The German far right and the scars of reunification
More than three decades after the end of communist rule, the victory of the AfD in a state election in the east underlines a lingering political divide
Earlier this year, Germany was roiled by reports that politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany had hatched plans to expel hundreds of thousands of people with immigrant roots, including some with German passports, as part of a policy it euphemistically called “remigration”.
The revelations triggered mass protests in dozens of German cities against the rise of the right. Many in Berlin believed the reports would finish off the AfD. In eastern Germany, they only boosted its popularity.
The proof came last Sunday with two regional elections that unleashed a political earthquake in Berlin. The AfD won in Thuringia, marking the first time in postwar German history that a far-right party had secured victory in a state election. In neighbouring Saxony they came a close second, just behind the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU).
It was a triumph for the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, an ethno-nationalist ideologue who was fined €30,000 this year for using banned Nazi slogans. “Germany can’t just go back to business as usual after this,” he said after the results were announced. Voters were sending a message about immigration. “If we don’t get it under control the state will just collapse,” he added.
The AfD left the three parties in chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious coalition in the dust. Voters seemed to be punishing a deeply unpopular government that they blame for everything from high inflation and uncontrolled immigration to expensive climate policies and constant internal bickering.
In an era where populist parties of the right and left are on the advance across Europe, the AfD’s successes might seem like another protest by voters who feel left behind. In the German case, the results speak more of the lingering political divide in the country more than three decades after the fall of communist rule and reunification. Sunday’s result suggests that divide is becoming deeper — and more permanent.
Eastern Germany has actually fared relatively well economically over the past decade. But the turmoil of the early years of reunification has left many easterners feeling deep resentment towards the political establishment, which makes them more sympathetic to parties that oppose liberal democracy and are determined to undermine it.
For many analysts, the biggest surprise about the results was that the AfD performed so well despite its growing radicalism. While the AfD initially dismissed the reports about its deportation plans as a smear campaign, it has more recently fully embraced the concept of remigration. In the east German campaign it was one of its main selling points.
That was evident at a rally in the Thuringian town of Suhl a couple of weeks before the election where Carolin Lichtenheld, an AfD activist in her early twenties, went on stage to demand the mass deportation of immigrants “here and now”.
“We don’t want a ‘multiculti’ society — we want to save Germany,” she said, to cheers from the crowd, which joined her in chants of “Re-, re-, remigration!”
In other parts of east Germany, AfD posters abounded with pictures of airliners in flight and the slogan: “Summer, sunshine, remigration!” while activists at AfD rallies handed out balloons in the shape of “deportation planes”.
The AfD was not the sole beneficiary of voter discontent in the east. A new populist party led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a former communist and best-selling critic of capitalism, also did well. Like the AfD, her party, the BSW, demands strict curbs on immigration, an end to military support for Kyiv and peace talks to stop the Ukraine war.
That nearly 50 per cent of voters in Thuringia — and 42 per cent in Saxony — had voted for populist parties of the left and right immediately triggered a wave of angst-filled soul-searching in Berlin.
Ever since, many have been asking why east Germans’ voting behaviour is so different from that of their western compatriots.
The historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, himself an Ossi or east German, says it’s “no coincidence” that both Höcke’s and Wagenknecht’s parties were so sympathetic to “Vladimir Putin’s bloodthirsty dictatorship in Moscow”.
“That goes down well in east Germany because such authoritarian ideas are very widespread there,” he told ZDF TV. “The call for a strong state has never really gone away there since 1990.”
The results were a painful wake-up call for a German political class that has tended to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification — a period Germans call the Wende — as one of the few unadulterated bright spots in the country’s troubled, at times tragic, history.
“It really hurts,” said Wolfgang Thierse, an easterner who rose to become one of the most prominent Social Democrats in post-Wende Germany. “It feels like a personal defeat.”
Speaking on German radio, Thierse said that during trips this spring to Thuringia — the region he grew up in — he was shocked at the scale of “hatred and contempt for democrats and democratic institutions” he encountered there.
There was something profoundly puzzling about it. “All this doom and gloom — they tell you everything’s bad,” he said. “But then you ask people about their personal situation, and they say ‘for me personally things are going well’.”
Therein lies one of the biggest mysteries of last Sunday’s election. In recent years, at least, the eastern economy has actually been relatively strong.
That is the assessment, anyway, of Oliver Holtemöller of the Halle Institute for Economic Research, who notes how “successfully it has caught up” over the past 20-30 years.
“The productivity of the eastern economy was just 30 per cent of that of the west in 1990, but now it’s about 80 per cent,” he says. “Such progress would not have been possible anywhere else in such a short period.”
The region’s economy has also outperformed that of western Germany over the past two to three years, he adds, partly thanks to a large public sector less vulnerable to cyclical fluctuations, as well as pension increases that disproportionately benefited easterners.
Scholz also seems mystified. Asked at a town-hall meeting earlier this week about the election results, he said that “compared with all the other countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain, eastern Germany has done really well”. Look at the billions in investments pouring into spanking new semiconductor plants in Saxony and Tesla’s gigafactory in Brandenburg, he added.
But he acknowledged that wages were still lower in the east. “That’s something a lot of people can’t understand, and neither can I,” he said. “We need a really big push [to plug the gap].”
Yet such upbeat assessments of the east’s progress mask a more complex reality. The post-Wende years were not a time of unalloyed joy for the easterners, but instead a period of upheaval and crises that left their mark not only on the generation that came of age in communist East Germany, but on their children and grandchildren.
For Detlef Pollack, a sociologist at the University of Münster who researches the history of East Germany, the period of the Wende “left wounds that have still not healed”. “The trauma of the 1990s continues to reverberate up till today and [the east Germans] have basically never got over it,” he wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last month.
“For many, the Wende meant economic collapse, loss of status, unemployment,” says Benjamin Höhne, an expert in populism at Chemnitz Technical University and native of the east German town of Wittenberg.
The legacy of that turmoil fuelled a sense of grievance towards Besserwessis, the smart-Alec westerners, which lingers to this day.
In exit polls by infratest dimap in Thuringia, 75 per cent of respondents said that east Germans are still second-class citizens. Seventy-eight per cent said the culture and mentality of east and west “remain different”. Politics and business “are still too strongly determined by west Germans”, another 75 per cent said.
Demographic shifts have played a key role in shaping political sentiment. Thuringia’s population fell by about 500,000 after 1990 to 2.1mn now, creating a downward spiral that continues to play out, particularly in rural areas.
Katja Wolf, the BSW’s lead candidate in the Thuringian elections who was born and brought up in the GDR, describes how the quality of rural life declined as people moved away, both to cities in the east and to the west. First to close, she says, was the village shop, then its GP practice, then the bank, then the youth club, and finally the local school.
“The promise was that [after reunification] you’d be better off than you were, and in purely material terms they were right,” she says. “But in rural areas you see a history of loss.”
Older people have to travel much further for doctors’ appointments than they used to, yet bus services have been savagely cut. They have also had to contend with soaring heating costs “on an average monthly pension of just €1,200”.
“The villagers feel left behind and their view is [it’s] because all the money is going towards integrating immigrants,” she says. “The feeling is, there’s nothing left for us, not even a bus.”
Experts say the more depopulated an area is, the higher the support for the AfD. In some Thuringian villages, more than half the population voted for the far-right party last Sunday.
But it is not just the slow decline of rural areas that has stoked the rise of the populists on the right and left. Experts also identify the refugee crisis of 2015-16, in which Germany admitted more than 1mn migrants, and the Covid-19 lockdowns, which provoked much more social unrest in the east than the west.
In the first instance, easterners felt the government had lost control: in the second, that it was doing too much. “They felt during the pandemic that the state encroached on their rights,” says Mario Voigt, Christian Democrat leader in Thuringia.
The University of Münster’s Pollack says the AfD’s popularity grew from a sense that progressive social values supported by government are at odds with their own. They feel the government now expects them to welcome immigration, accept sexual diversity and alternative lifestyles and keep their national pride in check.
“A mood of protest and outrage, of grievance and discontent, of humiliation and rebellion has emerged in the east which rejects all attempts at dialogue, communication and enlightenment,” he wrote.
Some observers warn against exaggerating the significance of last Sunday’s election results. Populist parties of the right and left have long been strong in countries like France and the Netherlands, they note.
“East Germany is reverting to the European norm,” says populism expert Höhne. Western Germany, where big-tent, centrist parties like the CDU still dominate, “is rather the exception”.
Indeed, some expect a greater convergence between east and west Germany in the coming years. Voigt of the CDU says it is already happening: he points to the AfD’s strong performance in recent regional elections in west Germany, such as in Hesse last October, where it came second.
“The East is not an anomaly,” he says. “On the contrary, it’s like looking into the crystal ball, it shows what’s ahead for all of us.”