Topographies of the far right: deprivation, social cohesion, and the urban-rural divide

The city as an absolute, relative, and relational space (Harvey 2004) is often depicted as a harbour for liberal values opposite the countryside, thus feeding into the narrative of the cosmopolitanism – communitarianism cleavage (Koopmans & Zürn 2019), with the latter group being prone to far-right ideology and populism. At the same time, gains of the far right among left-behind communities are often attributed to the orphaned working-class voters after the Blair-Clinton-Schröder years, establishing a link between economic deprivation and right-leaning politics (Oesch 2008). Finally, voting for the far right is also attributed to a lack of social cohesion, since trust, identification, and collective efficacy (Chan, To & Chan 2006) should advance progressive politics. This paper takes two closer looks at these links: Firstly, we combine vote shares for the far-right and indicators like sociodemographic makeup on borough level with original panel-survey data from 2021 (FGZ-Regionalpanel; Sackmann, Rees, Hartl 2024) on the same level for the cities of Magdeburg in East-Germany and Hannover in West-Germany. Using multilevel regression analysis on the local vote shares of the far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) in the 2021 general election, we find differing patterns regarding voting for the far-right. Whereas the narrative of the left-behind working class holds true for West Germany, voting for the far-right in East-Germany appears to be much more an expression of the "extremism of the middle" (Lipset 1960). This is underpinned by dynamics of "anomic provincialism" (Thompson 2012), with voters in affluent suburbs flocking to the right amidst an urban landscape impeding community-building. In a second step, we widen the focus to analyse the urban-rural divide and beyond Germany by extending our analysis to four mid-sized cities (with less than 50,000 inhabitants) and four rural settlements (less than 5,000 inhabitants) in Germany and one mid-sized city in Poland. For the latter, surveyed in 2023 deploying the same questionnaire as in the German communes, we fit models to the share of votes achieved in the 2023 Polish parliamentary election. However, we consider not only the right-wing populist party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, PiS) but also the far-right Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość (Confederation Liberty and Independence, Konfederacja), which made considerable gains against the backdrop of the overall win of the progressive alliance led by Donald Tusk’s Koalicja Obywatelska (Civic Coalition, KO). Concluding, we argue for a differentiated and more nuanced view on narratives about the rise of right-wing populism, including a thorough investigation of local and historical contexts to better understand the rise of the far-right in Europe.