Politicians are Failing We Must Do Something! German Business & the Populist Right

• In Event: The Far Right in Government and Society

Abstract

In the course of 2016, the nationalist wave sweeping the OECD countries crested in the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump, and in 2017, the AfD entered the German Bundestag as the largest opposition party.

These developments demolished a consensus about global free trade and threaten the interests of international business, and German business in particular. How have German firms responded to the rise of nationalism?

My paper focuses on business associations in this highly export-oriented economy to identify how business associations have responded to these geopolitical developments. I rely on interviews conducted in summer 2017 and summer 2018 with over forty German businesspeople and business associations officials to investigate how growing anti-market sentiments at the transnational level have affected firms’ orientations to the social question at the domestic level, as well as the discursive strategies firms use to defend their political positions.

Uncertainty and redistributive pressures have increased across the board: my interviewees are in universal agreement that they can take nothing for granted anymore. Nevertheless, responses diverge among different segments of the German business class.

Two business associations in particular – the machine-tool association VDMA and the federation of industrial enterprises in Baden WVIB have overcome collective action problems and heterogeneous member preferences, and for the first time ever in their history, they have created dedicated campaigns to support of the EU, liberal democracy, and the liberal market order, and oppose the populist right (for example, by trying to persuade their company's employees not to vote for the AfD).

What spurred these two associations into action? My argument is two-fold: first, the member companies of these associations tend to be small, export-dependent but not very internationalized, so more vulnerable to de-globalization than the other associations. Second, unlike behemoths such as BASF, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and Siemens, these small and medium-sized firms do not have their own government relations people and lobbyists. The vast majority of firms in both associations depend on the association to be their political voice.

There is some limited evidence that these more liberal segments of the German business class see the need for increased redistribution to facilitate a new social compromise and take the wind out of populism. By contrast, more conservative elements dispute the validity of claims that inequality in Germany is increasing or is fueling the winds of populism.

On the basis of this in-depth analysis, which reveals the discursive mechanisms linking employers’ political advocacy to their perceptions of the threats they face, I develop a framework for understanding how the rise of nationalism shapes political economic development across Europe.

Author

• Daniel Phillip Kinderman, University of Delaware