Why East Germany votes AfD: A reckoning with reunification's unfinished business

On September 6th, the Alternative für Deutschland—a far-right party hostile to immigrants and aligned with the Kremlin—won 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, making it the strongest force in the state parliament. It was a landslide on record turnout, and if the party finds its way into power, it will be the first far-right government in a German state since the Nazi era. For a writer with roots in East Germany, the result arrived not as shock but as the culmination of a long, visible decline—one that began the moment the wall fell and the east discovered it would be absorbed, not negotiated with.

The fear of fascism's return has shadowed German life since the author's youth. Growing up in Saxony in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant living with the constant presence of neo-Nazi violence. Friday nights carried the threat of fists and baseball bats outside clubs and tram stops. May Day marches became flashpoints. The state's first post-reunification prime minister, Kurt Biedenkopf, a West German Christian Democrat close to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, spent twelve years insisting that Saxony was immune to right-wing extremism. By 2004, the far-right National Democratic Party entered the Saxon state parliament with 9.2 percent of the vote. The author left for Berlin the following year, as did many peers—not because the threat had passed, but because the promised blooming landscapes of reunification had never materialized.

What followed was a steady climb: NPD gave way to Pegida, the anti-migrant protest movement of 2014, which gave way to the AfD. The names changed. The structure remained. But this result, the author argues, cannot be understood as a purely eastern phenomenon. The AfD was founded in West Germany. Much of its leadership was born and raised in western states like Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia. The question worth asking is not only why the east votes for it, but why a certain kind of west German built the party in the first place and chose the east as the ground to make it grow.

The deeper wound runs back to 1989. When the wall fell, many East Germans hoped for something between socialism and capitalism—not necessarily reunification itself. What came instead felt imposed rather than negotiated, too fast, decided by others. The Treuhand, the agency tasked with privatizing the entire East German state economy, oversaw a transfer of assets that left most of the population behind. Ninety-four percent of East German companies were taken over by West German or international investors. Six percent remained in eastern hands. Approximately two million jobs were eliminated. In the autumn and winter of 1990-91, people took to the streets again—not against their own government's repression, but against what felt like occupation by the west. They demanded new elections, a renegotiation of the agreements that had left millions jobless as unemployment skyrocketed.

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD's leader in Saxony-Anhalt, was born the year reunification happened. One of his central promises is to take back control. At his first victory press conference, he said the people of Saxony-Anhalt would no longer be patronized—a remark that tapped into something almost visceral, a desire not just for change but for a kind of revenge. The east, finally, telling the overpowering west: enough. Throughout the campaign, Siegmund traveled the state throwing parties—free sausages, free beer, dancing, music. Villages and small towns that had been hollowed out, some of them ghostly and depopulated, were suddenly told again: you matter. Everyone else may have left you behind, but we see you.

Most AfD voters, the author observed, do not actually read or know what is in the party's program. They do not seem to care. What won them over was simpler: I hear you. I see you. Yes, you have every right to be unhappy. The AfD gave people attention in exchange for a vote. It will not improve life in East Germany—but that was never the point. What many have not realized is that the party's program runs on ideas Germany once needed a war and total defeat to bury: racism, belief in superiority, a hierarchy of who belongs, contempt for who does not, a hunger for enemies dressed up as pride. That is not a regional problem. It is a national one.

In April 1932, the Nazi party became the strongest party in state elections in the region that now makes up Saxony-Anhalt, winning 40.7 percent of the vote and forming, with coalition partners, the first Nazi-led state government in Germany. The parallel is not accidental. Whatever anger, disappointment, or legitimate demand to be seen or heard got bundled alongside the AfD's fascist ideology. Whatever happens next, it will be hard to say we did not know.