From the archive
Why Eastern Germany Increasingly Turns to the AfD
Insofar as Germany seeks to prevent the AfD from becoming nationally dominant, the political center must take more seriously the degree to which many people living in the former East Germany feel overlooked and alienated from the western part of the country, argues Gerfried Ambrosch.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s recent landslide victory in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt is undoubtedly significant. Classified as a “confirmed far-right extremist” organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the AfD’s state party won nearly forty-four percent of the vote, more than doubling its 2021 result. The runner-up, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), secured only around seventeen percent, roughly half its 2021 share. However, these results are hardly representative of Germany as a whole—at least not yet.
Formerly part of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, states such as Saxony-Anhalt continue to lag behind their western counterparts economically, more than thirty-five years after German reunification—with profound demographic consequences. Having lost more than eighteen percent of its population since 2000, the state is now home to some 2.12 million people, or 104 inhabitants per square kilometer, while its capital, Magdeburg, has fewer than a quarter million residents.
By comparison, the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia alone has almost eighteen million inhabitants, or approximately 530 per square kilometer. At more than 619,000 inhabitants, the state capital, Düsseldorf, is not even North Rhine-Westphalia’s largest city. Cologne is home to more than a million people. According to current polling, around seventeen percent of North Rhine-Westphalians would vote for the AfD—roughly the same share as in Berlin, which is surrounded by AfD strongholds in the east.
What is more, almost one in three people in North Rhine-Westphalia has a migration background, compared with only eleven percent in Saxony-Anhalt. This suggests that the state is hardly being “overrun by foreigners” to an extent that would warrant voting for a party whose central political objective is “remigration.”
Overall, the eastern part of Germany is structurally much less urbanized and more rural than the west. While this difference is socially and culturally significant, the divide runs much deeper, which is reflected in the markedly different voting patterns for the AfD. As historian Katja Hoyer argues, "the western parties have not understood the East." She identifies the main conflict as one between wounded working-class pride and the left-liberal zeitgeist prevalent in the urban centers of western Germany. "The fact that people in eastern Germany have distinct experiences and sentiments is a crucial factor in understanding the AfD’s appeal," says Hoyer.
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