As an aside: I love how the people complaining about "identity politics" are often the ones engaging in a blatant form of identity politics by painting a pictur

As an aside: I love how the people complaining about "identity politics" are often the ones engaging in a blatant form of identity politics by painting a picture of a white median income working class person who doesn't care about social justice (which by the way is often an ahistorical caricature and is often used as a way to infantilize industrial workers, especially when the trope is invoked by politicians with academic backgrounds themselves). That said, I'd say both the FDP and AfD heavily engage in hollow populism and that has benefited both to some extent so far and seems to be what BSW wants to copy. The AfD uses a veneer of middle-class conservativsm to transport far-right extremist ideas, the FDP uses progressivism and futurism to transport very narrow interest group politics (i.e. despite all its bold claims in practice it tends to mostly do exactly what its core donor demographic wants and will abandon its supposed ideals if they gain too much traction). I'm not sure what it is the BSW is trying to transport but they seem to have adopted a shell that is a loose amalgamation of an anti-progressive, anti-Green reactionary sentiment mixed with a vague pro-worker veneer that is at the same time offset by a lot of pro-business ("innovation", "future technologies", etc) language. Just an example: in the party's programme they go to great lengths to explain that the Bundeswehr should not follow US interests (i.e. anti-NATO without committing to an explicit position of leaving NATO), should not maintain presences in foreign countries (i.e. no participation in joint operations), should not receive funding that is offset with cuts to social welfare (i.e. less funding?) but must also be "equipped appropriately" to defend Germany (i.e. more funding?). This reads more like a political Rorschach test than a political position: you can either interpret it as being anti-NATO, pro-Russia and asking for cuts to military spending or as being isolationist and asking for more accountability in military spending or as supporting the idea of a European military organization as a counter-balance to foreign interests or ... and so on. I don't know what it is but I don't have the feeling I'd get a straight answer from her or her supporters either.