From Hinterland to Hauptstadt: Populist Place-Based Strategies in Germany

The electoral performance of populist parties tends to vary significantly across different regions, with particularly strong support often concentrated in peripheral areas. While existing research has largely focused on demand-side explanations for this spatial variation, the supply-side—how parties respond to these territorial divides—remains underexplored. Some prominent populist politicians have deliberately targeted ‘left-behind’ areas, seeking to capitalise on spatial inequalities. Yet we lack systematic empirical analysis of the extent and nature of such place-based strategies. This paper addresses this gap by examining the case of the German populist parties, the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and radical left Die Linke, whose support differs markedly between East and West Germany, and between urban centres and peripheral regions more broadly. We analyse ideological strategies at the national and municipal levels, investigating how the populist parties adapt their place-specific messaging to different territorial contexts. Using a dataset of 18 national manifestos and 556 local party manifestos, we assess the salience and positioning of the parties across both the left-right and centre-periphery cleavages. This study makes three key contributions. First, by focusing on local manifestos issued by municipal party branches, it incorporates greater contextual variation and increases the number of observations compared to national- and regional-level studies. Second, by leveraging state-of-the-art Large Language Models (ChatGPT), it rigorously examines the concept of localism and its role in party strategies. Third, it situates populist parties’ subnational approaches within the broader party system by comparing their local manifestos with those of mainstream parties, clearly identifying points of distinctiveness. In so doing, this paper advances our understanding of how populist parties adapt their strategies to different territorial contexts and sheds new light on the spatial dimensions of their appeal.