Populismus für Anfänger

written on November 6, 2026, read November 2026

We all live in our own bubble, somehow. As far as I know, there’s nobody among my acquaintances who sympathises with the AfD (Alternative for Germany). At least nobody shows it openly. That may be because an acquaintance or friendship with me and voting for the AfD are incompatible, the people around me know that, and so they simply don’t tell me. Or because one’s own bubble pre-sorts acquaintances and friendships in such a way that the problem doesn’t even arise. After all, you look for people who fit you a little. And so AfD voters somehow stay at a distance. It works both ways: whoever votes AfD will probably consider my political preferences just as utterly incompatible with their own worldview and will unconsciously avoid me as soon as they, just as unconsciously, notice where I stand politically. I can live with that just fine. But that’s exactly how bubbles and echo chambers come about.¹

I’ve now been a poll worker at two elections with three rounds of voting. I’ve seen hundreds of people, greeted them in a friendly way, checked IDs, crossed their names off the list, handed them their ballot papers. And in the evening you learn how many people voted for the AfD. And you try to reconcile that with the faces you’ve seen during the day. Of course you have your guesses, your prejudices. Let he who is without prejudice buy himself a bag of pebbles. I’m certainly not. But you keep all that to yourself, don’t let anyone notice for a second what you’re thinking, and keep your eyebrows where they belong. Because there’s no room for that on the chair with the list. You only become a political being again when you go home in the evening after the count.

But this is the point where votes become faces. Possible faces. You don’t know, of course. Secret ballot and all that. In the polling district where I helped, 21.3 percent voted for the AfD. Those of them who didn’t vote by post could have stood in front of me that day. The voters of a party that is so far removed from everything you yourself think are no longer just a text on the internet or a note in the newspaper, but people you encountered during the day.

But I’m not someone who simply accepts things, says “That’s just the way it is” and doesn’t think about it any further. The AfD is a right-wing populist party. Why do people vote for populist parties? How does populism actually work? And why does it apparently work so well that so many people in my polling district vote for a party whose regional branch here in Lower Saxony has been classified by the domestic intelligence service as a right-wing extremist endeavour? And this isn’t information you have to search for long: the article I just linked comes from Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the regional public broadcaster.

It’s not that someone votes for or believes in something different, has a different sexual orientation or shapes their life differently. Everyone may find salvation after their own fashion, as long as they abide by the Basic Law. Do what you want, as long as you let me do what I want, and your swinging arm always stops just short of my nose. And as long as you also let others do what they want, and stop short of their noses too. You may also say what you want. It’s just that I might consider you a blockhead. But I can also live just fine with you considering me a blockhead.

It’s this “distinction” from the domestic intelligence service, our past and the election successes that I can’t get to line up.

Whenever I don’t understand something, I start reading. Because the next insight often lies in the next book. After “Machttechnik Populismus”, I recently read a second book on populism: “Populismus für Anfänger” (“Populism for Beginners”) by Walter Ötsch and Nina Horaczek. The two authors structure their book as if they wanted to hand an aspiring populist the necessary toolkit. And that works surprisingly well.

They sum up the toolkit in patterns you should stick to if you want to be a successful populist – for example “Pattern 14: Invent scapegoats” (p. 46). The patterns are often illustrated with examples. Because both Horaczek and Ötsch are Austrian, these examples have a clear Austrian bias. But the similarities with other countries are striking. In part the book points them out itself; elsewhere you involuntarily hold the impressions of recent years up against them.

Of course, the two use this device to show how to recognise populism, how to guard against it and, if necessary, how to set limits to it. The entire last chapter is about how to deal with populism – and I consider it the most important one in the book.

But I do think these patterns nicely show how simple populism actually is and why it catches on: because it is based on simple basic concepts and simplifies the world. A world that is becoming increasingly complicated and has increasingly complicated problems – and in which many people look for simple explanations because their own lives are complicated enough already. A world in which, even in the small garden of my own field, I increasingly wonder how much longer my mental little shovel will be enough to keep up.²

Time and again the two authors point to similarities with the Nazi era. They often accompany these references with the clarification that the Nazi era stands on its own. On page 188 they write: “A comparison is not an equation, a similarity is not sameness.” And that’s absolutely right. The Nazi era stands on its own in every respect. Anyone who claims sameness here trivialises it. But I know a soaped-up slippery slope when I see one – even if I don’t know where it leads. When you look at the toolkit of populism and keep drawing the comparison to the Nazi era yourself, you think: it’s frightening enough that so much is so similar that this sentence has to be written at all.

The time when the Nazi regime came to power was barely 100 years ago. Even though we’ve made so much progress since then – we’ve landed on the moon, can cram over 800 people into a plane and have computers that generate cat videos – 100 years are practically nothing. In Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, which compresses the history of the universe into a single year, 1933 would fall within the very last second before midnight. We aren’t all that different from the people of that time.³ And that’s why these means still work. It probably only takes the wrong person who makes use of this toolkit – at the wrong time in the wrong country. And that frightens me. Because I fear that Fritz Bauer – the Hessian attorney general who set the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in motion – was right: “I believe it is a sad truth that we are still very close to our ape state and that civilisation is only a very thin layer that flakes off very quickly.”