In the literature on class voting, the rise of right-wing populism is often explained by working-class defection from Social Democracy. Faced with the numeric decline of the working-class, Social Democracy has been targeting voter segments from the middle classes over the mobilization of traditional working-class constituencies, emphasizing cultural over economic issues, which has resulted in a de-politicization of conflicts around distribution and inequality. Hence, the increasing salience of the authoritarian-libertarian increased the attractiveness of right-wing populist parties for working class voters, who were always rather conservative on cultural issues. In short, the decline of Social Democracy and the rise of right-wing populism appear as two sides of the same coin.

Focussing on the German case, we challenge this literature in two ways: first, we show that the working-class support of right-wing populist parties is rather modest. Second, we show that the rise of right-wing populist parties is more related to the support for the Christian Democrats and patterns of religious voting. Beside the German-Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) cross-section samples from 2013 we rely on the cumulated GLES online tracking studies conducted three to four times a year since 2009. Our contribution resonates with the concern that political science tends too often to overlook the potential role of the Centre-Right and Christian Democracy for explanations of contemporary political trends and phenomena.