions or distanced themselves. The AfD’s further radicalisation in 2021 contributed to increased polarisation. Over time, the parties’ overall contribution to the national sovereignty dimension increased, making it second only to the socioeconomic dimension in structuring Germany’s political space. Our findings highlight the interplay between established parties’ issue avoidance, populist challengers’ entrepreneurial strategies, and their consequences for party competition in multidimensional spaces.