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Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rolf Frankenberger, Managing Director Research, Institute for Research on Right-Wing Extremism (IRex), University of Tübingen

The process of industrialisation, globalisation and urbanisation – spreading out from urban centres into the countryside – is one of the core developments of modern society. It has changed people’s lives in almost every part of the world. This is a process that has been going on for more than a century. New lifestyles have developed and traditional ones have been challenged.

A new division has emerged as a result between the urban and the rural. The two are more than just forms of settlements – they reflect ideals, values and lifestyles. Those who live in towns and cities lead almost entirely different lives to those who live in the countryside.

Where the two meet, there is potential for tension. And that tension can be politicised. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right nationalist and völkisch party, is using the “urban-rural divide” to polarise and mobilise an electorate that is attracted by romanticised notions of purity, tradition, nation and rurality.

Using spatial and data analysis, we can illustrate the patterns of this politicisation.

Imagine you are living in a small village in the countryside. You strongly believe in traditions and family life. You regard the landscape around you as home – as heimat, as it would be called in German. But people from abroad are moving into your village, because they can afford land there. They are different in the way they think and live. They might, for example, be digital nomads in search of a picturesque location for their home office.

These newcomers bring the city with them, changing the rural community they join. City, to you, is a cipher for urbanity, globalism and individualism.

But this is just one side of the coin. The other is that people from the countryside also move to cities, be it for education, work or just because there is nothing left in their village. And they bring their lifestyles to the city, too, trying to keep up traditional ideals of how the world should look.

Diversity, ambiguity and, sometimes, incompatibility become the norm under these conditions. Urban lifestyles and designs – such as shared flats, alternative family forms, non-binary identity or digital mobility at work – collide with rural norms such as the traditional family and “rootedness” across generations.

This can happen both in cities and in rural areas. As a result, a pluralism of ideas, styles and values arises – ranging from progressive, liberal and leftist, inclusive, modernist values to traditional, conservative and rightist, exclusive and nationalist beliefs. They coexist but are unevenly distributed over urban and rural areas.

The AfD and other far-right parties introduce a political meaning to the urban-rural divide. The AfD pushes a narrative of the city as a negative force that is fundamentally incompatible with the rural. It claims that an elite cartel has usurped power in Germany and is trying to destroy the “culturally determined German identity”. It instead advocates for the protection of a leitkultur – of customs and traditions (brauchtum) that it believes create identity. It asserts heteronormativity as a biological fact, emphasises a strong traditional family, traditional farming and rural identity.

What might be called cultural landscapes (kulturlandschaften) have become a particular battleground of late, with opposition to the construction of wind turbines, especially in forests, now a policy position. The AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, described these as “windmills of shame” (“Windmühlen der Schande”) and called for their dismantling at the recent party congress. Wind turbines can be understood here as expressions of urban leitmotifs in a rural cultural landscape – they disrupt the countryside to provide energy for unseen urban consumers.

And ultimately, this politicisation translates into electoral outcomes. In the European parliament elections of June 2024, the AfD took 15.9% of German votes. If we look at the spatial distribution of the AfD’s vote, a pattern showing the salience of the urban-rural divide emerges.

East and west, town and country

It’s clear by looking at the map that most (though not all) of the AfD’s strongholds are in eastern Germany – the region which used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Fascism and Nazism were outlawed by decree when this anti-fascist state was established but, in reality, far-right ideologies don’t die off that easily. The result was that extremist views survived in an environment where there was also a lack of education on the National Socialism of the past – and a lack of education about democracy.

When the socialist authoritarian GDR regime fell in 1989, Germany was reunified under western conditions. This had various effects, including a sense that the experiences of the east were not valued. The inequalities between the two sides of the reunified nation have left some in the east feeling distant from the state. The AfD’s version of nationalism finds fertile ground here.

Another pattern is also clear across the whole country: the AfD is stronger in remote and rural areas and weaker in urban centres. There is less support in cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich and Stuttgart. Places with more globalised cultures, international business and diverse populations remain comparably resilient to the spread of the far right.

These patterns become more visible if you take the European election results in the state of Baden-Württemberg as an example.

The AfD performs significantly worse in the more globalised, cosmopolitan and university-oriented urban areas and their suburbs than in the more remote and rural areas of Baden-Württemberg. On the map, university cities are marked out with a white outline.

The AfD is particularly strong in the northern and eastern Black Forest, on the Baar, in the Swabian Alb, in the Rems-Murr district, in the Swabian Forest and in Hohenlohe. Most of these areas are remote, with many small towns and villages. They have slightly lower income levels and lower levels of migration than average. They are much more traditional in terms of culture and religion than urban areas.

The Black Forest, the Swabian Forest, and Hohenlohe also have quite strong protestant and evangelical communities, which are strongholds of traditional family life, customs and traditions.

We should expect to see these trends continue. The AfD looks set to make further gains in the February 23 election being held in Germany, retaining its strongholds in the east but also spreading into the west in rural areas. The urban-rural divide will therefore become all the more apparent and entrenched when German voters head to the polls.

Rolf Frankenberger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. These maps of support for Germany’s far-right AfD lay bare the depth of the urban-rural divide – https://theconversation.com/these-maps-of-support-for-germanys-far-right-afd-lay-bare-the-depth-of-the-urban-rural-divide-248405