Victory for the AfD raises difficult questions about east Germany

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution

“Bit by bit, one loses hope.” That is what Charlotte Knobloch, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor and former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, posted on social media after publication of the results for elections in two eastern German states on Sunday.

For the first time in the postwar era, a confirmed rightwing extremist party has won a state election in Germany. The Alternative for Germany won first place in Thuringia; in Saxony, it ended up a close second after the Christian Democrats (CDU). The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which was launched only eight months ago and champions a left-conservative nationalism, gained third place with double-digit results in both states.

On the 85th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, two openly anti-system parties together received between 42 and 49 per cent of the vote. Both are anti-western, pro-Russian and oppose supporting Ukraine. Both are led by expert manufacturers of outrage: the AfD’s Thuringian head Björn Höcke has been sentenced twice for knowingly using Nazi slogans; the BSW’s national leader Sahra Wagenknecht is a fiery former communist with many admirers on the far right.

Why did — how could — this happen? After reunification in 1990, the former German Democratic Republic for many years seemed to have silently subsumed itself in an engorged version of the old West Germany. But in recent years a wealth of academic research, autobiographies and literary texts — often by German authors with eastern roots — has sought to redress an analytical deficit, and to return agency to a much-belittled region. Which is not to say that they agree on the nature of the problem.

One very bright dividing line separates later generations of east Germans from those with lived experience of dictatorship. The writer Dirk Oschmann (born in Gotha in 1967) last year published a diatribe against the “invention of the East” by West Germany. He points out accurately that the AfD is led mostly by westerners but — remarkably for a book that claims that the voices of easterners have been suppressed wholesale — fails to explain why so many of them vote for it. Meanwhile, the 87-year-old singer-songwriter and dissident Wolf Biermann, who was stripped of his citizenship by the GDR during a concert tour abroad in 1976, recently thundered: “Those who were too cowardly during the dictatorship are now engaged in a risk-free rebellion against democracy.”

In his book Ungleich vereint (United in Disunity), the sociologist Steffen Mau (born in Rostock in 1968) provides a richly textured and sourced summation of the current state of research. He notes that for a host of historical, demographic, economic and social reasons, the mediating organisations that representative democracy requires to thrive — such as parties, unions or civil associations — struggled to flourish after 1990. Instead, he argues, a feeling of imagined inferiority and a culture of street protests with maximalist demands are fused in a toxic “hyperpolitics” that is extremely vulnerable to ruthless “polarisation entrepreneurs”. Enter the AfD and the BSW. 

Freiheitsschock (Freedom Shock), a new book by the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (born in East Berlin in 1967) diagnoses the propensity of east Germans to vote for authoritarian parties as the result of the long-term damage caused by their past as “inmates of the GDR” who had dreamt of the west as another nanny state — only richer. The churning frustration and anger expressed by AfD and BSW voters at the government, at “elites” and migrants, in this reading, is a deflection from their own unexamined history.

Now what? In Saxony and Thuringia, none of the parties will have anything to do with the AfD. But the CDU — whose national leader Friedrich Merz hopes to become chancellor in the national elections scheduled for September 2025 — faces nasty political conundrums. In Thuringia, it can field the governor only together with the BSW and its predecessor, the Left party. Saxony’s conservative governor can keep his job only if he forms a four-way coalition with the SPD, the Greens and the Left party — or a variety of three-way coalitions, all of which would include the BSW.

Expedience will no doubt make the CDU reconsider its previous refusal to collaborate with the Left. But coalition negotiations could take many weeks. And, crucially, the BSW and Wagenknecht are now in the position of kingmaker.

On Sunday evening, the BSW posted this statement: “Diplomacy in the Ukraine war and a No to the stationing of US mid-range missiles are conditions for any coalition. We will not be available merely to secure a majority.” It looks as if Wagenknecht is doubling down on polarisation.