Stop Blaming the East for AfD — West Germany Built This

AfD's Landslide in Saxony-Anhalt: What the Numbers Tell Us

On 6 September, the Alternative für Deutschland won 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, becoming the largest party in a state parliament and doing so on record turnout. If the party finds a path to governing, it will be the first far-right force to lead a German state since the Nazi era. Those two facts—the scale of the win and the historic weight of what might follow—deserve to sit together without either being softened.

The result did not emerge from nowhere. It capped years of steady consolidation in eastern Germany, where the AfD has moved from protest vehicle to governing proposition. Saxony-Anhalt is not an outlier so much as a confirmation. The party is anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin, and openly hostile to the mainstream consensus that has defined the Federal Republic since 1949. Its MPs have drawn scrutiny for backgrounds ranging from former Stasi collaboration to neo-pagan and neo-Nazi networks. This is not a normal opposition party with unusual views. It is a movement whose leading figures flirt with the vocabulary of the 1930s while wrapping themselves in the language of democratic grievance.

Yet the deeper story is not the 44%. It is who delivered it, and why the rest of Germany keeps pretending the answer lies east of the Elbe.

The Convenient Narrative: Blaming the East

The night before the vote, I exchanged messages with a friend who, like me, grew up in the East. She was scared. I was scared. I had spent days scrolling through videos, reels, interviews, reports from the ground, caught in a loop that felt less like research than recognition. These voters were not strangers. They could have been relatives, friends of my parents, old teachers, former classmates. The incoherence in their words unsettled me precisely because it was familiar.

That familiarity is uncomfortable for a country that prefers a clean story. In the dominant western telling, the AfD is an eastern problem: a residue of dictatorship, a failure of civic culture, a region that never quite learned democracy. It is a flattering narrative for the rest of Germany. It locates the disease in a place that can be pitied, studied, and quietly condescended to. It allows western politicians, western media, and western voters to treat authoritarian sentiment as a regional pathology rather than a national condition.

But the numbers do not support the fairy tale. The AfD's strongest support sits in the East, yes. But its growth is national. Its rhetoric travels. Its donors, its media ecosystem, and its strategic patience are not confined to Saxony or Thuringia. Blaming the East is not analysis. It is absolution.

West Germany's Role in Fueling Grievance Politics

Start with the economics, because they are the ground on which grievance grows. Three and a half decades after reunification, GDP per capita in the eastern states still trails the western average by a substantial margin, and the wage gap has proved stubborn. Destatis and the German Institute for Economic Research have documented the persistence of these disparities year after year. Eastern households hold less wealth, own fewer assets, and inherit less. The transfer payments that flowed west to east were real, but so was the structural asymmetry they papered over.

Then consider who designed the reunification. The Treuhandanstalt dismantled eastern industry at speed, often selling viable firms to western buyers who stripped them for parts. Western firms acquired eastern markets. Western civil servants staffed eastern administrations. Western professors filled eastern universities. The message, delivered with bureaucratic efficiency, was that the East would be remade in the West's image—and that eastern experience, eastern competence, and eastern voice were surplus to requirements.

Political scientists who study post-communist societies have long warned about this pattern. Anna Grzymala-Busse has shown how the collapse of legitimate institutions creates space for illiberal entrepreneurs. Ivan Krastev has described the resentment that builds when populations are told their history was a mistake and their future is a favor. These dynamics are not unique to the former East Germany. They appear wherever liberal order is imposed rather than negotiated.

And they appear in the West too. The far-right breakthrough in northern France, in the deindustrialized towns of England's north and Midlands, in the once-social-democratic heartlands of Italy and Austria, did not require a communist past. It required economic hollowing, cultural displacement, and a political class that stopped listening. The AfD's eastern strongholds and the Rassemblement National's northern bastions are cousins, not opposites.

Understanding AfD Voters Without Excusing Them

Understanding is not the same as excusing. The 44% in Saxony-Anhalt include voters who know exactly what the AfD is and choose it anyway. Some are drawn to its ethnonationalism. Some are drawn to its Kremlin-friendly foreign policy. Some are simply voting against a governing coalition that has treated them as a problem to be managed rather than citizens to be represented. Motive matters, but so does consequence. A vote for the AfD is a vote for a party that threatens the constitutional order, whatever the voter's private reasoning.

Still, explanations that reduce 44% of a state's electorate to bigotry or stupidity are not explanations at all. They are defenses against looking in the mirror. The voters I grew up among are not caricatures. They are people who watched their towns shrink, their children leave, their expertise devalued, and their complaints dismissed as nostalgia. When mainstream parties offered them nothing but continuity, the AfD offered them recognition. It was a lie, but it was a lie that acknowledged their existence.

The task is to hold two truths at once. The AfD is dangerous and must be defeated. And the conditions that produced it were not created in the East alone. They were created by a reunification settlement that treated one half of the country as a project rather than a partner, and by a federal political class that has spent thirty-five years avoiding that reckoning.

What Germany Must Confront as a Whole Nation

Germany now faces a choice about how to name its crisis. If it is an eastern problem, the solution is more integration, more civic education, more patience. If it is a national problem, the solution is harder: a serious conversation about economic fairness, about the terms of reunification, about what representative democracy owes citizens who feel abandoned by every party that has governed them.

The data point in the harder direction. The AfD did not win Saxony-Anhalt because easterners are uniquely susceptible to authoritarianism. It won because a generation of western-led policy left a wound that no transfer payment could close, and because western parties have spent years treating the resulting anger as a regional embarrassment rather than a national indictment. The same dynamic is visible across Western Europe, where far-right parties have thrived in places with no communist past at all. The common thread is not the East. It is the failure of mainstream politics to answer legitimate grievance with anything other than contempt.

Opinion: Shared Responsibility Is the Only Path Forward

I do not write this to let eastern voters off the hook. I write it because the hook is the wrong instrument. Every German, east and west, now shares responsibility for what happens next. Western politicians who built the reunification settlement must answer for its costs. Eastern voters who hand the AfD a governing mandate must answer for its consequences. And the rest of us—those who watch, scroll, worry, and message friends the night before a vote—must stop waiting for the East to fix a problem the West helped create.

The AfD's rise in Germany is not a regional aberration. It is a national reckoning arriving late. The only way to meet it is to stop pointing across the old border and start looking at what was built on both sides of it.

Source: Opinion | The Guardian