The September 1 elections in the two East German states of Saxony and Thuringia have hit Germany like a hurricane. Strongest turnout ever For a far-right party in the post-war era. In Saxony, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 31 percent, trailing the Christian Democrats (CDU) and in Thuringia, where the AfD led. Court- fined twice Björn Höke, an ideologue and outspoken neo-fascist, won 33 percent of the vote, the highest of any party, and was thus mandated to form a government. The new populist party Sahara Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – a right-wing wing of the left-wing party with anti-immigration planks and pro-Russian sympathies – came third in both states.
Although it is unlikely that another party will share governance with the AfD—they all say they refuse to do so—the results raise enormous questions for modern Germany. How could such an extreme right-wing party do so well in postwar Germany, a country that, in its Eastern and Western postwar incarnations, has done so much to prevent the return of racist, authoritarian leadership? Why is this phenomenon so pronounced and radical in the region of former communist East Germany, in the east of the country, some 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Germans now ask: How could it all go so wrong? Several recently published books by German authors provide an account—and some answers.
Supporters of East Germany, including literary scholars Dirk Oschmann and historian Katya HoyerAuthors of recent bestsellers who blast the arrogant West and those who side with the West—much of the mainstream media, including leading weekly news magazines. the mirror-Practice throwing rhetorical grenades at each other. On their own, these one-sided arguments miss the mark. But taken together, and combined with new material, they explain how the journey to Germany made such a mess.
A rift between eastern and western Germany—defined by the east’s predominance of far-right votes and street violence, as well as the inability of the republic’s mainstream parties (with the exception of the CDU) to attract eastern members and votes—can be traced. For events after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today’s hard-right sympathies in the East are largely, though not exclusively, a strong reaction against the one-sided terms of West Germany’s annexation to the East, the West’s abusive treatment of Easterners, the humiliations imposed on many East Germans by the economic transition. , and the legacy of a suffocating, oppressive dictatorship over its former subjects and their subsequent generations.
Detlev Claussen, an emeritus sociologist from Frankfurt, hit the nail on the head: “The AfD is the East’s revenge on the West, responsible for all the upheavals since the 1990s,” he wrote in an email. foreign policy. “Party workers are right-wing extremists, voters only partially so, although they too appear indifferent to the charge of Nazism.” Claussen pointed out that populists’ top issues are migration and the Ukraine war, two topics unrelated to regional governance. Instead, another theme is almost always dominant behind them, regularly linked in the rhetoric of both the AfD and the BSW: the unfair, humiliating conditions of integration and the conditions of change since then. “The essence of the far-right vote is resentment against the West,” Clausen wrote.
The AfD vote in the east is complicated: the five eastern states are not bastions of foaming-at-the-mouth neo-Nazis—although neo-Nazis are among them. A German study shows that about 8 percent Germans—on both sides of the country—subscribe firmly to a hard-right, racist ideological worldview with large additional segments in the gray zone that may sometimes—but not always—endorse right-wing authoritarian, street violence. Politics, against racist laws, and anti-SemitismAlso.
The numbers are not that different compared to other European countries, although they are currently higher in Germany than at any time since the Nazi era, especially young peopleAnd also High in East Germany than West Germany. About half of AfD supporters in the east — roughly 15 percent of the voting population — are hard-right enough to actually lionize — rather than just accept — Höcke, who uses thinly veiled neo-Nazi language. soft-pedals Germany’s World War II crimes, and wanted non-native Germans living in Germany to be “settled” in their countries of origin.
This radical segment is extremely worrisome and a threat to people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, Muslims and left-wing groups, among others. They are the types who either perpetrate or condone far-right hate crimes, which have been on the rise for many years. Germany’s security services is counted 25,660 such incidents in 2023. That’s an average of 70 a day across Germany and 22 percent more than in 2022. In May, was the candidate for the Social Democrats attacked and was badly injured while putting up EU election campaign posters in Dresden, the capital of Saxony. Experts say this kind of violence has not been this bad since the 1990s, tagged today as the “baseball-bat years,” when pogrom-like attacks against migrants and others in eastern states took place.
The 1990s is a good place to start to understand right-wing extremism in the East. Easterners emerged from under the heavy hand of Soviet Communism and were glad to be rid of it, and welcomed political and economic systems—liberal democracy and market capitalism—of which they knew little. They were also unaware of how decades of dictatorship, military education and indoctrination had penetrated their psyches and habits. East German communism was ethnically homogenous and nothing if not parochial; Very few non-Germans, such as African or Asian guest workers, reported living in East Germany Regular abuse. When the wall fell, West German rightists—a generation before Hoeck, himself born and raised in northwest Germany—poured east to tap and organize this raw energy. When Easterners were confronted with refugee hostels in their communities in the 1990s, they often responded with anger—and baseball bats.
One explanation for today’s racist violence and voting patterns in the East lies in the 1949 to 1990 German Democratic Republic, and the values passed from Generation after generation. The young people today who vote for the AfD and join neo-Nazi street gangs are the children and grandchildren of the bat swingers of the 1990s—or come from the same communities.
Today’s AfD hotspots Similar to the scenes of violence in the 1990s. There have been one study after another over the years shown High levels of racism and intolerance in the East, which the West’s transplanted democratic educators—university deans, politicians, foundation heads, CEOs, school principals, police chiefs—wanted and expected in the transition years.
But the AfD phenomenon is more stratified, as this explanation alone, broadly speaking, concerns almost half of the constituencies and very few of the BSW. It doesn’t explain how radicalism this ugly can spread over three decades and then suddenly burst into the open again. In the democratic elections held in 1990, Easterners may have approved of the East being taken over by the West—they voted for the CDU and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who turbocharged the unification process, completing it just 11 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. —but the pain and sacrifices of the economic transition are deep and leave scars that are still smarting today, even though Eastern GDP per capita has grown over the years, today approx. 80 percent Its western counterpart, with unemployment at just under 7 percent.
The despair and loss of the former should not be underestimated. Kohl had promised them “Rich landscapes“But what they found was massive unemployment: Three million people who had jobs lost them—and were put on the welfare rolls, starting in the early 2000s. Half right of the GDP of the East. In the low-income labor market, the news was even worse: More than 50 percent found himself unemployed. Many young people, including those who could, fled to the West, like the engineer who leased my apartment on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin: he took a job with BASF in Ludwigshafen in West Germany and never returned. Easterners were outraged by the deal for the song that the Truhandanstalt—the government agency that sold East German enterprises—made. The overnight introduction of the Deutsche Mark and the fire sale of Truhand in 1990 ensured that West German companies and West German owners would abandon all business in Eastern Germany—and use the region to supply cheap, fragmented labor (which explains the low GDP per capita today).
The apparently burning topics of migration and the Ukraine war are largely red herrings, concluded sociologist Stephen Mau, author of a widely read new book on the East-West divide, titled Unevenly United: Why the East Remains Separate (Unevenly United: Why the East Remains Separate). Eastern states have by now smallest fraction The number of foreign nationals in the federal states, and those communities with the lowest numbers in the East, have the AfD (J But scored well In densely populated rural areas, places with fewer women, fewer medical services and higher unemployment). He is not threatened by the Ukraine war and has nothing to gain from praising Russian President Vladimir Putin. The EU, which the AfD lambasts for milking Germany dry, has spent $53 billion (€48 billion). The German state spent about $2 trillion (€1.75 trillion).
Mau, in his finely balanced study, concluded: “The economic transformation of the 1990s, which was associated with major restructuring and brought with it not only freedom but also economic marginalization and insecurity, has led to people [in the East] Less willing to undergo further changes. Already forced to fundamentally change their lives and abandon biographical fixtures, large sections of the population now strongly resist further impositions, be it increased diversity or socio-ecological change.”
None of this, of course, explains why such broad sections of the population voted for a party closely aligned with neo-Nazis, or for a party that looked to Russia for inspiration rather than Brussels. However, this is the hardest, most common way to strike back at the system that caused them so much disrespect and injury—and then blame their backwardness for the mess.
“German democracy owes its legitimacy to its radical break with National Socialism,” Claussen wrote. “The election results in Saxony and Thuringia call this foundation into question.” It’s a swipe that Germany’s mainstream elites aren’t going to shrug off quickly.
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