The East Rises in Germany, and So Does Political Extremism

Anna Wenske, 69, worked for decades at the national theater of East Germany, where she was born and still lives. “After the reunification, everything went kaput,” she said. She lost her job and her savings; it took her years of part-time work to reach a kind of equilibrium.

Now she resents what she considers the easy path offered to refugees while Germans suffer.

“Too many people exist on this planet and everyone wants to come to us,” she said in a sunny Weimar, “and we tell everyone welcome and we have nothing left for ourselves.” When it comes to Ukraine, she said, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia lied when he said he would not invade, “but I don’t trust the United States any more than Russia.”

When her state, Thuringia, holds elections on Sunday, she says she will probably support the Alternative for Germany party. The radical right ethnonationalist party, known as the AfD, plays with Nazi-era language and its state branch has been classified by domestic intelligence as right-wing extremist.

But she is also tempted by a newer party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, named for the former Communist who founded and leads it. Though the party abhors Nazism and supports the Constitution, it holds many of the same views as the AfD. “When I listen to Sahra, somehow she touches me,” Ms. Wenske said.

Germany is facing three critical state elections — Saxony also votes Sunday and Brandenburg on Sept. 22 — all in the former East Germany, where polls show such grievances are pushing many voters to the extremes, whether left or right. The expected results are already causing much hand-wringing in Berlin about the future of German democracy and the country’s failure to integrate east and west even 33 years after reunification.

The votes are being seen as a bellwether for the federal elections in September 2025, if the current government lasts that long. The three-party coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz is so paralyzed and unpopular that prominent members of one partner, the Greens, talk openly of a government out of ideas.

But more than anything, these elections are expected to show the persistent divisions in politics and social attitudes between west and east Germany, where extremist parties like the AfD have made by far their deepest inroads. Their success is changing the political debate nationwide, especially around issues like migration and support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

After Friday’s knife attack in the western city of Solingen, where prosecutors say a Syrian refugee killed three people and wounded eight, the AfD and Ms. Wagenknecht have trumpeted their plans to control illegal migration and deport those who do not qualify for asylum, like the Syrian man.

That has pushed Mr. Scholz of the Social Democrats, which has lost many voters in the east, to vow to step up deportations and call for tougher European laws on asylum and deportation.

The issues of refugees, migration and knife crimes have added to the sense of estrangement in the east. In addition, the attitudes, experiences and language bred over 40 years of East German sovereignty, passed down generation to generation, are for many a source of identity and pride.

A Country Within a Country

Even today the east remains virtually a country within a country, akin to Sicily in Italy, perhaps, or Flanders in Belgium.

There remains a strong feeling of having been mocked and colonized by West Germany after unification. There is also deep sympathy for Russia, rooted in persistent anti-Americanism, where Washington is still seen as dominating German foreign policy and leading the country astray.

The AfD wants to pull Germany out of the West, out of the European Union and NATO. Some of its election posters show the German and Russian flags commingled, with the slogan: “The East does it!” or “The East is rising!”

The BSW says it wants to work within the European Union to improve it, and to ensure that NATO remains “a security union and not an alliance for war,” as its leading candidate, Katja Wolf, said.

Both are openly national socialist parties, stressing German interests and economic help to pensioners and the unemployed, who feel victimized by the aid to migrants. And both are deeply sympathetic to Russian interests and oppose further military aid to Ukraine.

Those positions are resonating. Including The Left party, the inheritor of the Communist Party, parties on the far right and far left are expected to win up to 65 percent of the votes on Sunday, according to the most recent polls in Thuringia, more than 50 percent in Saxony and about 45 percent in Brandenburg. The AfD leads in all three states.

While the center is shrinking, not everyone is ready to embrace the fringe. Though he shared many of the same views as Ms. Wenske, the retiree, Jens Wickmann, an elevator technician with three children, said he would not vote for the AfD.

“I don’t want Björn Höcke,” the AfD leader in Thuringia whom many consider a neo-Nazi, Mr. Wickmann, 56, said in the little town of Nohra. “It harms our country. We’re not Nazis.” Instead, he said, he will probably vote for the Christian Democratic Union, the center-right party that is second in the polls and is the main opposition party in Berlin.

Mr. Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, by contrast, is expected to get only 6 percent of votes in both Thuringia and Saxony. It is possible that none of the parties in his coalition, which also includes the business-friendly Free Democrats as well as the Greens, will make it above the 5 percent needed to get into the state parliaments.

Why the East Is the East

The through-the-looking-glass nature of politics in the east has proved endlessly vexing to the leadership in Berlin, as well as to the mainstream parties that once dominated German politics. It has as much to do with history as with any of the problems Germany faces.

The burden of the past is everywhere in East Germany, but doubled. First there were the Nazis, which East Germany officially labeled a West German phenomenon. Then came the legacy of the German Democratic Republic, the former Soviet-occupied East Germany, which lasted 40 years and self-identified as antifascist and anti-Western.

Steffen Mau, a sociologist at Humboldt University, said the polls underscored his thesis that German unification has not produced assimilation but in fact has solidified lasting differences between western and eastern Germany.

In an interview and a recent book, “Unequally United,” he argues that “it was an illusion that unification would bring together two things artificially separated, because over 40 years two very different societies have developed, with very different social structures.”

While western Germany is a middle-class society, the east, which lost many of its jobs soon after unification, is still relatively poor, with little accumulation of wealth, he said.

In the east, the Communist state and party and large state-owned enterprises prevented the growth of civil society, with little role for the churches or the trade unions.

“It all disappeared overnight, creating a vacuum, and right-wing actors like the AfD saw an opportunity, with a frustrated population that was homeless ideologically,” Mr. Mau said.

Is the East the Future?

Even today, party affiliations are much weaker and more volatile in the east, with more votes on the extremes and fewer for traditional centrist parties.

That “may be a harbinger of Germany’s future,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.

The BSW is the wild card. Formed only in January by dissidents from The Left party, it does not have the same stigma among some voters as the AfD, which the domestic intelligence service considers to have many extremists in its ranks.

While the AfD may get the most votes in these elections, it is shunned by all of the other parties, which vow not to collaborate with it.

That is likely to render BSW, which is running third in all three states, a key coalition partner, presenting difficult choices for the Christian Democrats, who need a partner party in the east but have ruled out a coalition with the AfD or The Left.

The C.D.U.’s lead candidate here, Mario Voigt, says the party is concentrating on topics like energy prices, education, health care and migration. “We want to frame the race around issues here that matter for the next five years and tell people not to fall into protest votes.”

Mr. Voigt admits that he benefits from fears about Mr. Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia. But his party has already toughened up its line on illegal migration and is sounding softer on future aid to Ukraine, much as the federal government is.

The only realistic response to the extremist parties is to try to keep them small, said Daniela Schwarzer, a political scientist and board member of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a nonprofit institute devoted to civic participation. “The hope is to demystify them before they get into office” and contain them to the regional level, she said.

But success even at a regional level would be a big breakthrough for either the AfD or BSW, with the potential for normalizing a more extremist politics in the months to come.

Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting.