How Former East Germany Became Home to the Far Right
The anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland made big gains in Germany’s state elections this Sunday. The grim outcome shows how the wounds of reunification are pitching eastern regions toward the far right.
Björn Höcke in Erfurt, eastern Germany, on September 1, 2024. (Joerg Carstensen / AFP via Getty Images)
When Quentin Tarantino chose the small eastern German town of Sebnitz for a scene in his Inglourious Basterds, he was likely drawn to its beautiful scenery, not to actual Nazis. Yet, along the road to Sebnitz across Saxony, a several-meter-high flagpole stands tall in a backyard, displaying the black, white, and red flag of the Second Reich. While hoisting this flag is not generally banned, it is today one of the most blatant ways to express nostalgia for the Nazi regime.
Sebnitz, a Saxon town with about ninety-five hundred residents, is typical of many eastern communities in several respects. One of them is that almost half of eligible voters here backed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Sunday’s state elections. The scores for the AfD in both Saxony and Thuringia (also in the former East Germany) were moreover remarkable insofar as their respective AfD state associations are considered particularly radical. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, has labeled Saxony’s AfD — using a distinctly German phrasing — “verified right-wing extremist.”
In the Thuringian contest, the AfD topped a state election for the first time, with just over 30 percent support. In Saxony, the AfD was again the second-strongest force, but its gap behind the long-dominant conservatives of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) narrowed significantly. Meanwhile the left-wing Die Linke slumped to 13 percent in Thuringia and 6 percent in Saxony.
None of this was unexpected. In early summer, members of Die Linke came together in Sebnitz to prepare for the upcoming campaign. “We want a presence in the region, and we can’t do that if we only organize feel-good events in the big cities,” said Susanne Schaper, one of two leaders of its Saxon branch. The polls were already pointing to a massive surge for the far right.
“Some are resigned to the fact that there may soon be nothing on the Left politically, only the Right and far right,” Schaper continues. Once a strong force in post-socialist East Germany, Die Linke’s reputation changed dramatically over the last decade. Across much of rural eastern Germany, it is today not only unpopular, but hated, much like the Greens or Social Democrats. “I’ve had twenty-two attacks on my office since 2014,” says Schaper, seemingly unfazed. Her concern deepens when discussing her party’s campaigners: “Our hearts sink every time we get another call that someone has been attacked. But we also have to realize that we don’t have the opportunity to organize the election campaign in a way where everyone can be protected.”
Like much of the former East, Sebnitz slowly turned from a political home to hostile territory for the Left. Under the socialist economic system of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the town was known for its artificial flower factory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many once-thriving businesses were unprepared for a new economic reality called capitalism. They were either sold off cheaply to Western buyers or forced to close due to economic pressure. Today, while still retaining some charm, much of Sebnitz is run-down. As in many eastern climes, Sebnitz’s population is now aging, relatively low-income — and politically leans to the Right. In the constituency where it is located, the AfD took 45 percent support.
These election results are historic in many ways: for the first time since the fall of Nazism, a far-right party is the biggest force in a German state, even as voter turnout in the eastern states has never been higher. But it’s important to understand that the AfD’s success is the culmination of developments across the last decade.
Far-Right Roots
Far-right parties have existed in Germany since the 1990s, as have nonpartisan neo-Nazi groups. However, with the emergence of the AfD, the German far right took on a more strategic form. Founded in 2013, it initially positioned itself as primarily Eurosceptic, gradually adopting some of its current defining traits: Islamophobia, climate change denial, and neoliberal labor and social policies. The AfD’s relationship with Russia has been especially controversial. While its program merely calls for an “end to unilateral sanctions against Russia,” several scandals in recent years involved AfD politicians acting as election observers in Russia or allegedly maintaining ties with pro-Russian networks.
In eastern Germany, where nonparty movements like Pegida (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West”) laid the groundwork for anti-refugee rhetoric, right-wingers quickly focused on migration. While eastern Germany has a much lower migration rate than western states, this positioning resonated strongly. Former chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-borders policy during the 2015–16 European refugee crisis met with significant resentment among many easterners.
In 2015, during a visit to a refugee shelter in the Saxon town of Heidenau, Merkel was met with protesters who denounced her as a “traitor to the people.” Anti-refugee actions and sentiments continued to rise in Germany, culminating in over a thousand police-recorded attacks on refugee shelters in 2015. AfD politicians capitalized on this climate, with today’s federal spokesperson, Alice Weidel, calling for Merkel to be “brought before a proper court” in 2017, while the latter was still chancellor.
Over the past few years, more moderate AfD members have gradually left the party, opening the way for more radical figures: extremist leaders like Björn Höcke, chairman of the Thuringian parliamentary group, knew how to tap into easterners’ bad memories of state socialism for his election campaign. Earlier this year, he posted on Twitter/X, questioning, “Why does the current state of the country remind me more and more of the GDR?” in response to a Die Linke politician who labeled the AfD “fascist.”
The AfD has even used campaign slogans that promise voters a second “Wende,” alluding to the Peaceful Revolution that led to German reunification in 1989. Even within his own right-wing party, Höcke is considered extreme — with positions ranging from celebrating the Second German Empire and calling for an end of the memory of the Holocaust to pushing back “culturally alien” people “as far as the Bosphorus.” In his state, he is also extremely popular: since he was elected parliamentary group leader of the AfD in Thuringia in 2014, the party has more than tripled its share of the vote.
Höcke, born in West Germany, never experienced a day in the GDR. Nevertheless, his strategy has proven effective: while the AfD has found success in parts of West Germany, it is strongest in the former socialist states. The right-wing populists succeeded in marketing themselves as a new protest party, which drew votes away from the Left long before the recent elections. However, the AfD continues to make the biggest gains among those many easterners who have not voted for years — or have never voted at all.
Die Linke Setbacks
Die Linke activist Schaper is aware of her party’s loss of image in the East: “We have to stop this nonsense about ‘banning homework’ or ‘putting a brake on kebab prices,’” Schaper says, alluding to some propositions made by her party colleagues, “We are not in a situation where we can try funny things. [Her Die Linke colleague] Bodo Ramelow, for example, proposed the establishment of a state housing association in Thuringia to make affordable housing possible. These are measures that I can sell very well as a leftist.”
Ramelow, who governed Thuringia in various coalitions for the last ten years, was the first member of Die Linke to be prime minister in a federal state. But sixteen years of neoliberal austerity policies during the Merkel era did not leave the east unscathed, either. At the same time, substantial left-wing demands have largely been drowned out by a culture war from populist insurgents on both the Left and Right.
Former Die Linke parliamentary group leader Sahra Wagenknecht founded her own party at the start of 2024. By framing some AfD positions — such as Euroscepticism and migration restrictions — within a left-wing context, the “Bündnis Sahra Wageknecht” (BSW) immediately captured 11 percent of the vote in Saxony and 15 percent in Thuringia, largely drawing votes from the “old” Left Party. On possible future collaboration with the AfD, Wagenknecht responded rather ambiguously: “If the AfD says the sky is blue, BSW won’t claim it’s green.”
Both the AfD and BSW draw on the impression that Die Linke has lost its feel for the working class. While the AfD presents itself as a party that protects its voters from “left-green” measures such as the expansion of wind power and a planned ban on combustion engines, BSW is positioning itself against the alleged “identity politics” of Die Linke, like gender-inclusive language. Schaper argues that the charge is overblown: “During the last legislative period, we submitted 600 proposals, none of which dealt with the issue of gender-inclusive language.”
In Saxony, conservatives may now be forced to form a coalition involving Wagenknecht’s left-populists, while in Thuringia, the shape of the upcoming government remains entirely uncertain.
It seems that no party — whether progressive or conservative — is willing to form a coalition with the far right. The Christian-conservative CDU touts itself as a “firewall” against the AfD, firmly ruling out any coalition. However, some cracks in the “firewall” are already present: last year, the opposition Christian-Democrats in Thuringia passed a bill on the property transfer tax — a win made possible only with the votes of the AfD. According to surveys among Christian-Democrat party members, a majority does not entirely rule out cooperation with the AfD in the east.
Recent graphics analyzing the state elections in Saxony and Thuringia show a majority of electoral districts colored in AfD blue, with exceptions mainly in larger cities. In Leipzig, for instance, twenty-eight-year-old Nam Duy Nguyen achieved a significant political victory. Running as a direct candidate for Die Linke, he won a seat in the state parliament, essentially ensuring the political survival of the party in Saxony.
Nguyen’s win is remarkable for several reasons. As the son of a Vietnamese contract worker — part of the GDR’s recruitment of cheap labor from the “socialist brother country” Vietnam — his biography is deeply intertwined with the history of reunified Germany. He also succeeded at first try, and with a strictly grassroots approach, personally knocking on around fifty thousand doors with his campaigners. “We won,” Nguyen announced on Twitter/X on election night, later adding: “Whether it’s austerity politics or agitation, things won’t just continue as they are—they will get worse.”
Leipzig, one of the fewer eastern German cities where the population is growing rather than declining, stands out with its influx of new residents, vibrant cultural scene, and progressive image. The city now seems even more like an exotic island in an increasingly AfD-blue landscape.
Attacks
The shift to the right across much of eastern Germany has also emboldened other far-right forces. Just weeks before the recent state elections, neo-Nazis in large numbers protested against Pride events in eastern Germany. In Bautzen, Saxony, about a thousand Pride participants encountered several hundred neo-Nazis, who disrupted the event with loud slogans and Nazi salutes. Present among the groups was the loosely organized neo-Nazi group “Elblandrevolte,” one of whose members had previously violently attacked the Social Democratic politician Matthias Ecke. In Zwickau, a music festival was canceled after threats from right-wing youth. In Brand-Erbisdorf, teens with black, white, and red flags marched on a planned asylum shelter.
While there have always been active neo-Nazi groups in Germany, they have recently become noticeably greater in number and more popular — especially among some groups of young people. This resonates with the finding that the AfD scored the highest among voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Attacks are mostly targeting politicians and migrants: according to police statistics, the number of politically motivated crimes in Germany increased sharply in 2023, especially because of right-wing attacks on refugees and asylum shelters.
Another state election will be held in the former East Germany at the end of September, this time in Brandenburg, where Social Democrat Dietmar Woidke has been in power since 2013. At a recent event with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Woidke said about the AfD: “These people are not an alternative, but the downfall for our federal state and for the whole of Germany. . . . these people must never have one millimeter of power.” But recent polls suggest that the AfD could also become the strongest force here, too.