A new Earth4All survey across 17 G20 countries finds an overwhelming majority demanding economic change — and almost no confidence that politics will provide it. That gap is where the populist right is making its gains.
On 6 September, the AfD recorded its strongest election result to date at either state or federal level. The far-right party took almost 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. And as after every election victory for a movement defined by xenophobia and anti-establishment rhetoric, the question arises: why?
The global shift to the right is the expression of a society that understands itself as divided — marked by dwindling trust between people and the state, and among people themselves, coupled with growing tensions between social groups. Trust that “politics” will find adequate answers to the challenges we face today and in the future has eroded.
This is confirmed by a new Earth4All study published this week. It draws on an Ipsos survey across 17 G20 countries, and one thing is clear: the division so many people feel also shows up in the numbers. Germans see their country as more divided still than the global average would suggest. 79% think Germany is more divided today than it was ten years ago (globally: 67%), and only 19% believe the government will take decisions that benefit the majority of people in the long run (globally the figure is 31%; in Germany it was still 26% in 2024). 69% of Germans also want fundamental changes to the economy. That parties positioning themselves as standing outside this system profit from approval ratings this low is only to be expected.
After the election in Saxony-Anhalt, explanations were quickly offered that singled out xenophobia as the motivation, independent of economic factors. Various commentators argued that people vote for the right because they consider right-wing positions — above all on migration policy — to be correct, and not primarily because they are economically disadvantaged: studies, it was said, show that perceived or actual financial hardship barely explains support for the AfD, whereas concern about immigration does. In short: people simply do not want migration, and they place that issue even above their own economic situation.
And this cannot be dismissed out of hand. 75% of Germans see tensions between immigrants and the native population — 13% points more than the global average of 62%. It is also true that voters in Saxony-Anhalt, asked about their motivation, rarely cite economic reasons, even though voters who rate their own financial situation as difficult are over-represented among them. But the fact that questions of identity proved decisive when voters were asked directly can only be the beginning of the analysis, not its end — otherwise the picture remains incomplete.
To begin with, there are other parties that also want to limit migration and are less radically right-wing and less inflammatory. Xenophobia does not fall from the sky. Least of all in a state where comparatively few foreign nationals live in the first place, and where it still holds that support for the AfD is highest where the share of the foreign population is lowest. There is much to suggest that economic reasons — not necessarily one’s own present situation, but worries about the future, uncertainty and the fear of falling behind — have created the fertile ground on which the populist right now feeds.
Because across all countries, economic factors are named as the key drivers of dissatisfaction.
74% of Germans think there is too much economic inequality (globally: 70%), 68% believe the system is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful and, as mentioned at the outset, 69% want fundamental changes to the economy — exactly as many as the global average.
That is an overwhelming majority. And it runs across income groups, age groups and voters of parties on both left and right.
We already know from earlier research that growing inequality and vanishing chances of social mobility leave people behind and contribute to polarisation. In such a climate, the politics of division flourishes. Distrust of the state and of those who think differently creates the breeding ground for a populist rhetoric that would rather scapegoat migrants or minorities than address the structural roots of economic inequality. Years of culture-war rhetoric and the charging of public discourse with identity politics have played their part. But that does not mean economic causes play no role — only that the frustration manifests itself in different ways.
The desire for economic change unites people across all camps, but trust that politics can deliver it has collapsed.
So why is it that right-wing parties — in Germany as globally — are currently the main beneficiaries of this dissatisfaction?
One central problem for progressive parties is that they often appear as the last defenders of a status quo that a majority of their own electorate now considers unjust. It is now left-liberal parties that stress the virtues of free trade, that present the neutrality of central banks as indispensable, or that hold up carbon pricing as the most effective climate policy. And defence rarely wins against a promise of change when most people do not think what is being defended is worth defending. Whoever is seen as the custodian of a system perceived as broken cannot offer an attractive vision of the future.
The irony, as Nancy Fraser has emphasised, is that progressive forces have increasingly allied themselves with neoliberal market policies originally associated with the political right. In doing so, the centre-left weakened its commitment to social protection systems, trade unions, redistribution and protection against social decline. When neoliberalism produced inequality, precarity and distrust of institutions, the centre-left could hardly respond credibly — it had helped carry that model itself. The right, by contrast, enjoys the comfortable position of keeping its market-liberal ideology while rhetorically casting itself as the defender of people on low incomes, even though this has nothing to do with its actual economic policy plans. And it shifted the meaning of “social protection” towards borders, national identity and migration.
There is something else: neoliberalism copes better with identity politics than with redistribution. A capitalist society absorbs quotas for women or gender-neutral language relatively easily; higher taxes or questions of ownership hardly at all. Because the left concentrated on what fits the model and pushed economic arguments away from the centre of its politics, it created this space for the right.
Our study argues that a new social contract will have to deal with three deficits: a distribution deficit — who bears the costs of change; a recognition deficit — who is seen; and a hope deficit — does anyone seriously believe things will get better for the majority.
What do we learn from this? First, progressive politics must not be seen as the last defender of a status quo that, for many people, is not a future worth wanting. People want less inequality, better protection of nature, climate action. But they do not want it as an additional cost borne by those who have gained little from the prosperity of recent decades anyway. Support for decisive climate action falls globally from 71% to 54% as soon as higher prices are mentioned — in Germany to 46%. The question of who pays the bill is therefore essential. If the wrong policies place it on the shoulders of the economically weak, the result will be further polarisation.
None of this means that xenophobia does not also exist beyond economic explanations, nor that a loss of trust built up over years and decades can be undone by a tax reform here or a bit of redistribution there. It is not even clear that people can simply be “won back” — a genie is out of the bottle that will not easily be put back in. But 67% of Germans still consider a democracy with free elections the best form of government, and the 29% who want a strong leader without a parliament are far fewer than the global average of 40%. If trust is not to erode further, we need a vision of the future worth defending. And visions without the economic question are pathos, not politics.
