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Alexander Gauland confesses in the "FAZ" to populism. That's brave.
From the author and from the newspaper. So far, populism in Germany has been nothing to adorn oneself with. And Gauland as an author does not like everyone. Not even in the "FAZ". But it pays off to look through the immediately emerging outrageous mist: Gauland has written a clever text about the German - and the Western - misery. But from his right thoughts on elite criticism, he then draws the wrong conclusions.
We live in a time of conviction. It is by no means self-evident to deal with thoughts that one rejects. This is particularly difficult for the AfD. It is a right-wing, in part right-wing extremist party. She lives from resentment. She sows the hatred. It fuels the fear of Islam and the contempt for Muslims. And it gives the Holocaust trivia and anti-Semites a political home - even if now a Jewish group has been founded in the AfD.
But with all that she is - at least when it comes to development - the currently most successful party in Germany. When the boss of this party analyzes his success, one should listen carefully.
Gauland explains modern populism in response to globalization. It has formed a new elite, "you could also speak of a new class": people from the business, politics, entertainment and cultural industries working in international companies, the media, the NGOs, in the large Living cities that are mobile, who know each other, who are here today and tomorrow there - everywhere at home, but no longer in their homeland.
"The rain that falls in their home countries does not make them wet", writes Gauland and suddenly you realize that he is writing about the lives of these people with a peculiar poetry that does not speak of contempt or incomprehension, but almost a sad one Nostalgia.
Gauland juxtaposes these globalists with AfD supporters: people from the bourgeois middle class, including the middle class, and the so-called "simple" people. These groups would be united by the importance they give to their homeland and by their outrage that for bank crisis and migration "billions" of taxpayer money has been spent.
Up to this point, Gauland also presents the unwilling reader with a major problem: one must concede that he has correctly described the shearing forces that are tugging at Western societies. Of course, he is wrong when he counts the German Mittelstand as one of the globalization losers. On the contrary, medium-sized companies have succeeded in conquering the world market from their native town. But only marginally.
Gauland's key words are: "It was a constellation that demanded a fundamentalist opposition, which could come from right and left, but it necessarily needed to be populist.
Populist means against the establishment. "And then he adds," Frau Wagenknecht has understood that. "
That's pretty mean. Once, because he obviously wants to pull the left here in his bracing waters - that pleases those who warn of an alleged "cross front" from the far right and left, although on the left far and wide nobody is to be seen, who give himself for it would.
But it is also bad because Gauland drills with pleasure in the left wound: "This opposition could come from the right and left, but it must necessarily be populist." Since the man is right.
It was the pseudo-center-centered political system that so unevenly distributed globalization gains - or at least tolerated that distribution. The reaction to it necessarily had to break away from this consensus of the middle. That could come to the word of Chantal Mouffe, another great populist preacher, but just a left populism.
And the difference between right and left is not just that Mouffe has just published her new populism book at Suhrkamp - while Gauland, if he were an author and not a politician, would probably prefer to publish in the right-wing Antaios publishing house.
The difference is the meaning that the word home has.
Gauland is a right-hand man. Home is therefore its keyword. It seems quite natural to him that people who lose their orientation in globalization cling to their homeland and want to defend them against everything that is coming and threatening. Maybe it is natural. But it is not smart.
The left key word, on the other hand, is justice.
You can try to cling to your homeland - or you can embrace the world. You can hide at home or go out and fight for justice. The one way leads to the right. The other left.
The left path is the more exhausting one.
The left must endure the humiliation of having failed where the rightists succeeded: displeasure, anger, disappointment, dissatisfaction with the deteriorating conditions, and drawing new strength and political power from it.
A successful, left-wing populism is sought in vain.