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 by 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 Saxony-Anhalt’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 of a 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.
For one thing, forty years of communism remain within living memory and cannot simply be brushed aside. To illustrate, a friend of mine recalls that, as a child growing up in the GDR in the 1980s, he wished for a can of pineapple for his birthday—hardly an experience shared by children growing up in West Germany on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Growing up in neighboring Austria, I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on the news and being surprised to discover that the people on the other side spoke German.
For another thing, the East has been the subject of considerable prejudice and condescension for decades—also after the Berlin Wall fell. "Every time you turned on the TV or read something about eastern Germany in the newspaper, it was either about Nazis, or they would film some old lady in an apron standing by a fence in Brandenburg, complaining about foreigners or whatever. So there were always these negative portrayals," remembers Hoyer, herself born in East Germany.
Indeed, eastern Germans have been stereotyped as backward, unsophisticated, and poor, their dialects ridiculed. Ossi—a colloquial term for an East German—was used pejoratively, and I have heard western German Baby Boomers use it that way even in surprisingly recent years.
“Those states were promised full integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet many of their residents still feel left behind.”
The AfD promises to restore a sense of pride to eastern Germans who feel that their identity and experiences have long been overlooked or belittled. "Be proud again—anything is possible" was literally one of the slogans used in the AfD’s recent election campaign.
Controversial AfD figure Björn Höcke, head of the party’s Thuringian chapter, which Thuringia’s domestic intelligence service has also classified as far-right extremist, has even argued that eastern Germans are more authentically German than their western counterparts, having not been westernized to the same degree after World War II.
In an interview, Höcke went so far as to call western Germans "German-speaking Americans." For Höcke, "Americanism is the antithesis of Germanness," while the AfD’s role is to spearhead nothing short of a revolution by "true Germans" against American hegemony and a domestic political elite that he believes "hate Germany and want it to perish." Why four decades of Soviet hegemony are supposed to have left a "true" German identity intact in the former GDR remains unanswered.
Be that as it may, the AfD today strongly aligns itself with the Russia of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin under the guise of being anti-war. This is something it has in common with a fringe party that also performed relatively well in the Saxony-Anhalt elections, securing just over five percent of the vote: the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, the former leader of the far-left party Die Linke (The Left), the direct successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which ruled the GDR as a dictatorship. Die Linke has just won the state election in Berlin.
Not only did the BSW’s performance in the Saxony-Anhalt election prevent the other parties in the state parliament from securing a narrow majority over the AfD, but, unlike the other parties, it has also not categorically ruled out working with the AfD and could, therefore, become the kingmaker in Saxony-Anhalt.
Indeed, the left-wing party—which has been criticized for reproducing anti-Semitic stereotypes in its election campaign by portraying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, as motivated by greed—has already declared its willingness to engage in coalition talks with the AfD. That willingness was recently put to the test when AfD state party leader Ulrich Siegmund said: "We don’t categorically condemn the production of military equipment [in Saxony-Anhalt], because, when we launch future deportation and remigration offensives, we will of course need such equipment."
The AfD’s extraordinary success among voters in the former East Germany—most recently in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the party also doubled its vote share, securing around thirty-eight percent—suggests that other parties have failed to take ordinary people’s concerns seriously or address them in a credible way. Germany’s center-right and even center-left parties are now playing catch-up—for instance, by finally taking a tougher line on immigration and political Islam—but for too long they neglected these issues, much as they neglected people in the structurally disadvantaged eastern states. Those states were promised full integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet many of their residents still feel left behind.
Instead, the established parties, most of which originated in the former West Germany, repeatedly invoked the Brandmauer, or “firewall,” against the AfD, portraying those who crossed it as fascists and, in the process, delegitimizing their fears about the future—from economic decline to rapid social and cultural change. For many eastern voters in particular, that approach has only deepened their sense of alienation from the Western-oriented political class—and given them yet another reason to vote AfD, whose radical promise to upend the existing system exerts a seductive pull.
These failures by the political establishment must be rectified if election results like those in Saxony-Anhalt are not to become the norm across the country—cultural differences between East and West notwithstanding. Yet if German democracy is to withstand authoritarian subversion, the political center must not give up but instead double down on the liberal-democratic values of the West.
Gerfried Ambrosch is a journalist and writer based in Austria.
