*3.2. AfD*

Founded in 2013, and with members elected to the European Parliament and to the state parliaments of Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia in 2014 (in addition to a number of municipal and *Kreis* councils), the AfD achieved parliamentary representation four years earlier than Vox. This means that (as of 2019) in contrast to Vox there is already a considerable body of scholarly research on AfD. The party's emergence and metamorphosis has been outlined by, for example, (Decker 2016; Lewandowsky 2016; Lehmann and Matthieß 2017; Jesse 2019). The most detailed account is to be found in (Butterwegge et al. 2018, Chapter: "Entstehung und Entwicklung der AfD bis zur Gegenwart") which also provides information on other and earlier populist parties in Europe with very similar discourse strategies and concepts to those to be outlined below for AfD. Within the development process of the party an important factor is the role played by the massive influx of refugees (at least 800,000) in 2015 (Arzheimer and Berning 2019; Geiges 2018). The party is also the farthest right of any party on the parliamentary spectrum in Germany, which has naturally given rise to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution's (*Bundesverfassungsschutz*) placing it under observation. Presentations and analyses of its radicalisation and/or positions are to be found in, for example, (Gould 20186; Zick et al. 2019). These considerations inevitably lead to the topic of populism in relation to AfD: See (Lees 2018; Häusler 2019). They equally lead to questions about the party's electorate, particularly as relating to the rejection of refugees (Hambauer and Mays 2018; Lengfeld and Dilger 2018). There is, however, some discussion around the question of whether persons at the lower end of the social scale are more inclined or not to vote for AfD (Lengfeld 2017; Lux 2018) or whether they were drawn from the same classes of voters as the existing parties (Hansen and Olsen 2019).

In the case of AfD, a similar opportunity to that provided to Vox by the surge of regional separatism in Catalonia was the arrival in Germany in 2015 of at least 800,000 refugees from Moslem countries. It accelerated the move by the AfD away from its origins in the financial crisis as an anti-Euro party towards a more nationalist stance more immediately understandable and appreciated by a wider voting public, enabling the party to point to the danger the refugees represented for national identity.

The evidence above that Abascal's positions on fundamental points concerning Spanish identity significantly pre-date the party, plus the information on Islamophobia and anti-Islamic discourses at various levels of German society (see above and Sarrazin 2010) in the 1990s and 2000s, indicate that any 'Bannon effect' arising from his networking in Europe in 2018/2019, much discussed in the press (Die Welt 2019; Junquera 2018; Pérez Oliva 2018), and deliberately provocative interviews (Verdú 2019), is limited to the promotion of well-established and already-existing views on Muslims, immigration, the EU, the nation, etc., and does not involve the creation of these views. (Junquera 2018) and Verdú's interview with Bannon (Verdú 2019) indicate the establishment of contacts between Bannon and Vox; for contacts between Bannon and AfD, see (Serrau 2019).

## **4. The Nation**

## *4.1. The Nation and Its National State*

Each party views Spain or Germany, as the case may be, as the present and future framework for the existence and evolution of its respective nation. Consequently, it is both relevant and important to consider the attitude to the state and the fit (or otherwise) between this essential framework and the nation which inhabits it.

In the case of each country, the fundamental structure of the national state is federal. In Germany this is not contested by any party or at any level. In Spain, on the other hand, the term "federal"

<sup>6</sup> To save space and avoid repetition frequent reference will be made to this long analysis of the AfD election manifestos for the 2107 federal election and for the 2017 state elections in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, the Saarland, and Schleswig-Holstein.

is strictly avoided. However, with significant areas of governmental activity such as health-care, social policy, policing, local government, language, education, some areas of taxation, certain levels of the administration of justice, cultural a ffairs, agriculture, environment, heritage a ffairs being the responsibility (though in some cases shared with the central government) of the elected parliament and cabinet of each of the seventeen 'autonomous communities' whose existence is guaranteed in the Constitution (plus also the autonomous cities of Melilla and Ceuta on the North African coast), it is not unreasonable to think of the structure as federal in fact and form, if not in terminology (Baglioni 2013). This federal or quasi-federal political structure is the home to the respective *Volk* and *nació<sup>n</sup>*, each of which is acknowledged to be an ethno-cultural entity (see below). However, it will also be outlined below how Vox consistently attacks the current political form of Spain as fundamentally in contradiction to its conception of the unitary identity of the Spanish nation and consequently as deeply harmful to this unity and to the unity of the state. The two parties di ffer fundamentally in their attitudes to the political structure of the nation state.
