Co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the party’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, features on the cover of a 2023 edition of Stern magazine. Photo by conceptphoto.info/Flickr.

On November 6, 2024 German Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner. Notwithstanding the broad agreement on policy goals, striking a balance between deficit reduction, support for renewable energy and increased arms spending turned out to be impossible. Lindner, a liberal, opted for social cuts; Scholz, a social democrat, wants to avoid them. They had to part ways. After Scholz lost a no-confidence vote, federal elections were scheduled for February 23, 2025. The question that worries everyone from old-school conservatives to new millennium lefties is: How many votes will go to the hard right (if not neo-Nazi) party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland or AfD). In the last federal elections in 2021, the AfD got 10.4 percent of the total vote. Current polls put them at 20 percent, but nobody knows what will happen on election day. In this new age of uncertainty, polls don’t predict election results as reliably as in the past.

Elections in the East German provinces Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia have already shown what hard-right success looks like. They also reveal the inability of the political centre to understand how much it contributed to the rise of a new right. Refashioning totalitarianism theory in the New Cold War climate, centrist politicians and pundits typically portray the success of the new right as the outgrowth of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships that ruled East Germany from 1933 to 1990. West Germany, which was spared Communist rule and, allegedly, shook off the burden of its Nazi past, appears as a role model in this democracy-versus-dictatorship story. Totalitarianism theory could possibly explain why the AfD is more successful, so far at least, in East than in West Germany. But it can’t explain right-wing success in other countries, like France, that were never under Communist rule and know Nazi rule only from occupation, which strengthened anti-fascist traditions in those countries. But even these traditions couldn’t stop the rise of the new right there.

This article offers a different explanation for the hard-right surge in Germany. It shows that German unification in 1990, signalling the triumph of liberal democracy and the onset of neoliberal globalization, unleashed a new form of nationalism—Deutschmark nationalism—which, after mutating into export nationalism for a while, became the ideological seed for the AfD. West Germany, or, more precisely, the economic miracle that was West Germany in the post-war era, served as a role model during German unification. Promoted by West German elites and eagerly embraced by people in East Germany, it raised the expectation of a new economic miracle materializing in the West and extending to the East. However, these hopes were soon disappointed as political unification caused socioeconomic divisions between East and West Germany and, in the early 2000s, a turn to austerity policies that were highly unpopular in the East and the West. Just when it seemed that Germany would weather the world economic crisis of 2008-9 better than other Western countries, and maybe even become the European hegemon, things started falling apart. The Euro-crisis made clear that it was not only politically united Germany that was plagued by massive socioeconomic and geographical divisions but the European Union, too. Continued economic weakness combined with New Cold War marching orders from Washington fed a nostalgia for a supposedly great past—symbolized by the Deutschmark. This nostalgia, I argue, would not have taken root if the left had been able to channel growing discontent into mobilization for a more equitable and less insecure future.

State elections don’t typically get international media attention. The September 1, 2024, elections in Thuringia and Saxony did. After all, it was the first time since the downfall of the Nazi-regime that a hard-right party, the AfD, pulled the majority of votes in a German election. It proved a bitter coincidence: The AfD celebrated their victory in Thuringia, obtaining 32.8 percent of the total vote, on the 85th anniversary of the Nazi-invasion of Poland that marked the beginning of the Second World War.

The Conservative Christian Democrats (the Christlich-Demokratische Union or CDU) came in second with 23.6 percent. The parties of the federal government coalition, Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD), Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and Liberals (Freie Demokratische Partei or FDP) ended up with single-digit results, the FDP reduced to a mere 1.1 percent. At the time of the election, this was the party of the federal minister of finance. The Left Party (Die Linke), which in the previous election had become the strongest party for the first time in any German state, lost almost 18 percent and came in fourth, even trailing the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht or BSW), a breakaway group from the Left Party.

In Saxony, the AfD won 30.6 percent of the votes, just behind the CDU’s 31.9 percent. As in Thuringia, none of the parties of the federal government coalition achieved double-digit results. The Left Party lost more than half of its vote and ended up with a devastating 4.5 percent. The BSW came in a distant third with 11.8 percent.

Just three weeks after their election victories in Thuringia and Saxony, the AfD scored another success in Brandenburg. Narrowly beaten by the SPD that got 30.9 percent of the total vote, the AfD came in second with 29.2 percent, way ahead of the BSW’s 13.1 percent and the CDU’s 12.1 percent. The Left Party and the Greens obtained less than five percent of the vote, which is the minimum threshold for holding seats in provincial or federal parliament under the mixed-member proportional electoral system. The FDP pulled less than one percent.

Barely beaten by the Conservatives in Saxony and the Social Democrats in Brandenburg, the AfD was elected by roughly a third of the electorate in three East German states, becoming the strongest party only in Thuringia. If ever there was a right-wing surge, this was it. Most media reports attributed the phenomenon to widespread dissatisfaction with the federal government, particularly regarding migration, climate policies and the war in Ukraine. Accounts of why the AfD is more popular in the East (approval ratings in the west of Germany range from 8.5 percent in Hamburg and the Saarland to 21 percent in Lower Saxony) focus mostly on disappointments caused by German unification, continuing socioeconomic disparities and a widespread feeling among erstwhile East Germans of being second class citizens. Other explanations invoke the authoritarian heritage of communist rule in East Germany, which is often presented as an extension of the Nazi-regime. Against the two dictatorships in the East, West Germany is presented as a role model of liberal democracy. This as if there hadn’t been considerable continuity between Third Reich and West German elites; as if East Germany’s ruling bureaucracy, despite all its dictatorial wrongs, wasn’t established by antifascists who had been exiled or jailed during the Nazi reign; as if the nationalization of the means of production, despite the wrongs of bureaucratic rule, had not marked a break from the West German capitalism that made West Germany a junior partner in the American Empire; as if West German capitalism had not dictated the terms of unification at the very time that a grassroots movement for democracy unsettled bureaucratic rule in East Germany. The destruction of the East German economy and the integration of the East into existing West German institutions left no room for the aspirations of East Germany’s civil rights movement. Rather than explaining growing support for the new right, media talk about the “peculiarities of the East” reinforces existing frustrations there—frustrations that help shed light on the relative strength, so far at least, of the right-wing surge in the East.

The ‘two-dictatorships’ thesis that pits the East against the liberal democratic West revives the totalitarianism theory that was an integral part of the anti-communist, anti-Soviet consensus during the Cold War. It is now part of the New Cold War ideology that counterposes democracy and authoritarianism. As in the old Cold War, charges of totalitarianism serve to short circuit thinking about alternative economic and political systems, reinforcing the neoliberal creed that there is no alternative to capitalism. The lack of actually existing alternatives is, of course, also one of the reasons for the rise of the new right. Emerging out of an ailing neoliberalism, this right-wing force presents itself as an alternative to the status quo but actually just recasts neoliberalism in a nationalist and racist mould. Replacing neoliberalism’s earlier commitment to corporate globalization in Germany, as elsewhere, neoliberalism is haunted by the spectre of fascism, which, to centrist neoliberals, has everything to do with misled masses unable to understand the virtues of capitalist liberal democracy and nothing to do with capitalist crises that undermine the legitimacy of liberal democracy. Neoliberalism is also haunted by the spectre of communism as ruling classes worry that crisis of legitimacy could extend to capitalism itself. As the neoliberal centre denies the possibility of alternatives and the left generally (not only the Left Party in Germany) appears unable to advance real world alternatives, the growing appetite for change, spurred by recurrent crises wrought by capitalism, settles for right-wing fantasies of a harmonious life in a nation that competes successfully with other countries economically and is freed from job- and welfare-stealing migrants.

Capitalist crises and their exploitation by the right are common phenomena, certainly in the imperialist centres of the world system, but also in the peripheries. But they play out differently in different national contexts. Behind the AfD’s electoral successes in Thuringia and Saxony as well as its broader surge in popularity lie the combined histories of German unification and the rise and decline of neoliberal globalization. The upsurge of the new right is just one of the outcomes of these combined histories. Equally important is the defeat of the federal government coalition and the rout of the FDP, whose leader, former federal Minister of Finance Christian Lindner, promotes austerity policies that stymie government plans to subsidize the transition to non-fossil energies. These policies also lead to a creeping roll-back of social spending—except when it comes to arms spending. Little wonder a government that took office on the promise of something like a Green New Deal lost its credibility almost entirely and called for a federal election scheduled for February 23 of this year.

And then there is the defeat of the Left Party that, despite programmatic commitments to progressive alternatives, is widely seen as the appendage of a lame-duck government in Berlin. At the other end of the political spectrum, the AfD is widely perceived as an oppositional force, even though its program blends austerity, nationalism and militarism in ways that are more extreme but qualitatively not much different from policies advanced by the CDU and the FDP.

In the face of electoral defeat, the federal government, which embraced the US’s New Cold War policies a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, also introduced dramatically tougher migration policies. Rather than representing any kind of alternative, as its name purports, the AfD is the black sheep of the establishment family, expressing racist views more radically and bluntly than even the Conservatives. While the Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens are intent on denying such views, they reveal themselves as Western supremacists when it comes to fending off so-called authoritarian threats arising from Russia and China, stirring up longstanding fears in the West that ‘the Russians are coming’ or that ‘Asian hordes’ augur “the decline of the West,” in the words of right-wing intellectual Oswald Spengler.

The hypocrisy of the Greens, who advocate a green transition while supporting the purchase of dirty oil and gas (wherever they can get it ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine ended Russian gas-flows to Germany), make them a prime target of AfD agitation. But in reality the AfD and the Greens share the fear of Western decline. The AfD engage in fearmongering around the replacement of white people by non-white immigrants and accuse the Greens and their coalition partners in the federal government of accelerating Western decline. But while the Greens may be the prime target of the AfD’s culture war, the truth is that despite significant differences in tone, the Greens and the AfD share a basic consensus on the decline of the West.

Encouraged by Glasnost in the Soviet Union, many East Germans took to the streets in the fall of 1989. Under the banner “We Are the People” they demanded democratic reforms of East Germany. Neither unification with West Germany nor a return to a capitalist economy was on their agenda—at least not initially. As protests grew, and especially after the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) had opened the border to the West, “We Are the People” was replaced by “We Are One People” more and more often. It was supplemented by the slogan “Germany, United Fatherland,” which is actually a quote from East Germany’s national anthem, written by the communist poet Johannes R. Becher in 1949, at a time when the leaders of the SED still thought a united Germany could be achieved—not necessarily socialist but not aligned on either the US or the Soviet Union. Such hopes were buried by the Cold War, for which the Berlin Wall became a symbol, casting a dark shadow over communist East Germany and allowing capitalist West Germany to present itself as a beacon of freedom. It was in a matter of weeks in the winter of 1989-90 that the abstract possibility became a demand, massively fanned by West German politicians—notably then chancellor Helmut Kohl—and mainstream media, which hinted at the possibility of East Germany adopting the West German Deutschmark. Many East Germans seized on such hints as an irresistible offer. “If the D-Mark comes, we’ll stay here; if it doesn’t come, we’ll go to it” became the next popular protest slogan. Since the opening of the border, thousands of East Germans had gone to the West, creating conditions reminiscent of the times before the wall was built in 1961. Back then, the East German economy lost so many people, most of them young and well-trained, that a collapse of social reproduction became a real threat. The wall stopped the bleeding of the East German economy but inflicted irreparable damage on the legitimacy of the political system.

Almost 30 years later, the opening of the border by the SED-leadership came as a bit of a surprise to West German elites. Yet, they were quick to grasp the possibilities it created. To them, this meant the integration of East Germany into the West German political and economic system, not coexistence with a somehow reformed but still politically independent East Germany. The ‘take over the East’ goal of West German elites and the Deutschmark rush of East German masses fed each other. The civil rights movement that wanted to democratize East Germany was sidelined. Some of the groups active in that movement adjusted to the new zeitgeist quickly, some even entered into an electoral alliance with the East German conservative party, despite their having criticized it as a small but integral part of the SED-regime. Angela Merkel, who would later become chancellor, belonged to one of these East German groups that allied with other conservative-turned-civil-rights groups and the East German CDU. This Alliance for Germany easily won the last East German elections and negotiated the integration of East Germany into West Germany’s institutional structures. On July 1, 1990, the Deutschmark came to the East, three months later the independent state of East Germany vanished into an enlarged West Germany. Most of the Alliance for Germany dissolved into the West German CDU immediately after unification. In December this enlarged CDU won federal elections.

In less than a year the Cold War had come to an end and an entire state had disappeared. However, the hopes pinned on unification, notably the introduction of the Deutschmark, were soon dashed. A year after unification, unemployment, which had existed in communist East Germany primarily in a hidden form, stood at 10.2 percent and rose to over 20 percent in the early 2000s. It didn’t fall below 10 percent until 2014, a quarter of a century after the Berlin Wall fell. Moreover, mass migration from East to West Germany, which the introduction of the Deutschmark was meant to curb, actually accelerated after the arrival of the Deutschmark. From 1990 to 2015, East Germany lost significantly more than one million people, the vast majority during the first two years after unification, and almost all of them of working age. Were it not for this emigration as well as early retirement schemes and retraining schemes for thousands of workers, unemployment in the East would have been even higher than it actually was. Introducing a new form of hidden unemployment, many of the participants in retraining were enrolled in one course after another, often in different fields, until they were old enough for early retirement.

One of the main, if not the main, reasons for the collapse of the East German economy was the Deutschmark. Introduced at a rate of one Mark West for one Mark East, while average productivity of East Germany was estimated to be about a quarter that of West Germany,........

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