The AfD is winning far beyond its right-wing core constituency – especially among workers. Those who respond to this with only information about its program and declarations of loyalty to democracy are underestimating the problem. Unions must challenge the AfD’s monopoly on opposition and make themselves visible again as an independent societal counterforce.

Saxony-Anhalt is a warning signal for unions. Not only because the AfD has become the strongest force there, but because it performs even better among workers. This can no longer be dismissed as an East German special case.

The obvious union response has been the same for years: The AfD does not represent the economic interests of wage earners. Its tax policy relieves the wealthy, its social policy weakens social security. Unions must educate people better about this.

All that is correct. But it is not enough. Because speaking of workers voting “against their own interests” presupposes that a social situation clearly dictates what one’s own interest consists of. But political consciousness does not work like that. The common dependence on wage labor does not automatically determine which interests people prioritize politically, how they interpret them, and against whom they direct them.

An employee can see themselves as a wage earner who needs higher wages and co-determination. At the same time, they can see themselves as a taxpayer who thinks they are paying too much for others; as a German skilled worker who wants to defend their status against migrants; as a driver who experiences climate policy as an imposition; or as a “contributor” who considers social benefits for others too generous. Class position does not produce class consciousness. Objective interests do not speak for themselves. They must be recognized, interpreted, and organized.

It is exactly here that the AfD steps in. It targets parts of the working class specifically, but does not articulate their interests as a common class interest. It translates social experiences into group interests that are pitted against each other: contributors versus transfer recipients, German employees versus migrants, industrial workers versus climate policy and its alleged winners.

With this, the conflict shifts. No longer is the question of who decides on investments, working conditions, or profits at the center, but rather which group one belongs to, who “contributes,” who allegedly profits, and who lives at the expense of others.

The underlying experiences are real: job insecurity, loss of industrial employment, high housing and energy costs, fear of downward mobility, crumbling infrastructure, competition for scarce resources: affordable housing, kindergarten places, medical care, or functioning public transport. For many, these problems are interconnected – and indeed, energy prices, industrial crisis, public investments, social policy, and geopolitical decisions are all related to each other. Unions and the Left, however, often struggle to develop a coherent political explanation from this.

The AfD is quite different: It offers a narrative for this – twisted, inverted, reactionary, but politically coherent. It says: These problems have a common origin, and we can name who is responsible for it.

The unity that emerges from this is not class unity. It is constructed through nation, performance, order, belonging, and enemy images. The AfD integrates crisis experiences by disintegrating class solidarity. It connects different crisis experiences politically by segmenting the interests of those affected against each other. In this way, dependent workers, self-employed individuals, and parts of the bourgeoisie can find themselves in a political camp, while the power relations between labor and capital fall out of view.

For unions, this leads to an uncomfortable insight: It is not enough to explain their “correct” interests to employees. When people have multiple, sometimes contradictory interests, the political task is not pedagogical but organizational. It consists in connecting different interests with each other so that joint capacity for action can emerge.

This is the core of class politics. The common dependence on wage labor establishes a common class position and a real opposition of interests to capital. But this commonality does not automatically become political action. Class politics must make it visible, mediate different partial interests, and translate them into common demands and organized power.

A caregiver, an automobile worker, and a migrant package driver do not share the same immediate interests. But they can forge commonalities: regarding collective bargaining coverage, social security, working hours, or the question of who bears the costs of economic transformation.

Democratic class politics therefore does not begin with a declaration but with practice. Where the right organizes horizontal competition, unions must forge connections. Where groups are pitted against each other, they must make visible which conflicts run vertically: between employees and corporate management, between those who have control over investments and those who bear their consequences.

Here democracy also becomes concrete. Unions can rightly refer to human dignity, equality, and democratic rights in opposition to the AfD. But such values gain a different power when democracy appears not only as a constitutional order but as an experience of one’s own efficacy.

Whoever jointly prevents a shift regulation, enforces staffing levels, or fights for a collective agreement experiences democracy in an elementary way: as the possibility to influence the conditions of one’s own life together with others. Solidarity is therefore not primarily a moral stance. It can be a practical experience.

A migrant colleague is then not primarily the subject of a debate on migration, but rather the person without whom the majority cannot achieve a demand. A temporary worker is not a competitor when regular and temporary staff jointly secure the agency workers' transfer into direct employment. Differences do not disappear. But their political significance changes.

Exactly there lies the class-political potential of organizing. Organizing does not presuppose class unity. It can contribute to creating it. Not through appeals, but by people talking to each other, developing demands, airing conflicts, and acting together.

Political education too would then need to be thought differently. Unions need clear boundaries vis-à-vis racism and dehumanizing positions. But educational work that limits itself to conveying the »right« democratic attitudes does not win the struggle for interests. Whoever wants to push back right-wing interpretations needs spaces in which different experiences can be voiced and translated into common interests.

The task is therefore not to »bring back« a supposedly lost working class. That romanticizes a former unity that never existed. Class politics is not a return to a past milieu. It is a process of creation.

Unions possess a special resource for this: they can address people, but also organize them. They can develop common demands from isolated dissatisfaction and turn those common demands into counter-power.

The fact that the AfD itself offers no politics in the interest of wage earners does not change the fact that for many today a vote for it appears as the most effective means to punish the protagonists of a political course they perceive as directed against their interests and disastrous. The decisive question is therefore not only why employees vote for the AfD. It also asks: Why should they believe they can achieve more change with their union than with their vote for the AfD? There is no purely communicative answer to this. It must be given practically – in terms of power politics.

Unions must not only provide a better explanation of the crisis. They must organize the more effective form of joint representation of interests. Solidarity must be experienced.

  • Jörn Boewe is a freelance journalist and author. For many years he has dealt with unions and labor conflicts in his journalistic work; at the same time, he is active in union educational work and organizing.