Even after almost 35 years when the so-called German Reunification which was, in reality, a bit more like an Anschluss wherein West-Germany simply took over East-Germany occurred, a divided Germany continues to appear today. There is no more wall, but there still is a division between East- and West-Germany.

In the minds of many, democratic political parties remain strong in West Germany while in an authoritarian East-Germany, Germany’s most Neo-Nazi party in post-Hitler history – the AfD –  moves from one electoral success to another electoral success.

Some have even argued that the rise of the AfD in East-Germany is the revenge against a failed unification. Meanwhile,  Helmut Kohl’s deceptive promise of blooming landscapes was a sham.

The electoral con delivered election wins for the conservatism but engineered the devaluation of Eastern professions and educational achievements, job losses, mass unemployment, misery, despair, poverty and low-level property-related mini-criminality.

It all came with a rapid transition from state socialism to capitalism defined by the cruelty of neoliberalism and ideologically legitimised through democracy: East-Germans were free to vote now. Yet, democracy remained on shaky grounds.

Historically, Germans never won a decisive victory in their struggle for democracy. Most of Germany’s democratic revolutions were brutally put down by reactionary forces – from The Peasant Wars of 1525 to 1848.

Worse, Germany never had a French Revolution – not even a Paris Commune. It did not even fight Nazism to save democracy anywhere close to the fight of democrats the Spanish had to put up against the fascist dictator Franco in 1936.

Instead, Germany’s first democratic society only emerged for a short time – between the years 1919 and 1933.

In other words, East-Germans who were living under a Stalinist regime between 1945 and 1989, did not experience democracy until 1990.

Meanwhile, democracy came to West-Germany on the back of the battle tanks of the Allied Forces who freed West-Germany from Nazism. All of this impacted on the state of democracy in both East-Germany and West-Germany.

Today, local state elections in the two East-German states – Saxony and Thuringia held in 2024 – were a huge eye opener for many Germans.

Both elections delivered the strongest-ever turnout for Germany’s the anti-democratic AfD. It was a result that was previously unseen in Germany’s post-Nazi history.

In Saxony, the neo-fascist AfD was able to capture a whopping 31%. Just a touch less than one third of all voters supported an openly anti-democratic. The AfD positioned itself – very narrowly – behind Germany’s conservatives – the Christian Democrats (CDU).

Meanwhile in the East-German state of Thuringia, the AfD’s semi-official Führer, twice-court-fined hate-speech demagogue and outspoken Neo-Nazi Björn Höcke did well. Björn Höcke is widely known. Voters knew what they were doing.

In Thuringia, Björn Höcke’s radical AfD took a monstrous 33% of the vote. Worse, it was the highest that any democratic party had achieved. Hence, the anti-democratic AfD has a clear mandate to form a government.

Another party challenging democracy also did well. Germany’s newest crypto-populist political party – the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – is a right/left(ish) offshoot of Germany’s socialist – Die Linke – party.

The BSW runs on a racist anti-immigration ticket combined with strong pro-Russian overtones and, worse, pro-Putin sympathies. Unsurprisingly, the BSW’s strong showing secured third place in both states.

In both East-German states as well as throughout Germany, it is – still – somewhat unlikely that any democratic party will team up with the authoritarian  AfD to form a government.

Despite many noteworthy examples of local cooperation with the AfD that are already breaching the infamous fire wall, all of Germany’s democratic parties still say – at least officially – that they refuse to cooperate with the AfD.

Yet, in modern Germany, the extreme hard-right and neo-fascist AfD performed – and continues to perform – extremely well.

Meanwhile, in the eastern and western parts of post-Nazi Germany, it remains state policy to block the return of a Nazi-like Aryan racist, anti-democratic and authoritarian leadership – the Führerstaat.

The common agreement to fight Nazism has been the state sponsored raison d’être of Germany. Its Germany-defining doctrine has been implanted in disregard of which political parties are in government. Germans call this the Freiheitlich Democtische Gundordnung or Liberal Democratic Basic Order.

In other words, all of Germany’s democratic parties have been united in their fight against Nazism – until the neo-fascist AfD appeared.

Despite democracy being the official doctrine, the phenomenon of a far right – if not outright Neo-Nazi – upsurge is most strongly pronounced in Germany’s east – the geographical territory of former state-Stalinist East Germany.

Worse, support for Neo-Nazism, far right hooliganism and the neo-fascist AfD occurred almost 35 years after the Berlin Wall fell.

Some protagonists from a “we understand eastern Germany” cohort are correct in highlighting the overbearing West.

This came like an Anschluss or a takeover or what a recent book calls Die Übernahme – a mixture of invasions, conquest, and buyout.

In short, virtually all governmental, legal, professional, educational, cultural, economic, political, etc. institutions were taken over by the infamous and all too often extremely arrogant Wessies – people from West-Germany.

By the end of April 2025, western arrogance, condescension and the humiliating attitude of western politicians towards the east reached a new height. Germany’s new chancellor Merz’s conservative cabinet, politicians from East-Germany played an even more insignificant role.

Only one – the future Minister of Economic Affairs – comes from the east. It was Katherina Reiche from East-Germany’s Brandenburg. She is a good Christian (CDU) who separated from her husband after her long-term relationship with the scandalous and discredited Guttenberg came to light.

Meanwhile on the western side of Germany, and this came mostly from West-Germany’s mainstream media, a practice of throwing rhetorical missiles against the Ossies, the East-Germans, became rather common.

East-Germany, for example, is defamed as Dunkeldeutschland – dark Germany – with backward and stupid people living in the dark, remote, and far eastern woods of, for example, Saxony unwilling to adjust to the glory that Wessies bring to the east.

All this taken together can explain how and perhaps even why the trajectory of the two Germanies was paved with problems:

1. There is a democracy that was introduced from above and not struggled from below with the arrival of democracy only occurring during the 1990s in East-Germany.
2. There is the Anschluss – the complete, comprehensive and often rather brutal neoliberal takeover of East-Germany by western forces.
3. There is the lying CDU politician (Helmut Kohl) who promised blooming landscapes but delivered gloom, despair and mass unemployment.
4. There is the near total sell-out of East-German companies resulting in massive job losses and widespread poverty.
5. Much of this came with a sizable population movement of the young [and mostly female] workforce from the east to the west leaving the unemployable and the elderly behind.
6. There is the comprehensive replacement of East-Germany’s managerial, educational, and administrative level by arrogant Wessies.
7. Finally, there is the public defaming of East-Germans as second class citizens – Trabbi vs. Mercedes, etc.

As a consequence of these seven elements, the crack between the east and the west is still visible today. In terms of politics, it is more or less defined by the very high level of voters opting for the authoritarian and anti-democratic extreme right.

Worse, voting occurs with a corresponding level of far right thuggish street violence and daily Neo-Nazi brutalities in East-Germany.

Unsurprisingly, this is also accompanied by an inability of the democratic parties – with the exception of the conservative CDU, perhaps – to attract new party members and voters in East-Germany.

In short, democracy does not really seem to have gained a real foothold in East-Germany. To many Ossies, democracy is no more than a façade democracy or a democrafarce – a farce.

Today’s hard-right and Neo-Nazi sympathies in the East are largely – but perhaps not exclusively – a resentful backlash against the one-sided conditions of West Germany’s seizure of the East.

In other words, many East-Germans remain rather resentful towards an overbearing, Uber-arrogant and condescending westerners.

Perhaps the German philosopher Max Scheler wasn’t totally wrong when saying resentment is the product of weakness and passivity. Both were enforced onto East-Germans.

Deprived of an all-encompassing state that took care of them from birth to death for decades, left alone and exposed to the harshness of neoliberal capitalism’s cold intimacies, many felt hopeless and depressed.

Perhaps it was a bit like what is known as learned helplessness – a feeling that, quite easily, can turn into resentment.  And thirty-five years of the West’s rather patronising and humiliating mistreatment of easterners has only added to all this.

Many Ossies feel and experience a level of personal degradation that the economic transition from state-socialism to neoliberalism inflicted on many East-Germans.

In the background lingers the legacy of a suffocating and repressive dictatorship that, at times, expresses itself – rather paradoxically – in the feeling of nostalgia for the former non-democratic state. A pining for the good old days.

This attitude is so widespread that it received its own terminology: Ostaligie – merging Ost (East) with nostalgia.

This too, spices up the idea that the rise of the neo-fascist AfD in East-Germany is the Ossie’s revenge on the West.

It is the west that is accused of being the cause of all evil that befell East-Germany since 1990. It was, more or less, deliberately engineered by the elite in West-Germany to push capitalism into the east.

The AfD was at hand to smokescreen this. Its rise allowed the neo-fascist AfD’s official personnel to be composed of right-wing extremists. The AfD is a thriving job-machine for those unemployed Neo-Nazis who are not too stupid to work in an office.

Meanwhile, the East-German electorate of the AfD appears to be rather unresponsive to the accusation that the AfD is governed by the ideology of Nazism. Instead, the electorate is incensed by the AfD’s core issues of asylum seekers, migration, and the Ukraine war.

In East-Germany, these issues aren’t even important as East-Germany has very few migrants and is not involved in the Ukraine war.

Yet, AfD propaganda has successfully managed to link both to the misery caused by the neoliberal takeover.

Migrants are blamed by the AfD for the unfairness caused by capitalism and the humiliating conditions of reunification.

Migrants are even made responsible for the unfavourable conditions meted out against East-Germans ever since the transformation from state-socialism to neoliberal capitalism that resulted in a widespread feeling of resentment.

Perhaps the neo-fascist AfD is also an expression of their resentment against the west, migrants imported by the west, it is against western institutions, western capitalism, the western elite, western politicians and western arrogance. It is The Politics of Resentment.  

Yet, an analysis of voting patterns for the AfD in the East remains a complicated task. Germany’s five eastern states – Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia – can indeed be seen as strongholds of anti-democratic values, a tendency towards authoritarianism, far right populism, and Neo-Nazism.

Some recent studies have shown that about ten per-cent of Germans – in East- and in West-Germany – more or less subscribe to hard-right, racist and far right ideologies.

They support a right-wing dictatorship, far right street violence against politicians and democratic groups and NGOs, racist and anti-migration laws, and even anti-Semitism in a country that gave the world Auschwitz.

These numbers are higher than at any time since the victory over Hitler’s Nazism. Worse, support of authoritarianism is particularly strong among Germany’s young people, and it is higher in East-Germany compared to West-Germany.

Worse, about 50% of AfD supporters in East-Germany or about 15% of East-Germany’s entire voting population hold hard-core far right attitudes.

Much of this is signified by the AfD’s unofficial Führer – Björn Höcke – who, rather cunningly, employs a highly coded Neo-Nazi language.

Formerly known by his Neo-Nazi code-name Landolf Ladig, the often rather soft-spoken AfD-Führer Björn Höcke and west-import to East-Germany, likes to belittle Nazi crimes and wants to remigrate (read: ethnic cleansing) all non-native Germans living in Germany to their origin countries.

Björn Höcke is the Führer of a radical segment of East-Germany’s AfD that comprises a grave danger for people of colour, those deemed to be of non-Aryan stock, LGBTQ+ individuals, Muslims as well as progressive and democratic groups in East-Germany.

His followers are also the people (read: thugs) who either perpetrate or support far right and Neo-Nazi hate crimes. These have been on the rise for several years – particularly in East-Germany.

One more prominent example of Neo-Nazi criminality occurred in East-Germany. In May 2024, a candidate for the social-democratic SPD party was brutally attacked and badly injured in Dresden – the capital of the East-German state of Saxony – while putting up EU election campaign posters.

This kind of recent right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi violence hasn’t been so vicious since the 1990s. These years became known as the baseball-bat years because of the brutalities of East-German Neo-Nazis.

Beyond beating people with baseball bats, those years were defined by far-right pogrom-like attacks carried out in many eastern states against migrants and others.

In the recent chronology of German Neo-Nazism, the baseball-bat years (1990s) of radical right violence are a sensible starting point to understand East-Germany’s right-wing extremism.

At that time, easterners were forced to – rather quickly – switch from one political and economic system to another. They were promised liberal democracy and received the harshness of neoliberal free market capitalism. This was a system, they knew next to nothing about.

Meanwhile, East German society was, in terms of ethnicity, a rather homogeneous society. Walled in, it was insular and perhaps even narrow-minded.

It was a society in which very few non-Germans were living, apart from a few so-called African and Asian “guest workers” from a handful of socialist countries.

When the Berlin Wall fell, West-German Neo-Nazis – the generation before Höcke (who was, incidentally, born and raised in West-Germany) moved into East-Germany.

These Neo-Nazis tapped into the anti-socialist energy and chaos of the dying and rather authoritarian and semi-Prussian state-like East-German socialism.

Around the same time, East-Germans were confronted with the arrival of asylum seekers as refugee hostels and place of accommodation were opened in “their” rather insular communities during the 1990s.

Deprived of their livelihood through massive job-losses by the arrival of neoliberal capitalism, betrayed by the false promises of Western politicians (Kohl, etc.) and in the absence of a well-ordered state that had protected them for decades, they tended to react with anger – and baseball bats – toward the new arrivals. Western Neo-Nazis tapped into this – successfully.

This marks all but one possible explanation for the racist violence and the far-right voting patterns that are still prevalent in today’s East-Germany.

Worse, the prevalence of an authoritarian Ostalgia, the absence of a functioning state, the betrayal by Western politician, the economic misery brought by neoliberal capitalism, and the influence of Neo-Nazi propaganda tends to be passed on from one generation to the next.

In many cases, the young people in today’s East-Germany who are voting for the neo-fascist AfD and belonging to Neo-Nazi street gangs are the children and grandchildren of those came from the very same communities that gave the 1990s its name: baseball-bat years.

Today’s AfD hotspots are almost exactly the same as those locations in which Neo-Nazi violence was prevalent during the 1990s.

Over the three decades since the 1990s, study after study has shown higher levels of racism, xenophobia and intolerance in East-Germany compared to West-Germany.

Worse, the years of the transformation from state-socialism to neoliberal capitalism have not diluted the feeling of being neglected by the west.

There were widespread feelings of being treated as second class citizen by the West-import of teachers, university deans, politicians, civil servants, heads of state institutions, business leaders and CEOs, school principals, judges, and police chiefs – the list goes on.

Worse, after 35 years, the per-capita GDP in East-Germany has climbed only to being about 80% that of West-Germany with East-Germany’s unemployment rate being at just under 7%.

In sum, the disillusionment, resentment and personal hurt, humiliation, and injury of many East-Germans should never be underestimated.

None of this alone, of course, explains in its finality why so many East-Germans continue to cast their ballot for a party of Neo-Nazis.

For many East-Germans, voting for the neo-fascist AfD is also to strike back at a capitalist system that only gave them disrespect, degradation and hurt and, worse, being then blamed for the mess created by the Western elite.

What the neo-fascist AfD has also done to perfection in East-Germany way better than in West-Germany is to divert the frustrations of many East-Germans that was caused by the arrival of western style neoliberal capitalism away from capitalism, and onto the easy scapegoats of the West, democracy, migrants, and refugees.

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