Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

East Germans And The Far-Right AfD

Paul Hockenos 5th October 2017

Paul Hockenos

Paul Hockenos

Angela Merkel’s immigration policies may be the ticket that propelled the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) into the Bundestag on September 24 with a stunning 12.5 per cent of the vote nationwide. The extremists’ entry into prime-time German politics shattered a post-war taboo in a country ever mindful of its Nazi-tainted past. In the eastern states, 22.5 per cent of voters choose the AfD, and one in four males. In the campaign, the party underscored controls over borders, migration and security.

But the explanation as to why the xenophobic party could rise so powerfully in the eastern German states, which were its incubator and remains its bastion, reaches back much further into German history than the 2015 refugee crisis, when the German chancellor enabled nearly a million refugees to seek political asylum in Germany.

The AfD’s existence and the potency of its allure can be traced back to the Cold War era and Germany’s unification in the 1990s.

The first unlikely figure in this narrative is the late German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who has already been written into German history books as a great chancellor and world-class international statesman. Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Kohl began pushing for German unification with all of his might – and didn’t stop until he succeeded, in less than a year’s time. Kohl is revered as the ‘father of German unification’ in Germany, having pulled off a feat that few had imagined possible in their lifetimes.

But Kohl’s impatient, one-sided unification of the two Germanies sowed seeds of discontent. Kohl insisted that unification happen entirely on the terms of West Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany. And indeed the Federal Republic absorbed post-communist East Germany whole, putting it under its post-war laws and institutions without altering anything.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

In hindsight, some observers refer to it as an ‘annexation’ since the process took into account none of the east’s traditions or the fresh democratic institutions that its citizens had built in the hopeful aftermath of communism’s demise. (Of course, in the GDR’s first and last free elections in early 1990 Kohl’s Christian Democrats ran away with the election by promising unification as soon as possible. It thus wasn’t a forced annexation.)

Moreover, Kohl did much the same with the fragile eastern German economy, which was in the process of transitioning to a market economy.

By introducing the western Deutsche Mark into the east in mid-1990, overnight Kohl put the east’s industries on a competitive footing with West Germany’s powerful postwar economy, one of the world’s strongest. The result was the swift collapse of the east’s commerce, and jobless soared across the ‘new eastern states.’

Unemployment shot up from almost zero in 1990 to nearly 20 per cent in 1996, where it remained for a decade.  Two million easterners fled their depressed hometowns for jobs in the west, leaving behind bitter, disappointed families and peers who had voted for Kohl’s Christian Democrats in good faith. They had believed that the ‘blossoming landscapes’ Kohl had promised, would gradually appear. Rubbing salt in their wounds, many western Germans blamed the easterners for the debacle, implying that they were too dim to master the new system.

The second factor in the right’s rise is the authoritarian legacy left by the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), also called East Germany. The easterners endured the disappointment and hardship of unification in a society that was just starting to learn democracy. The liberal premises of the Federal Republic hadn’t had time to take root.

For four decades the GDR had been a hard-nosed dictatorship that rewarded conformity and blind obedience to its narrow-minded ideology. It had taught its charges to think in black and white categories, and expect the state to guide them from cradle to grave. There were very few non-Germans in the GDR, and thus no experience living in multicultural societies. It’s an understatement to say that tolerance of diversity wasn’t a virtue in the GDR.

The West’s steamrolling of former East Germany aggravated the easterners’ resentment, turning them away from the west’s political system and liberal values. Polls from the time show deep dissatisfaction with liberal democracy and even many wishing a return to the communist era.

The umbrage and latent racism was often taken out on refugees, migrant workers, and darker-skinned Germans, whose living quarters were physically attacked or bombed with Molotov cocktails. In the course of the 1990s racist violence soared in the east, worst in the hard-hit ‘black holes’ of eastern Germany, where unemployment could be over 35 per cent. Foreign nationals were warned to stay out of so-called ‘Nazi zones.’ In 2006, Germany’s security service(Bundesverfassungsschutz) reported that Saxony was the capital of right-wing extremism in Germany with 75 right extremists per 100,000 people. The Germany-wide average was 47. (In the 2017 vote, the AfD emerged as the strongest party in Saxony, even ahead of the CDU.)


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

A third and final factor was the market reforms of the noughties, set into motion by the Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Schröder, facing high unemployment in the west and double that in the east, instituted ‘New Economy’ reforms along the lines of those of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The pro-business measures dramatically cut back the safety net of the social welfare state, which caused the jobless to quickly land on the welfare rolls. Just when the easterners needed it most, social services were yanked out from beneath them.

During the course of the two decades between unification and the AfD’s founding, an array of far right, even neo-Nazi parties, tried to get a foothold in eastern Germany – and some succeeded briefly. But only a few of the neo-Nazi ‘old rightists’ made the jump into the regional legislatures, and they never lasted long.

Then came the AfD in 2013 with its leadership of respectable-looking professors and professionals. At first it emphasised opposition to the euro and Chancellor Merkel’s efforts to bail out the debt-strapped southern Europeans. The protest party with a modern veneer began its march into Germany’s state-level legislatures in the eastern states, capturing about 10 per cent of the vote.

Its fortunes and orientation changed in 2015 when refugees trekking from Syria and other places in the Middle East and Northern Africa crossed the Mediterranean Sea escaping hardship in their own countries. Merkel, seeing no alternative other than barbed wire and water cannons to keep them at bay, opened Germany’s borders to them.

The numbers of refugees and Germany’s unpreparedness to take them in shocked many Germans. Polls showed that a majority of Germans – not just easterners – disapproved of Merkel’s measures.

This is when the AfD opportunistically shifted its focus to immigration, singling out the refugees, many of whom were Muslim, for undermining Germany’s security and bloating its welfare rolls. By then eastern Germany’s economy had picked up, many now had jobs and had entered the middle classes. But the resentment, racism, and now the fear of losing what they’d only recently gained was potent.

In the course of 2016 and 2017, the new xenophobic AfD surged into regional legislatures first in the east and then in the west. In the eastern states of Mecklenburg Pomerania and Saxony Anhalt, the AfD became the second strongest party with 21 and 24 per cent of the vote respectively. These are places with infinitesimal numbers of refugees or foreign nationals living there. In Germany as a whole, the number of refugees entering to apply for asylum have been cut down to less than 100,000 this year, numbers that Germany can easily process.

In the wake of Sunday’s vote, Germans aren’t looking back self-critically at the 25 years since the Wall’s breach. Even those in Merkel’s own party are citing migration itself as the grounds for their poor showing. Yet, reducing immigration still further in Germany won’t address the irrational and illiberal political culture that gave birth to the AfD and its ilk.

This article originally appeared on the International Politics and Society Journal.

Paul Hockenos

Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based author and political analyst. Among others, he has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, and Foreign Affairs. He is the Europe Correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education and authored several books on European politics.

You are here: Home / Politics / East Germans And The Far-Right AfD

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube