“You won’t only change Saxony and Thuringia’s future, but bring political change across Germany!” On the morning of Sunday’s elections, Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Alice Weidel had a clear message: the vote in these former Eastern states is a chance to send a message to the national as a whole.
In this regard, she was surely right. In both contests, the AfD took almost one-third of the vote. In Thuringia, it came in first place, the first such victory for a nationalist party in the Federal Republic’s history. In Saxony, it was only just edged out by the Christian Democrats, who head national polls ahead of the 2025 federal election.
The result was a disaster for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s federal government, even given its previous poor standing here. His Social Democrats took 8 per cent in Thuringia and 6 in Saxony; finance minister Christian Lindner’s Free Democrats fell to just 1 percent in both, and the Greens also dropped out of the Thuringia parliament.
The AfD’s success was widely expected after its headway in these same states over recent elections. And much punditry cast its continued rise as a product of the failings of reunification, or the authoritarian mores said to be baked into the former East. But, perhaps more troublingly, its vote is today stronger among young and early-middle-age voters who grew up in an already-reunified Germany.
Still, the geographical divide is plain to see: data on the top-placed party in each district in June’s EU election showed an almost exact split along the pre-1990 border, with the AfD in first across the former East. While the AfD has risen also in wealthier, Western länder, it scores around twice as well in the eastern “new states”. As sociologist Steffen Mau explains, the difference is not so much residual, as the emergence of a distinctive, Eastern political identity.
The AfD’s call for a second “Wende” — another go at the revolution of 1989–90 — shows how little this has to do with nostalgia for the socialist era. It is instead shaped by a feeling of being “second-class citizens” — in AfD rhetoric framed as all the more unjust because of what it calls the favourable treatment of immigrants. “Left-behind” resentment is further heightened by Germans’ own migration patterns, as the pull of the cities thins out the younger population in small eastern towns.
But if the East is often said not to have “caught up” with democratic modernity, its politics are heading along a path well-trodden in Europe since the 1990s. In France and Italy, social democracy has withered and the far right has become established. In Spain and Portugal — once said to be “inoculated” by the recent memory of dictatorship — the far right is a stable presence in parliament. In many ways the volatility of eastern Germany’s politics and its identitarian trend are “normal”.
To understand this, we could cite parallels between German unification and the last three decades of European integration. These include the outer limits placed on social policy by budget-cutting rules, the reliance on a low-wage growth model in poorer regions, and strong internal migration. These ills are not always the direct motivation for far-right voting. But they have undermined the social partnership and strong trade unionism on which the inclusiveness of the West German social model long relied.
This is also related to the difficulty in reproducing the party systems once built on this basis. If Scholz’s Social Democrats have more members over the age of 80 than under the age of 30, some of its rivals do without them entirely. Following the same path as Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia or Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, in Sunday’s election Sahra Wagenknecht led a one-woman party to a strong result, capturing most of the vote of left-wing outfit Die Linke.
Past assumptions are in flux. If the major parties (and some media) treat the AfD as a pariah, this divide is not so clear-cut in society. The fact that the Thuringia AfD is under state observation for “extremism”, or that its leader Björn Höcke has been convicted for using a Nazi slogan, has not fundamentally suppressed its support. The scandal earlier this year over leading right-wingers’ discussion of the “remigration” of ethnic-minority Germans weakened the AfD’s poll scores, but not permanently.
It still faces barriers. For now, the Christian Democrats are clear that they will not form coalitions with the AfD in Saxony or Thuringia. Even among European far-right parties, the AfD is on the more radical wing, especially given its unwillingness to fall in line on support for Ukraine. But even as a noisy opposition force it can shape the national conversation, especially on migration. Social Democratic Chancellor Scholz this week said asylum seekers should be entitled to only “bed, bread and soap”.
The “remigration” scandal triggered anti-AfD protests across the country — from the mass rallies in Berlin to the brave demonstrations in smaller, closer-knit Eastern towns — in an attempt to show that this party “does not represent Germany”. It does, however, represent a sizeable minority force. And even the mainstream is increasingly taking up strident positions on immigration and national identity. The far right remains at arm’s length from high office. But, as in so much of Europe, it’s inching closer.