Success of far-right AfD shows east and west Germany are drifting further apart

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together to grow together”.

How optimistic that image of organic healing sounds 35 years on. Tonight’s historic election results from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose eastern and western regions are, if anything, drifting further and further apart.

The far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is riding a populist wave across Europe’s largest economy. If federal elections were held tomorrow, recent polls suggest the party could become the second strongest group in the Bundestag.

But only in the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has already done after emerging top in a state election for the first time ever, on at least 30% of the vote.

And in none of the western states do polls predict that the far right would challenge the established parties of the centre right and centre left as seriously as in Saxony, where projections have the AfD in a head-to-head race with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with the latter slightly ahead in exit polls.

In Brandenburg, the state that surrounds the capital, Berlin, the AfD is also expected to emerge as the strongest party later this month.

As long as the remaining parties manage to uphold the cordon sanitaire around the far right and prevent it from gaining a majority, its dreams of seizing power will probably remain merely aspirational. Nonetheless, the AfD’s establishment as a dominant regional force raises serious and troubling questions about Germany’s political identity and how it contain the rise of such forces in the future.

For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had “caught up” with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align. According to such reasoning, the rise of the AfD is cast as a protest vote against continued disparities in income, employment and living standards.

But economics and demographics only go so far to explain the outcome of Sunday’s votes. The population of the east is older than that in the west, but it is no longer demographically “bleeding out” as it was during the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the two decades that followed. In fact, every year since 2017, more people have migrated from the west to the east.

Unemployment is higher, but only by a fraction – the real contrast here is between northern and southern Germany. For the last two years, the economies of the eastern states have been growing faster than those in the west, as global players such as Tesla and Intel have set up factories in the eastern lands. Levels of immigration in the eastern states that went to the polls on Sunday night are among the lowest in the whole of Germany.

According to a survey published by Olaf Scholz’s government at the start of this year, about 19% of east Germans say they feel left behind. That is twice as many as in the west (8%), but would still suggest that 80% of the population of the five eastern states do not feel they are losing out. Yet a sizeable number of them cast their votes for a party that, in its Thuringian branch, has been certified as rightwing extremist.

The eastern-born sociologist Steffen Mau has coined the term ossifikation for this trend – a play on the slang term for former GDR citizens and the biological process by which tissue hardens into bone. Far from still “catching up”, Mau writes in his recent book Ungleich Vereint (Unequally Unified), east Germany is voting differently from the west precisely because it has already caught up and now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity.

In her book Tausend Aufbrüche (A Thousand Starts), which won this year’s top German nonfiction prize, the GDR-born historian Christina Morina says the AfD is winning in the east because it has managed to tap into a distinctive understanding of what democracy entails, which was shaped by 40 years under communist rule and remains different from that in the west.

This might sound paradoxical, since the GDR was a single-party dictatorship without free elections and no division of state powers. Yet the GDR’s regime claimed the concept of democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically so.

“East Germany too claimed for itself to have found a democratic response to national socialism,” Morina told the Guardian in a recent interview. “It’s just that the communists’ story of how democracy worked was a deeply populist one, which claimed to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in the west, which they said was merely organising class hierarchies and representing the interests of capitalism.”

The historic experience of that kind of pseudo-democracy, she argued, was one explanation for why the AfD was managing to mobilise so many more previous non-voters in the east than other parties.

Unlike the established centrist parties, the AfD has not only held rallies on the campaign trail, but organised spaziergänge , “strolls” through town centres, which are designed to evoke the peaceful Monday protests that accompanied the unravelling of socialist East Germany. It is the only party in Germany that calls for the president to be directly elected by citizens rather than through a federal convention, and has advocated for a Swiss-style direct democracy of regular referendums.

“In its election campaigns, the AfD very effectively tapped into an experience that is widely shared among east Germans,” said Morina. “That you don’t make yourself heard through voting, by engaging yourself in political parties, civic groups or unions, but by mobilising the masses for street protests.”

There is every reason to distrust the AfD’s claim to merely represent a different democratic tradition. Underlying its story of empowerment lies a deeply racist strand of thinking, which casts easterners as more pure Germans because they resisted multiculturalism and all the ideas that entered the West German discourse after the student revolutions of 1968.

But both Mau and Morina suggest that winning back voters from the far right can only work by engaging them directly through unconventional and creative means, such as local citizens’ assemblies. To halt and eventually reverse the drifting apart of Germany’s east and west, the political centre needs to start thinking outside the box.