Protest never goes out of style: the German Green Party and the gentrification of protest

In many Western democracies, protest has become a normalised form of individual and collective political expression, even for political parties. Progressive political parties support, ‘sponsor’, and participate in street demonstrations and encourage and mobilise their party members to turn out. Yet, existing scholarly explanations for the interaction of institutional and extra-institutional politics often underplay the role protest plays for mainstream(ing) or established progressive political parties. Previous research focuses on conceptual frameworks which capture either party organisational types and structures, or party-internal ideological shifts. Indeed, such approaches underexplore the legacy of protest or social movement ancestry within a political party and ignore how this interaction of protest and party politics is experienced by individual party members. Using the contemporary German Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) as a case study, this thesis remedies this omission by analysing party and protest interactions as part of a broader political style I term ‘gentrified protest’. I apply the analytical framework of gentrified protest to data generated through interpretative ethnographic methods to demonstrate the ways that the German Greens in 2018/2019 exhibited the political style of gentrified protest. As a result, this analysis shows how the everyday activism of Green Party members still involves interaction with protest. These are demonstrated through party participation at non-violent, tame street demonstrations or the performance of support online. Protest remains an authentic feature within the German Green brand, highlighted by the concerted effort to maintain links with the party’s past during a rebrand of party principles. Party members, and their role as multi-level marketers performing personalised political communication in party and protest activism, legitimise and reproduce the party’s participatory and democracy-focused political style. However, this aesthetic of participation and democracy is not always experienced in reality, reminding scholars to interrogate ‘official’ party understandings and conceptualisations of party image, processes, and activism.