Why is local politics relevant for radical right-wing parties? - New paper published

Local politics is a part of the political system that often receives little attention, but at the same time is central to local political negotiation. For radical right-wing parties, local politics offers opportunities to become active at a low threshold and weaken democratic institutions. Different radical right-wing parties use different strategies. A new party from this spectrum, the Free Saxons, has existed since 2021 and first contested local elections in Saxony in 2024. Why is the local level relevant for the new radical right-wing party and what is its local political strategy?

Michael Krell, a member of staff at the Chair of Human Geography, has published a new article on these questions. The paper appears in the journal "Berichte. Geography and Regional Studies". In the study entitled "'Storm the town halls with us': A scale-sensitive argumentation analysis of the Saxon local election campaign of the radical right-wing micro-party Free Saxony in 2024", Michael Krell examines the discursive patterns with which the Free Saxons present the municipal level as relevant to them and draws conclusions about their local political strategy.

Based on five identified argumentation patterns, the study shows that the Free Saxons develop a municipal policy strategy that explicitly distinguishes themselves from other radical right-wing parties. In contrast to the AfD, which is moving towards normalization, and the NPD (new: Die Heimat), which paid little systematic attention to the municipal level, the Free Saxons are trying to exploit the weaknesses of the municipal level in order to attack and weaken the democratic system "from below".

The effects of this new strategy could already be observed in the summer of 2024, when a Saxon local politician resigned due to hostility from the Free Saxons, among other things. Michael Krell wrote a scientifically sound classification of the case for Zeit Online back then.