ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the emergence and the political discourse of the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The primary goal of this analysis is to identify the representations, argumentations, and problematizations about Europe and the EU in relation to the populist discourse. The findings revealed variation across the three stages of the party regarding the construction of the popular identity and the representations and problematizations about Europe and the EU. In the first stage, the signifier Bürger was found to be the most prominent term to construct the popular identity, and Menschen served to demarcate the “other”—the migrants. During this period, the euro bailout and the critique of the EU and the political class, conditioned both the representations about Europe and the EU and the construction of the popular identity. Fundamentally, the ordoliberal hegemonic discourse was rearticulated as a demand for an exit from the eurozone, considering the EU as an “excess of statehood.” Since the summer 2015, the “nationalist turn” led to the AfD to mobilize new representations of Europe as threatened by ethnically and culturally demarcated migration, especially related to the religion of Islam.
