In early September, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored a historic victory in Thuringia, in eastern Germany. It defeated Bodo Ramelow, the minister-president (equivalent to a state governor in the United States) and the Left Party (Die Linke), marking the first time the German far right has won a state election since the Nazi era. The latest wave of an ultraconservative tide sweeping across Europe, the AfD’s success — which extends to European Parliament elections — is bound to reshape German politics, influencing policy on immigration and climate change, and normalizing sentiments that the legacy of World War II had previously kept in check, such as xenophobia, antisemitism and militant nationalism.
Although the AfD stands poised to become the second-strongest party in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, the majority of its activities and supporters are based in the country’s eastern, formerly communist half. This geographic rift, distinct from internal divisions observed elsewhere in the European Union, suggests that eastern Germany’s far-right tendencies may be linked to the Cold War and Die Wende (German for “the turning point,” the term for the peaceful transition from the fall of the Berlin Wall to reunification) — to legacies of the German Democratic Republic’s Soviet history, and the problematic nature of its reunification with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990.
While some scholars warn that interpreting German politics through such a lens turns a blind eye to far-right momentum in other countries and detracts from the need to look at the problem from an international, as opposed to regional, perspective, these approaches need not be mutually exclusive. Right-wing parties are making headway across the Western world, but while they adhere to similar values and rely on similar tactics, their appeal is shaped by the unique histories of the constituencies in which they operate. Understanding those histories, therefore, can help us understand how these parties managed to become so popular and what the future has in store for them.
The AfD is hardly the first right-wing movement to gain traction in eastern Germany. As early as the late 1990s, a small but significant number of Germans in the former East turned to nationalist and neo-Nazi groups out of frustration with the region’s slow economic growth and high unemployment rate relative to Germany’s western states. Historians frequently point out that the fall of the Berlin Wall led not to the reunification of East and West so much as the assimilation of the former into the latter. The West, unencumbered by years of planned economics and unaffected by the financial crisis resulting from the Soviet Union’s collapse and dissolution, made up a whopping 92% of Germany’s GDP at the start of Die Wende. Rather than resources being distributed between the two former countries, however, many of East Germany’s state-owned enterprises fell into the hands of West German businesses. As wealth flowed westward, workers, students and entrepreneurs followed suit, exacerbating a population disparity that persists to this day, with the AfD holding the greatest sway in places with the highest levels of brain drain.
More than 30 years later, the western half of reunited Germany remains far more prosperous than the formerly communist eastern part. Eastern Germany’s economy is roughly 80% of the size of western Germany’s, while salaries are $13,000 lower. The average resident of western Germany also has nearly three times more savings than their eastern counterpart, as well as double the value of private assets — disparities exacerbated by the housing crisis, the lasting economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and high levels of inflation linked to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Like other far-right parties, the AfD has attracted followers by blaming their economic insecurity on the political establishment, which they argue places the well-being of foreign nationals above the prosperity of Germans and eastern Germans in particular. “Our voters are against the EU gaining more power,” AfD leader and member of parliament Peter Boehringer said in February 2024, referring to the union as a “centralized planned economy” that seeks to override the national sovereignty of its individual members. “This EU must die,” Bjoern Hoecke, an AfD leader in Thuringia, proclaimed the year before, “so that the real Europe can live.” They oppose social welfare programs for asylum-seekers, as well as financial support for other countries, whether to bail out Greece or provide weapons to Ukraine, framing these policies as a continuation of eastern Germany’s historical exploitation by its neighbors to the west.
In the former East, feelings of security are closely linked to fears of immigration, globalization and loss of national identity. “Heimat,” a person from Brandenburg told Vox when asked why he voted for AfD, using a term that roughly translates as “homeland.” “It’s just not nice anymore.” While he listed examples that conservatives living in the Netherlands, France and Italy might — unsafe streets, English-language education and “newcomers receiving benefits that longtime residents don’t” — such attitudes are colored by eastern Germany’s past. In a blog post for the Washington-based nonprofit Rise to Peace, counterterrorism research fellow Camille Amberger points out that, while urban areas in West Germany became more culturally diverse in the 1970s and 1980s following an influx of migrant workers from countries like Turkey and Morocco, East Germany largely remained homogeneous.
This explains why, as the Soviet Union began allowing limited numbers of residents from Vietnam, Mozambique and Cuba to move to East Germany in the 1970s, anti-immigrant rhetoric led to attacks, many of which remained unreported by state-owned media. Hostility toward foreigners continued after Germany’s unification. A noteworthy example took place in 1992, when neo-Nazis in the northeastern port city of Rostock attacked Vietnamese and Mozambican immigrants to the applause of many of their fellow citizens, who viewed the victims as competitors for scarce jobs, housing and welfare.
Another factor contributing to the rise of right-wing politics in eastern Germany is the legacy of the GDR’s denazification campaign — a campaign that was in many respects more thorough than that in the West but was nonetheless predicated on the notion that Nazism was a predominantly West German phenomenon. Alan McDougall, a professor of German history at the University of Guelph and author of “The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany,” tells New Lines that the East German regime always treated the country’s shared fascist past as “something externalized and separate from the socialist state they had built.” The result of this official attitude was twofold. While those loyal to the Soviet regime pretended fascism was gone forever, ignoring threats the West tried to confront head-on, those frustrated by the regime drifted toward right-wing groups as a means of protesting against East Berlin and Moscow. “The fact that the East German state was so publicly and loudly antifascist and demonized the capitalist FRG as the successor to Hitler,” notes McDougall, “actually pushed away some of the younger East Germans in the ’80s. It’s like when I tell my kids not to do something, they become curious about it.”
While it may seem contradictory that right-wing parties are able to flourish in formerly communist territory, this development isn’t actually all that surprising. After all, similar developments have taken place in countries like Russia and Hungary, where the political apparatus of the Soviet Union became the skeleton of the authoritarian regimes of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. In the case of the former East Germany, inexperience with democratic governance and civil society infrastructure, paired with a political culture that did not tolerate dissent, has left the region vulnerable to populists whose agendas are based on the identification and persecution of a public enemy, real or imaginary.
“One of the most fascinating aspects about East German society,” Alex Holznienkemper, a professor of German language and literature at the University of New Hampshire, writes to me in an email, “is that grassroots associations were not part of life in East Germany. Everything had to gain approval by the Party apparatus, and any kind of non-conformity had no chance of being debated, heard, or implemented. For many, this was just fine, as they felt they could nevertheless be part of something bigger, but for others it could lead to tremendous cynicism about the political class and the Party.” Today, this cynicism is directed toward the Bundestag and Brussels.
Perhaps the most important (and overlooked) parting gift of Germany’s Cold War history is the lasting cultural rift its decades-long division produced between East and West, manifesting as an inferiority complex in the former and a superiority complex in the latter. Plagued with shortages and deprived of Western art, entertainment and consumer goods, East Germans famously imagined the other side of the Iron Curtain as a land of progress and abundance. At the same time, East Germans — like their Russian neighbors — were proud of the socialist society they helped to build and maintain, a society they perceived as threatened by, and morally superior to, the free-for-all West. In “The People’s Game,” McDougall touches upon this complex sentiment by way of East Germany’s repeated use of steroids at the Olympic Games. “Everyone in the GDR knew their athletes were using doping,” he says. “Still, they quite liked beating the West Germans, who were richer and had nicer cars, bigger apartments, real chocolate, and bananas.” In other words, you could feel oppressed by your government and proud of your country at the same time.
This feeling strengthened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when both the good and bad of Soviet culture disappeared and the GDR turned from the most prosperous of all the Russian satellite states into the poorer half of a newly reunified Germany. In a 2019 poll cited by Amberger, 60% of Germans in the former GDR said they saw themselves as second-class citizens. Many Germans in the western part of the country regard their eastern neighbors in the same way, not least because of their right-wing voting behavior.
This relationship creates a vicious cycle, with Germans in the eastern states voting for right-wing, antiestablishment parties because they feel disempowered and disenfranchised, while Germans in the former West exacerbate those sentiments by referring to Germans in the East as uninformed at best and Nazis at worst, and the eastern Germans double down on their political allegiances in response.
As informative as interpreting German electoral trends through a Cold War frame can be, it’s worth reiterating that historical factors form but one part of the puzzle and many experts prefer a different approach. “I don’t think the success of the AfD has anything to do with nostalgia or a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy,” Katja Hoyer, a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and author of “Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany,” tells me. “Quite the opposite. If anything, West Germany is the outlier (though AfD is also growing there) while the East reflects what’s happening in France, Italy, Austria, and many other countries.”
Nitzan Shoshan, an assistant professor of sociology at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and author of “The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany,” argues that the East-versus-West approach functions as a convenient historical and political narrative, one that “continues the displacement of fascism onto the GDR.” Holznienkemper, for his part, wonders if more emphasis ought to be placed on the influence of social media, which transcends borders and cultures. “I can see the growing vulnerability to fake news in my own family in Germany,” he says, “and wonder if we should also look at this phenomenon through the lens of a broader urban-rural divide in addition to the East-West dichotomy.”
The Dutch journalist Karel Smouter examined this urban-rural divide in the Netherlands in his 2022 book “Blue White Red” (“Blauw Wit Rood”), finding that, in a relationship similar to that between East and West Germans, right-wing voters in the Netherlands’ rural provinces felt alienated from the predominantly liberal, urban populations around Amsterdam and Rotterdam that dominate politics, media and many industries. They talk of “global elites” who “wish to subjugate them like a new aristocracy,” an overblown conspiracy theory rooted in the reality that they have long lacked representation in the businesses and institutions situated around the Dutch capital and, as a result, feel they do not have enough of a say in the policies that affect their lives and livelihoods.
A comparative study of voting behavior across Europe reveals that right-wing movements in different countries are motivated by similar fears and frustrations, yet also underscores the unique histories that give rise to those motivations, not to mention the nationally specific solutions required to reduce political polarization in different parts of the EU. If, as Smouter suggests, the Dutch government should focus on improving the economic well-being and political agency of rural provinces in the Netherlands, then Germany’s — as many scholars have suggested — must put greater effort into healing the wounds of Cold War division and addressing the failures and shortcomings of the reunion of East and West. What is needed is not assimilation but true reunification.
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