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Schaefer, Hanne

University of British Columbia

While both research on rising European anti-immigration parties and memory politics have vastly expanded in the last decades, the connection between the two has been widely neglected. To bridge this gap, this thesis studies the relationship between historic narratives and society's advocated boundaries by populist right-wing parties (PRPs). Utilizing the concepts of memory politics and Schinkel's conceptualization of imagined societies, this thesis analyzes the 2021 party manifesto of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). The analysis is structured by the following three questions: 1) Is German society portrayed as a historical one? 2) What historic moments are chosen as crucial for defining such a historic society? 3) How does the party's historic society narrative relate to its immigration agenda? Through a both inductive and deductive critical discourse analysis of the 2021 party manifesto, it argues that the AfD's anti-immigration position builds on the party's professed duty to protect German historic society by protecting the country's cultural and geographical boundaries. In the second part, this thesis explores the usefulness of the framework when applied to parties beyond the far-right political spectrum. Given the scope of the thesis, it chooses the left-wing populist party DIE LINKE. The findings indicate that the left-wing party shows a different challenge than the right: Namely, an ideological approach to German historical identity and immigration, lacking a true acknowledgement of immigrant history in Germany.

Text

2024-01-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87070

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/