Between Alarmism and Denial: A Personal Retrospective on Robert Hepp, the New Right, and Political Drift

Robert Hepp, a German sociologist who gained public visibility in the late 1980s and 1990s through television appearances and political debate, was known for provocative theses on migration, national identity, and historical continuity. Long before the rise of today’s right-wing protest parties, he positioned himself as a radical critic of postwar German consensus culture. I first encountered him in the 1990s through the talk show Talk im Turm, where his arguments struck me as unsettling, excessive, and deliberately transgressive. Looking back, I still regard him as a right-wing extremist and a historical revisionist. That assessment has not changed. What has changed is my ability to separate ideological intent from empirical observation.

One of Hepp’s most prominent claims was that Germany would face a form of “Balkanization” through migration. Even then, the term was clearly chosen to provoke fear and suggest an inevitable descent into ethnic conflict. In retrospect, that prediction was plainly overstated. Germany has not fragmented into warring communities, nor has it experienced anything resembling the violent disintegration associated with the Balkans. In that sense, Hepp was wrong. Yet it would be equally misleading to deny that the underlying issue he pointed to has become one of the central challenges facing Germany and much of the Western world.

Large-scale, poorly regulated migration from societies with fundamentally different social, legal, and cultural structures has placed significant strain on institutions that depend on shared assumptions: the rule of law, secular governance, gender equality, and an education-centered path to social mobility. These are not abstract values but functional prerequisites of modern industrial and post-industrial societies. What was underestimated for a long time was not migration itself, but the cumulative effect of speed, scale, and cultural distance, combined with an expectation that integration would occur automatically.

Here lies the crucial distinction between Hepp’s partial insight and his broader failure. He identified points of tension, but he explained them through an ethnically and historically charged framework that led to authoritarian and anti-democratic conclusions. He recognized symptoms while misdiagnosing causes. His intellectual project was not to strengthen democratic cohesion but to undermine the legitimacy of the postwar order altogether.

Hepp is often described as one of the ideological forerunners of the so-called New Right, and this characterization is largely accurate in a metapolitical sense. His influence lay less in concrete policy proposals than in legitimizing a style of discourse that framed social change as civilizational decline. He is also frequently cited as a formative influence on the early German Republicans. The original party program of the Republicans, however, was not overtly extremist. It was national-conservative, skeptical of immigration, and critical of political elites, but it remained, at least formally, within the democratic spectrum.

The fate of the Republicans illustrates a recurring dynamic in German politics. When new parties articulate taboo-adjacent concerns, media and political institutions often respond not with granular critique but with comprehensive moral delegitimization. This reaction may feel justified, but it carries unintended consequences. Moderate supporters withdraw, unwilling to accept social stigma, while radical fringe groups move in to occupy the vacuum. Over time, the party becomes what it was initially accused of being. The diagnosis appears confirmed, even though the process itself contributed to the outcome.

A similar, though more complex, pattern can be observed in the case of the AfD. It is a party composed of multiple currents, ranging from national-conservative and economically liberal positions to clearly right-wing extremist ones. The extremist wing is loud and visible, but it does not necessarily represent the full spectrum of the party’s voters. Many supporters are driven less by ideology than by protest, disillusionment, and legitimate concerns about migration, energy policy, public safety, and social decline. Recognizing this does not absolve the party of responsibility, but it does allow for a more accurate understanding of its appeal.

What is striking, in retrospect, is how little of Hepp’s actual worldview has been internalized by today’s movements. He was an ideologue, deeply invested in historical reinterpretation and cultural pessimism. Contemporary right-wing parties are far more pragmatic, reactive, and crisis-driven. They are not the heirs of a coherent intellectual tradition but the products of unresolved tensions in modern democracies.

The deeper failure lies elsewhere. For too long, Western societies avoided open discussion of integration limits, cultural compatibility, and institutional capacity. This silence allowed figures like Hepp to appear retrospectively prescient, even though their conclusions remain fundamentally flawed. Alarmism and denial are opposing errors, but they reinforce each other. Both prevent sober, democratic problem-solving.

My own position has settled between these extremes. I reject Hepp’s ideology without reservation, but I also reject the comfort of pretending that the challenges he gestured toward were imaginary. Democracies do not defend themselves by refusing to name their problems. They do so by analyzing them honestly, addressing them without hysteria, and insisting - calmly and firmly - on the norms that make pluralistic societies viable in the first place.