Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany

German workers remove a statue of Lenin from the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain in November 1991 (Photo by BERND SETTNIK/DPA/AFP via Getty Images)

A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant sentiment, most German commentators believed that the Alternative für Deutschland was now a spent force.

The party had been able to attract centre-right voters following the 2015 migrant crisis, many of whom may not have agreed with its entire manifesto but sought a political outlet for their scepticism of Merkel’s handling of the crisis. But last year, its national polling dropped to just over half the level of support it enjoyed in late 2018.

The pandemic has brought to the surface many of the AfD’s most extreme members and activists, including anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. This seemed to have made them unelectable — or so we were told.

None of the established West German parties have offered East Germans anything besides silent assimilation

And yet the party’s prospects look promising in today’s state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. The right-wingers are on course for a quarter of the votes in the east German state — just a few points behind Merkel’s Christian Democrats, they may yet take first place.

The resurgence of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is a symptom of a wider trend in regions of Germany that once lay behind the Iron Curtain. Support for the nationalistic party is far higher in the states that had formed the GDR. In three of them — Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia — nearly one in four voters support the far-right party.

The fact that East Germans are more likely to vote for the AfD has led many national (which often means West German) politicians to give up on the region. The government’s secretary for East Germany, Marco Wanderwitz, recently caused outrage when he said former GDR voters were ‘lost to democracy’.

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