The Self-Proclaimed Defender of Freedom: The AfD and the Pandemic

Lehmann, Pola; Zehnter, Lisa Article — Published Version The Self-Proclaimed Defender of Freedom: The AfD and the Pandemic Government and Opposition Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Lehmann, Pola; Zehnter, Lisa (2024) : The Self-Proclaimed Defender of Freedom: The AfD and the Pandemic, Government and Opposition, ISSN 1477-7053, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Vol. 59, pp. 1109-1127, https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2022.5 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/251772.2 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ARTICLE The Self-Proclaimed Defender of Freedom: The AfD and the Pandemic Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter* Department of Democracy and Democratization, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (Received 22 June 2021; revised 12 January 2022; accepted 17 January 2022; first published online 30 March 2022) Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nearly every aspect of life and superseded issues at the core of populist radical right (PRR) parties’ideology, dispossessing them of one of their main narratives. This also challenged the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a relatively young but strong PRR party in opposition. We explore how the party has adjusted its policy supply to this unprecedented situation and how this has affected its popularity among German voters, building our analysis on press releases issued by the AfD between January 2020 and March 2021, vote intention data and recent election results. Initially, the party’s reaction was inconsistent, but from autumn 2020 the AfD focused on fuelling discontent with the government’s lockdown measures, acting as a supporter of the anti-coronavirus demonstrations. It framed its response as elite critique. So far, its siding with the lockdown protesters, however, has not had any positive effect on support for the party. Keywords: COVID-19; populism; political parties; press releases; AfD The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nearly every aspect of life. By becoming the dominating issue in public discourse, it has superseded issues at the core of populist radical right (PRR) parties’ideology, dispossessing them of one of their main narratives. In a matter of days the pandemic dominated the policy agenda, not only depriving PRRs of one of their core issues (migration) but also creating a dilemma for PRR parties in opposition on how to position themselves with regard to two of their main characteristics: anti-elitism and authoritarianism. As governments were taking hard measures, the PRR parties in opposition had to choose between either criticizing the government and thereby giving up on supporting harsh measures or demanding such measures but thereby siding with the government. This also challenged the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has established itself in the German party system after a long period without a successful PRR party. How did the AfD react to this unprecedented situation and was the party able to profit from the crises or did it lose support? © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Government and Opposition (2024), 59, 1109–1127 doi:10.1017/gov.2022.5 This article is part of a special issue that explores how PRR parties reacted to the pandemic by means of single-country case studies. Here, we look at the case of a relatively young but strong PRR party in opposition. For ease of comparison all articles in this special issue address the same three research questions: How did the PRR party respond to the pandemic (question 1), how did it frame it (question 2) and what effects did the pandemic have on its popularity (question 3)? A crisis requires fast and drastic measures. Thus, in such a situation the focus lies on the executive, while the possible courses of action for the opposition are limited. Especially at the beginning of the crisis, the main question for opposition parties was whether to side with the government or to oppose it. Their main tool of influence in this situation was how they communicated about the crisis and how they framed the pandemic. Therefore, we study the AfD’s response to and its framing of the pandemic, building on an analysis of the press releases issued by the AfD and the party’s parliamentary group between January 2020 and March 2021. We find that at the beginning of the pandemic the AfD took the coronavirus very seriously and demanded even stricter measures. By late April, however, the party had switched positions and criticized the government for locking down the population at the cost of civil rights and an economic crisis. This position stayed quite stable over the course of the pandemic, with the AfD continually demanding the reopening of shops, restaurants, hotels and so on, describing masks as useless and essentially criticizing all measures taken by the government to contain the virus. The frames the party used clearly follow PRR parties’core ideology. In an anti-elitist way it continued to criticize the government and experts, who would ‘govern like autocrats’(AfD 29.03.2021, Brandner) against the people. In a nativist fashion the AfD published press releases which described the virus as being brought to Germany from other countries and expressed its pleasure that ‘the legend that German borders could not be controlled …was now obsolete’(AfD 21.01.2021, Gauland). 1 Authoritarianism only played a role at the beginning of the pandemic, when the party had not yet found its positions with regard to COVID-19 and actually demanded stronger containment measures than the ones taken by the government. Despite the growing number of coronavirus-related protests, this policy supply seems to not have had any positive effect on support for the party. Vote intention for the AfD dropped to below 10% at the start of the pandemic and stayed quite stable for the whole period under examination. One reason for this seems to be the ‘rally-round-the-flag effect’(Mueller 1970), according to which in times of crisis voters turn to the parties in power. Even when the previously continuously high support for the government and the measures collapsed in 2021 (Infratest dimap 2021: 8), it did not strongly benefit the AfD. These findings go against the notion that populist parties profit from crises (Moffitt 2015; Pappas and Kriesi 2016). However, this might be due to the fact that, first, the possible reactions of an opposition party are limited and that, second, the AfD could not promote two of the defining attributes of the PRR. Issues connected to nativism (such as migration) have not been as salient during the pandemic and, as the AfD presented itself as a defender of freedom, the party could not rely on authoritarianism either. Being left with populism only, this did not pay off in terms of popularity. As Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) have noted, it is the combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism which makes PRR parties successful. 1110 Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter Right-wing populism in Germany For a long time, Germany was considered a ‘laggard in international comparison’ (Bebnowski 2015: 33) and a ‘large negative outlier’(Arzheimer 2015: 540), as no right-wing populist party had managed to establish itself on the national level. Why this was the case is beyond the scope of this article (see, for example, Decker 2008 and Dolezal 2008). What is significant is that this changed when the AfD entered the political scene in 2013. Originally the party’s focus was on economic issues, but this quickly changed. At first, the AfD developed from an anti-elitist, Eurosceptic party to being a ‘functional equivalent’of a right-wing populist party (Berbuir et al. 2015: 174) that could fill this gap in Germany (Häusler and Roeser 2014), if the situation arose. Such a ‘window of opportunity’(Caiani and Graziano 2019) presented itself in 2015 with the so-called refugee crisis, which caused the party to shift its thematic focus (Franzmann 2016; Lewandowsky et al. 2016) towards the three defining attributes of the PRR: nativism, populism and authoritarianism (Mudde 2007), now undeniably turning it into a PRR. In the 2017 general election, the AfD received 12.6% of the votes and not only entered the German parliament, but also became the biggest opposition party, thereby belonging to the group of PRR parties in opposition analysed in this special issue. Although the AfD’s reactions to the pandemic as an opposition party are constrained, it can unfold its full potential as a PRR party by framing the pandemic in relation to the three core characteristics of the PRR’s ideology. Here we refrain from discussing these characteristics in detail as they have been presented in more length in the theoretical framework of the introductory contribution to this special issue (Rovira Kaltwasser and Taggart 2022). Instead we directly apply them to the case of the AfD, where they apply in varying intensity. Nativism, which describes a form of xenophobic nationalism (Betz 2017) that ‘subsumes racism, ethnocentrism, and anti-immigrant sentiment’(Arzheimer 2015: 537), has become a core feature of the AfD. Everything that the party counts as non-native is seen as a threat to the nation state and its homogeneity, claiming that the cultural identity of immigrants, especially of those from Muslim countries, is incompatible with Western values. Policies like closing borders and restricting migration are therefore supported. With this policy profile, the party exploited the fact that immigration dominated the political discourse in Germany for quite some time. The coronavirus crisis, however, shifted attention from immigration towards health and economic policies. As the AfD has no issue ownership in these fields, this represents a challenging situation to the party. We therefore expect the party to counteract this by framing the virus in nativist terms and connecting it to immigration. Populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’(Mudde 2004: 544) comes into full play in connection with nativism. The ‘pure people’are identical with the native Germans only, while the people’s antagonist is portrayed as the ‘corrupt elite’, which refers to actors on the national, international and EU levels. Since the party’s foundation, criticism of the elite has played an important role in the AfD’s messaging: from critique of EU elites to demonizing the German government and Chancellor Merkel in the so-called ‘refugee crisis’(Rosenfelder 2017). With the start of the COVID-19 Government and Opposition 1111 crisis, public health authorities (such as the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Germany) as well as virologists and epidemiologists have played an unprecedented role in informing and advising the German government. Simultaneously, with the lengthening duration of the pandemic, the popularity of and support for measures like the lockdown have declined (Infratest dimap 2021: 2). To criticize these scientific authorities and the government is in line with the AfD’s populist notion and one that might seem worthwhile given the growing dissatisfaction with the measures. We therefore presume that the party uses the pandemic to criticize the government and its handling of the crisis to at least the same extent as in times before COVID-19. Moreover, in line with the decreasing support for the measures, the longer the pandemic lasted, the stronger the attacks by the AfD on the establishment. Authoritarianism describes the idea of a hierarchical notion of society in which traditional values are the norm. Any deviation from this norm is supposed to be severely punished. Authoritarianism is not anti-democratic per se, but rather illiberal, as it rejects pluralism and minority rights (Mudde 2007). The policy programme of the AfD stresses such authoritarian values. The protection of traditional moral values especially plays an important role in the AfD’s programme, which supports the conservation of traditional family values, argues for strict drug policies and calls for a strengthening of police forces (Lehmann et al. 2019: 128– 130). The pandemic created a situation in which national states, including Germany, adopted harsh measures like closing borders and exerting national sovereignty. As steps had to be taken quickly, the German government had put its focus on the ‘own’population, before seeking international or at least EU-wide solutions. Exerting control and adopting strong restrictions are typical authoritarian demands. Thus, in other situations the AfD would demand that the government acts more restrictively. But if the government takes this path itself, the AfD –as a strong opponent of the government –has to take a different stand. It cannot criticize the government and support its harsh measures at the same time. In this unusual situation, we anticipate that the AfD –against its core ideology –is promoting less authoritarian measures in order to present itself as the defender of ‘freedom’. Studying the AfD’s COVID-19 response in its press releases Undoubtedly the COVID-19 crisis has been an unprecedented situation, challenging the whole state and also the political parties. While government parties quickly had to take measures to contain the virus and counteract its impact on public health and all other areas of public and private life, the possibilities for opposition parties to react were much narrower. 2 They could mainly impact the situation by how strongly they criticized the government and by how they framed the pandemic itself and the government measures. An important aspect of the opposition’s reaction can thus be captured in how they communicated about the crisis. A relevant source for a party’s communication strategy are its press releases. Parties use press releases to address the media directly, and through that the public (Franzmann 2016: 6). In contrast to, for example, parliamentary speeches, parties do not face any constraints here; they can decide freely which issues to address and which to 1112 Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter ignore and when and how to do this (Klüver and Sagarzazu 2016: 386). At the same time this means that press releases only capture the message a party wants to send; they are not reflecting each reaction given in public appearances by party officials or in the speeches by AfD parliamentarians. In addition, press releases are published throughout the whole year and thus allow us to study how a party reacts to a certain situation over time. In this study we therefore use the AfD’s press releases to analyse how the AfD reacted to the pandemic over time and how it framed the politics of the pandemic. We collected all press releases issued by the party headquarters and the parliamentary group in the Bundestag between January 2020 and March 2021. 3 In total there are 2,059 press releases; 1,504 of them published by the parliamentary group and 555 by the party. 4 To study the AfD’s response to COVID-19 and the government measures, we manually coded the main focus of each press release. To do this we developed a category scheme specifying 19 policy topics and a residuals category (see Table 1). The category scheme was created inductively. We started by clustering Table 1. Saliency of Topics in AfD Press Releases between January 2020 and March 2021 Topic NShare (%) COVID-19 measures 310 15.06 Migration, asylum and integration 175 8.50 External relations 143 6.95 Interparty dispute 132 6.41 EU 130 6.31 Islam and identity politics 127 6.17 Democracy and rule of law (incl. corruption) 115 5.59 Law and order 112 5.44 Economy and COVID 96 4.66 Health and social security 91 4.42 Energy and climate 86 4.18 Agriculture 82 3.98 Economy and labour 74 3.59 Women, gender and family 64 3.11 Vaccination 55 2.67 Self-victimization 53 2.57 Public service broadcasting and media critique 52 2.53 Finance 42 2.04 Transport 31 1.51 Residuals (topics appearing in fewer than 15 press releases) 89 4.32 Total 2059 100.00 Government and Opposition 1113 all press releases into 15 groups with the help of a topic model. Based on these clusters we determined the main underlying topics, which served as the starting point for our coding scheme. However, we decided to split some of these categories. For example, we divided the category ‘economy and COVID’into one category that dealt with all press releases that specifically focused on the impact of COVID-19 and the government measures on the economy and a second category that subsumed press releases that made statements on economic issues without any reference to the pandemic. Finally, we also added a ‘residuals’category for all press releases that did not fit into any of the existing categories. Equipped with this category scheme, we manually coded all press releases. The AfD and the pandemic: reactions and frames In this section we will first use the quantitative coding results to analyse how COVID-19 and the government measures have influenced the AfD’s policy agenda over different phases of the pandemic, and then we will look at the press releases in more detail to study which measures and reactions the AfD proposed in light of the pandemic and to illustrate if and how the party applied the typical PRR frames to the pandemic. 5 With this three-step process we keep zooming in, starting with the analysis of how the overall policy agenda was affected by COVID-19, then looking at the specific answers to the pandemic and finally the frames the AfD used for these answers. Our analysis is structured along five phases: a pre-COVID-19 phase (January– February 2020), a first wave (March–mid-May 2020), summer (mid-May– mid-September 2020), a second wave (mid-September 2020–mid-February 2021), and a third wave (mid-February–end of March 2021). We identified these phases based on the number of COVID-19 cases (Figure 1) and COVID-related deaths (Figure B1 in the Online Appendix). 6 Pre-COVID The most dominant topic in the pre-COVID phase is ‘interparty dispute’–that is, press releases which more or less focused on criticizing the established parties (Figure 2), a focus mainly driven by press releases from the party headquarters. This topic clearly feeds into the populist narrative. The second most important topic in this phase is ‘migration, asylum and integration’–a topic at the core of the PRR ideology aligning with nativist views. While the first coronavirus case in Germany was reported on 27 January 2020, the first time the AfD mentioned the coronavirus was in a press release from 13 February, one day after a debate in parliament on matters of topical interest (Aktuelle Stunde), which was called by the governing coalition of the Christian Democratic Union/ Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). 7 The AfD described the dangers of the virus and called for ‘controls and effective measures against further spread’and even suggested a ‘worldwide action plan’, but also criticized the ‘irresponsible dependence [of Germany] on Asian manufacturers’regarding pharmaceutical products (AfD 13.02.2020, Spangenberg/ Schlund). 8 While the party here takes the virus and the consequences of a 1114 Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter worldwide spread seriously, it also shifts the attention to another issue, namely Germany’s dependence on other countries, which fits into the populist frame of a strong, independent nation state. Figure 1. Daily COVID-19 Cases: March 2020–March 2021 in Germany Source: Data from Robert Koch Institute. Note: Bar graph displays the daily COVID-19 cases, line graph displays the weekly mean. Figure 2. The Three Most Important Topics in AfD Press Releases, per Phase Note: Migration includes asylum and integration. Government and Opposition 1115 First wave By March, the number of cases started to increase quickly (Figure 1); as a consequence the government started taking stricter containment measures which, according to the Government Response Tracker from the University of Oxford, reached a high plateau from the end of March through to April (Figure 3). The data track the measures governments all over the world have taken to counteract the COVID-19 crisis. Reported here is the stringency index, which is built from eight containment indicators. The two most important topics in the press releases at this time are the ‘COVID-19 measures’, followed by ‘economy and COVID’(Figure 2). In third place we find ‘migration, asylum and integration’. In conjunction this shows that even though the AfD’s core issues lie in other fields, the party needs to react to changes on the political agenda. Once COVID-19 had captured the agenda, the AfD, too, turned its focus to these issues. Nonetheless it also continually tried to put its core issue on the agenda, which was more or less eliminated from public discourse at the time. A party searching for its position: unsettled between strict measures and civil liberties While, as just shown, the COVID-19 measures dominated the AfD’s agenda, the party needed some time to define its position on these issues. In the beginning, the AfD responded to the rising numbers by recommendations ‘to cancel all public party events that are not absolutely necessary for prevention reasons until further notice’(AfD 04.03.2020a), demanding that schools should be closed, warning about consequences the pandemic might have for the German economy, explicitly stating that ‘the outbreak of the coronavirus is no longer only a health crisis’(AfD 04.03.2020b, Schielke-Ziesing/Pohl). However, the AfD’s position towards the Figure 3. Government Stringency Index in Germany Source: Data from Hale et al. (2021). 1116 Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter Chrupalla asked whether this was ‘a structural problem within the Union’(AfD 08.03.2021, Chrupalla). The AfD’s popularity Our analysis of the AfD’s press releases demonstrated that the AfD’smainstrategy during the pandemic was to criticize the government and its measures, trying to portray itself as the only defender of freedom rights. But did this communication strategy pay off for the AfD in terms of popularity among the German population? To assess this, we rely on monthly reported vote intention data (so-called Sonntagsfrage)from the Allensbach Institute (IfD 2021). Figure 4 clearly shows the ‘rally-round-the-flag effect’(Mueller 1970) for the German government in 2020. While in March 2020 support for the CDU/CSU, Chancellor Merkel’s party, was around 29%, it rose to 38% in April and May and even cracked 40% in June. Support rates dropped slightly thereafter, but with 37% reported in December, this was still significantly more than before the pandemic. This increase of almost one-third is exceptional: ‘no other governing party came even close to these numbers’(Wondreys and Mudde 2020:7). However, the situation drastically changed in March 2021, when the public became increasingly impatient with the slow vaccination roll-out, scandals about ‘mask deals’ became public (Olterman 2021) and the third wave commenced. In succession the rates for the CDU/CSU dropped to 28.5%. The junior partner in the grand coalition, the SPD, had from the start not benefited from the rally-round-the-flag effect to the same extent. In fact, estimated votes increased only slightly by around 2–3 percentage points from 14.5% in February and stayed on this plateau for the whole period under examination. This is in line with the ‘almost invisible [effect] for junior coalition parties’(Wondreys and Mudde 2020: 7). Figure 4. Sonntagsfrage Allensbach Source: Data from Allensbach Institute, Sonntagsfrage. Government and Opposition 1123 Being the biggest opposition party in Germany, the AfD is the harshest detractor of the government even in non-pandemic times. Before the pandemic hit Germany, the AfD was continually estimated to win between 13% and 15% of the votes if an election were to take place next Sunday, but by April 2020 support had dropped to 9% and rose only slightly after that, culminating in a result of just above 10% at the federal election in September 2021. 10 In that sense, the AfD can be seen as one of the ‘victims of the pandemic’(Wondreys and Mudde 2020), at least in terms of electoral support. This is an interesting finding, because even though support for the government was high throughout most parts of the pandemic, there has also been increasing dissatisfaction with the government, creating a reservoir of potential AfD voters. To capture the size of this protest potential and to study why the AfD was not able to make better use of it we draw on data from the Monitoring System and Transfer Platform Radicalization (MOTRA) project (Grande et al. 2021). 11 The MOTRA survey data (Grande et al. 2021) reveal that not all protesters are necessarily potential AfD supporters. Among those who show understanding for the protests (Protestversteher), identification with the AfD is highest (25.8% on average) and has increased over time (up to 30.2% in November 2020). While in comparison to the other parties this is a high number, it also means that around 70% of the protesters are not (yet) AfD voters, and because of the high diversity of protesters it remains unclear whether the AfD will ever be able to win their support. The common denominator among the coronavirus protesters is a strong distrust towards the federal governments as well as concerns about the restrictions of freedom. So far the AfD has not been able to use this dissatisfaction to mobilize more support for the party. However, due to the susceptibility to conspiracy theories, a considerable potential for radicalization towards the extreme right exists, which might also offer an increased voter potential for the AfD. Conclusion When the COVID-19 crisis hit Germany, the AfD was still a very young PRR party. Founded in 2013, it had only entered the German Bundestag for the first time at the previous election. The party had gained most of its support in the so-called ‘refugee crisis’in 2015 and had since then focused on the immigration issue, playing a nativist card, its policy programme scaled high on the authoritarian dimension, and in all its statements it stood out as the strongest opponent to the government. The COVID-19 crisis imposed a clear challenge to the party, as it not only suppressed its main issue, immigration, but also created conflict between the other two frames the party had so far relied on: elite critique and authoritarianism. In this article we have studied how the AfD reacted to this challenge and whether and how it managed to apply the core frames of PRR parties to the pandemic. We studied the AfD’s response to the pandemic based on its press releases issued between January 2020 and March 2021. By looking at the press releases we focused our analysis on the party’s strategically chosen communication strategy. As a PRR party in opposition the AfD’s possibilities of reaction were limited, motivating our decision to study its official communications strategy, but the choice of press releases as the primary data source does not come without limitations either. 1124 Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter While this communication channel can be used without external constraints, the AfD and its parliamentarians also positioned themselves in further arenas. Future studies should also look at the communicative (re-)actions of PRR parties on social media and in parliament to get an encompassing picture of the PRR not only in times of a pandemic, but during crises more generally. However, we believe that this study of the AfD’s official communication is an important part of this picture. The analysis has shown usthat the frames the AfDused todescribe the pandemicare clearly connected to the defining attributes of the PRR, which played a distinct role in the party’s communication and were used to different extents at various points in time. Since one of its core issues, migration, was nearly eliminated from public discourse, it tried to find other ways to express its nativist stances by framing the pandemic, how it developed, and how it should be overcome in this way. In an anti-elite fashion, the AfD strongly criticized the government’s handling of the pandemic, discrediting its measures as ‘unlawful’and dangerous and opposing nearly all coronavirus measures taken by the government. In times of stay-at-home recommendations and mandatory face masks in supermarkets or public buildings, the AfD demanded more freedom rights and criticized others as being too authoritarian, while –in non-pandemic times –being an authoritarian party itself. The fact that the AfD could not rely on two of its main core features, nativism and authoritarianism, left the PRR party in opposition with populism only. In terms of popularity this has not won the AfD considerable voter support. While opinion polls saw AfD support around 13% before the pandemic, support dropped below 10% in April 2020 and stayed there for the rest of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. As the self-proclaimed defender of freedom, the AfD could not profit from the crisis –even when satisfaction with the government was low –which is in line with the assessment that the key to PRR success is the combination of the three defining features (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). Supplementary material. The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10. 1017/gov.2022.5. Acknowledgements. For research assistance and proofreading we want to thank Juliane Hanel, Leonie Schwichtenberg and Leila van Rinsum. We are also very grateful for valuable comments by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart and three anonymous reviewers. Their comments strongly helped improve the paper. We gratefully acknowledge financial support received from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the context of the long-term funding of the Manifesto Research Project on Political Representation (MARPOR). Notes 1Online Appendix A lists all the press releases with their full source information. See also note 3 below. 2Here it is important to note that the AfD was the only ‘pure’opposition party in Germany at the time, as all other parties were, at least on the Länder level, part of one or more government(s). 3The press releases have been scraped from the websites of the AfD (www.afd.de/presse/) and the AfD’s parliamentary group (www.afdbundestag.de/pressemitteilungen/). The scraping took place between 2 and 11 February 2021 (for the press releases from 2020) and on 12 April 2021 (for the press releases from 2021). If we directly refer to a specific press releases in the analysis, we cite it by presenting date and author. Online Appendix A lists all these press releases with their full source information. 4We excluded 74 press releases, because they did not contain any information about when they were published. Government and Opposition 1125 5When speaking of frames here, we refer to the concept of ‘emphasis frames’, where actors stress or put emphasis on specific aspects of a certain topic and thereby influence its perception (Druckman 2001; Nelson et al. 1997). 6The source we rely on for this data is the Robert Koch Institute. This is the German federal agency responsible for infectious diseases. It publishes the official data on COVID-19 cases and COVID-related deaths (Robert Koch Institute 2021). 7www.bundestag.de/en/parliament/function/scrutiny/instruments_scrutiny-245710. 8All quotes from the press releases have been translated by the authors. 9At the time of writing, a mandatory vaccination is being discussed –which is, however, not the same as forced vaccination. 10 It must be noted, though, that AfD support might have also been affected by several decisions by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesverfassungsschutz), which decided to classify the AfD-suborganization ‘Der Flügel’as a right-wing extremist endeavour and to upgrade it from a suspected case to a classic object of observation in March 2020 (www.verfassungsschutz.de/de/ oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/presse/pm-20200312-bfv-stuft-afd-teilorganisation-der-fluegel-als-gesichert-rechtsextremistischebestrebung-ein). 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