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The AfD’s Rise Isn’t Just About East Germany

The Alternative für Deutschland has a stable national poll lead, including in the former West Germany. Its rise owes to much more than Eastern grievances.

When the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the Saxony-Anhalt state election on September 6, many pundits saw proof of Germany’s unending internal divide. More than three decades since reunification, we are told, the former East Germany is still a different country politically. Not only did the AfD take 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt but in this Sunday’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election it soared to 38 percent, its third win in a row in the so-called “new states” that joined the Federal Republic in 1990. These results are, by now, unsurprising to anyone. The AfD is widely considered the party of the east.

Martin Sonneborn, who represents the satirical outfit Die Partei in the European Parliament, noted the irony. The border wall erected by East German authorities in 1961, nominally meant to keep out Western reactionaries, was officially called the Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart. On the day of the Saxony-Anhalt vote, Sonneborn issued a mock appeal to rebuild the wall—this time to protect western democrats from the marauding Nazis in the east. His post was obviously absurdist. Yet it reflected widespread assumptions about the new political gulf along the former inner-German border, and ungenerous attitudes toward easterners.

Progressive-minded Germans on X pleaded with foreign observers not to over-generalize from the Saxony-Anhalt result: Such a small, poorer eastern state, some suggested, is no more a barometer of German opinion than Wyoming would be for the United States. Many analyses centered on local psychodramas, explaining that easterners, or Ossis, never learned to use democratic freedoms wisely, that they have a culture of inflated grievance, or that the East’s communist rulers never forced them to atone for the Nazi past. Others blamed the fallout of reunification: because of deindustrialization, or because Ossis feel like second-class citizens even in a country that welcomes new immigrants.

Yet all these accounts of easterners’ refusal to catch up with modern, democratic, cosmopolitan Germany all sidestepped a rather bigger problem. How come the far-right AfD has started topping the polls in the former West Germany?

True: Even from up here on the 10th floor of our eastern Berlin prefab block, I can see that our area is much more an AfD target than western parts of the city. Still, the east-west split little explains the party’s overall rise. Only one in six Germans live in the former East and yet the AfD is the biggest force across the Federal Republic: It polls close to 30 percent nationally, almost 10 points ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). The AfD has since April topped every federal-level poll: It has repeatedly ranked first-placed in the west, at around 25–26 percent, as well as in the east, at 35–40 percent.

Political maps like this one, showing the biggest party by area in last year’s national election, show Germany split in two: the east AfD blue, the west CDU black. Yet the picture is changing rapidly, especially in federal polling. In rural areas and small towns, and among young and middle-aged men, the AfD is piling on votes even in western areas where it has little past organization. In the 2021 local elections in Lower Saxony, in northwestern Germany, the AfD scored 5.4 percent, but in the same races this month it took 16 percent. Far from a residual eastern force, it is gaining millions of new voters in the largest western states, such as North-Rhine Westphalia (where it averages around 17 percent) and Bavaria (around 20 percent; one poll shows it at 42 percent among under-30s).

Still, while the AfD would like to present itself as the natural home of ordinary Germans, it isn’t winning everywhere. Polls aren’t real votes, and where the AfD is the largest single party it rarely has majority support. Even after its win in Saxony-Anhalt, it isn’t clear that it can form a government. Headlines about its Mecklenburg-Vorpommern breakthrough shouldn’t blind us to the resistance it faces there or the fact that long–Social Democratic areas—for instance more urbanized districts with stabler economic circumstances and higher educational levels—have........

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