East Germany has for many years been considered the problem child of the Federal Republic. The former socialist Länder reunited with West Germany more than thirty years ago. Still, there is a widespread understanding that the walls that separated the two Germanies live on in people’s minds, leading to a larger support among East Germans for political forces that seem to embrace the country’s authoritarian past(s).

For a long time, this has meant high support for Die Linke (the Left), which can be considered, to some extent, the heir of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. More recently, however, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) has been gaining ground.

In the European elections in June, East German voters expressed a clear preference (29.7 per cent) for a party whose members, just a few months earlier, had been caught discussing the remigration of “foreigners”, including those holding German citizenship.

On 1 September, two East German states, Saxony and Thuringia, elected new parliaments. In both cases, the AfD got close to one-third of the votes, becoming the strongest party in Thuringia (nine percentage points ahead of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and coming in second in Saxony (behind the CDU).

The AfD has not been the only anti-establishment political force to enjoy success in East Germany. A newly formed party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), founded by a charismatic but controversial former Die Linke politician, came in third in both states, with 12 and 16 per cent of the votes, respectively. At its core, the BSW is a left-wing populist party, but its messaging is also aimed at winning the sympathy of far-right voters. It advocates a much tougher stance on migration and wants to run an investigation into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic (even though there is evidence that the vaccination campaign managed to save lives, and Germany’s lockdown rules can by no means be considered strict, compared to other European countries).

Coalition-building and the blue sky

In Saxony, the CDU is likely to retain power, though it’s not yet clear what coalition it will form. In  Thuringia, incumbent Minister-President Bodo Ramelow of Die Linke is unlikely to be reappointed. Ramelow is still rather popular in the state (partly because his politics was more social-democratic than far-left). Yet the breakup between Die Linke and BSW has visibly reduced his support. While the BSW is completely built around Sahra Wagenknecht’s personal brand and barely has members, its support now surpasses that of Die Linke.

As for the AfD, even though it is extremely strong, it is very unlikely that it will be able to govern in any of the East German Länder – at least for now. The AfD’s branches in Thuringia and Saxony were labelled right-wing extremist organisations by intelligence agencies, and the Thuringian branch is led by Björn Höcke, who also headed the party’s more extremist wing, “Der Flügel.”

Against this background, it is no wonder that political parties are weary of joining forces with the AfD. The CDU has decided at the federal level that it won’t form state-level coalitions with the AfD.  Similarly, the Christian Democrats have ruled out collaborating with Die Linke, shrinking the pool of democratic alternatives. For the moment, no such decision has been made towards the BSW, even though Wagenknecht was known to be one of Die Linke’s politicians with the most outspoken Communist sympathies. Some CDU members would love to see the ban extended to the BSW, while the more pragmatic ones are already actively looking for avenues to cooperate. On the national level, the two parties share a hard line on migration and security, but when it comes to geopolitics, Sahra Wagenknecht is rather pro-Russia, while the CDU supports Ukraine.

In East Germany, however, Christian conservatives tend to disagree with the rest of the party. CDU politicians such as Saxony’s Minister-President Michael Kretschmer are more cautious on military assistance to Ukraine, would support immediate peace talks (even if they favour Russia), and wish to rebuild the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. While these issues are dealt with at the federal level, they might have played a role in the outcome of East German state elections.

Kretschmer has ruled out coalitions with the AfD, but still aims to appeal to potential AfD voters by adopting far-right positions. The BSW goes even further than just borrowing far-right talking points – party members have expressed their willingness to support AfD proposals on a case-by-case basis. The BSW’s logic is that one should not try to negate the statement “the sky is blue”  just because someone from the AfD said it. What a blue sky might mean in political terms is hard to say.

Inequalities at the core of the problem

One can blame politicians for making pacts with the devil or pandering to the worst instincts of their voters, but there is also a demand side to this. East German voters (apart from those who live in cities like Leipzig, Dresden, or Potsdam) have clearly lost faith in progressive political parties. The Greens narrowly made it to parliament in Saxony, but fell short of the 5 per cent threshold in Thuringia. In both states, the three parties in government at the national level – Social Democrats, Liberals, and Greens – gained less than 15 per cent of the vote in total.

There are many attempts to explain why this is happening. East Germany was for many years run by a communist dictatorship, a direct consequence of the Nazi past, while the West could enjoy freedom and financial support packages, as well as an “economic miracle”. The economic restructuring of East Germany in the 1990s didn’t help either. The neoliberal shock therapy, which involved the mass privatisation of state-owned factories and the inflow of Western goods, led to serious economic difficulties in the newly democratised part of the country. Although East German real wages were somewhat sheltered compared to other former socialist countries, but hundreds of thousands of people moved to the West.

Instead of being seen as equal members of society, East Germans are sidelined and regarded as the source of most of Germany’s troubles.

Of course, East Germans are better off now than they were prior to the reunification, but remain underrepresented nationwide in management and leadership roles in companies, the media, public administration, and academia, and their salaries or pensions are still lower than those in West Germany.

Does it mean that the roots of AfD and BSW’s success are purely economic? In his 2023 bestseller Der Osten: Eine westdeutsche Erfindung (“The East: A West German Invention”), literature professor Dirk Oschmann claims that the core of the problem is rather the “othering” of East Germans by their Western counterparts. Instead of being seen as equal members of society and being granted the same opportunities, they are sidelined and regarded as the source of most of Germany’s troubles.

Historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, by contrast, argues that the population of East Germany suffered a so-called “freedom shock”: the people who were formerly locked inside an authoritarian system were unable to make use of their new opportunities. Worse, they mistook material wellbeing for freedom. The economic miracle came hand in hand with democracy in post-war West Germany, but the two are not necessarily correlated – as exemplified by the high unemployment and the collapse of the economy in the East. What we see now is the outcome of lacking agency in the face of disappointment. Decades of dictatorship made people unable to participate in public discourse or discussion. It left them disillusioned and cynical – to a degree that some of them might even think they were better off in the state of unfreedom.

The crisis of established parties

After the reunification, East Germans did not manage to create channels for political participation. It is hard to say to what degree it was their own fault, or the outcome of Western dominance in public life. Just like in most countries of Eastern Europe, the newcomers to democracy (many of whom were on the streets demanding freedom in the late 1980s) were presented with readymade economic, social, and political recipes that left no space for homegrown ideas on how to organise their lives. East German civil society organisations and unions remained weak, the political path was decided by Western political parties, and citizens gradually started to experience a loss of control over their fate.

This can also be explained by the population size of East Germany: excluding Berlin, less than 15 per cent of the German population lives in the East – a fraction small enough to be forgotten, when decisions are made that concern the whole of the country.

The perceived lack of opportunities and the feeling of not being heard partly explain the disillusionment with party politics in East Germany. Party membership, in relation to population size, is well below that of West Germany. In local elections, candidates often choose to run without being associated with a party. In the state of Brandenburg, half of the mayors and municipal council members currently have no party affiliation.

The AfD framed immigration as the root of all evil, while more substantial issues like social justice and deteriorating living conditions were not addressed properly.

But if party politics is disliked, how are the AfD and BSW attracting so many votes? In the past years, some degree of societal stress – especially the real and perceived challenges of immigration and the Covid-19 pandemic – triggered a degree of politicisation in East Germany, a longing for solutions. Immigration, the topic that seemed most important to people, was easily captured by populists. The AfD framed it as the root of all evil, while more substantial issues like social justice, the dwindling workforce, or deteriorating living conditions were not addressed by anyone properly.

According to the latest book by macro-sociologist Steffen Mau, Ungleich vereint (“Unequally United”), the radical left and the AfD deliberately highlight certain aspects of the East German experience in their program, so that people can feel spoken to. The AfD does this so successfully that it can pretend to be the party of the “East” while labeling the Greens the party of the “West.” It doesn’t seem to matter that leading members of the AfD are West German – including the lead candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke.

What next?

Gaining a third of the seats is not enough for the AfD to form a government, but it can influence politics through a blocking minority. A thorough analysis by Verfassungsblog highlighted that the party could use its strength to prevent constitutional amendments (the Länder have their own constitution) and the election of constitutional judges. In Thuringia, blocking power also applies to judges’ and public prosecutors’ election committees, and to the parliamentary control commission (which oversees the intelligence agency).

This power could allow the AfD to exert pressure on other parties and blackmail them with the hope of shaping the legislative process or securing positions in the state parliament. At the federal level, the AfD’s influence is already visible in the way German political elites deal with immigration, and it might pose further challenges to the passing of diversity policies, among other things. The high number of AfD sympathisers in courts, the military, and other institutions that are expected to uphold the rule of law is also a reason for concern.

In the next weeks, we will see the formation of state governments made up of established parties, with some participation of forces considered far-left. The far right will be kept out of power, and its blackmail attempts will be most likely downplayed in public-facing communications. A major risk is that mainstream politicians will think that they successfully averted a far-right takeover, and will go on with business as usual.

This would be a mistake. The AfD could manage to build a blocking minority in Brandenburg too, and ineffective governance can bring even more supporters to the far right. Greens, who have a long-term vision for society, should urgently think of ways to convince voters that they are not just a party of the West. This is all the more important considering that the trends shaping politics in the East are also observed in the West – and can become stronger in the coming years.

In this sense, the elections in East Germany represent a rehearsal for a larger far-right project: securing power at the national level. The disillusioned East is easier to win over, but the AfD has already secured significant support in all the Western Länder too. Dissatisfaction with the government’s paralysis is felt across the country, and forming coalitions will only get more complicated after next year’s federal elections. Borrowing far-right talking points as a way out will only strengthen the AfD.