Die AfD: Eine Partei der sich ausgeliefert fühlenden Durchschnitts- verdiener?

When the party was founded in 2013, AfD supporters earned above-average incomes but over time there has been a shift towards an average income. Despite this downward shift, AfD supporters are not overly worried about their own economic situation; they are, however, very pessimistic about the future. Their concerns are not only connected to immigration questions but also to the future of Germany‘s economic and social institutions. The expressed anxieties and concerns are fed by a feeling of general helplessness. In this article we try to find an explanation for the conflicting poles between a sound financial situation on the one hand and the perceived threats on the other by conducting a regional regression analysis of federal state elections in Germany. Although AfD supporters do not live in precarious conditions, the AfD turns out to be especially successful in economically weak regions with high unemployment rates and in regions with a high proportion of foreigners in West Germany, which seem to lead AfD voters to infer threat scenarios. In West German university cities, however, this is different since the AfD is less successful there. This holds particularly true when the proportion of foreigners is high. For East Germany we find few specific regional determinants across districts for the comparably high AfD vote shares. There the AfD seems to have arrived in the middle of society.