When my wife and I were about to buy a house on the edge of the Thuringian Forest a couple of years ago, some friends from Hanover expressed concerns. Their objection was not to the home itself. The traditional half-timbered house lying on a three-quarter-acre lot with immediate access to trails, selling for less than $250,000, was, in many ways, a dream. Their skepticism, instead, stemmed from its setting. They asked if we really wanted to live in an “AfD Dorf,” or AfD village — a hamlet full of people who support Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Their perception is based on statistics and phantom data visualizations that represent eastern Germany — the areas of Brandenburg, eastern Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia that from 1949 to 1990 made up the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany — as an almost solid mass of far-right sentiment. Outside major cities like Berlin and Leipzig, they see the entire east as one big AfD Dorf.
They are not alone. In the aftermath of Germany’s March 2 federal election, which the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won with 28.5% of the vote, there has been yet another round of commentary and analysis about eastern Germans opting en masse for the AfD. Color-coded maps, and their associated explanations, frame eastern Germany as almost solely responsible for the far-right party’s popularity and ascent to become the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament since its founding 12 years ago.
This is only partly true. In the area around Eisenach, the western Thuringian town my wife and I ended up finding the apartment we live in, 4 out of 10 voters chose the AfD. Those numbers need to be taken seriously. Yet the idea that the AfD’s rise is due entirely to voters in the east, and the maps used to sell that view, are demonstrably flawed.
According to statistics from the Bundeswahlleiterin, the officer responsible for overseeing elections at the federal level, 70.7% of the 10.3 million votes cast for the AfD last week came from western Germany, while only 29.3% came from the east of the country. The AfD did win the vast majority of eastern constituencies, but the party also took the lead in two western constituencies — Gelsenkirchen and Kaiserslautern — for the first time.
While the ex-socialist states of the former GDR appear to be a sea of blue — the AfD’s color — on electoral maps, support for the party actually rose all across the country. As the AfD improved by 14 and 15 percentage points in the eastern states of Brandenburg and Thuringia, respectively, it also saw increases of near, or more than, 10 percentage points in several western states (Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony and North-Rhine Westphalia), including jumps of 11 percentage points in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. The far-right party pulled support from across the political spectrum, with the center-right CDU/CSU conceding the most, losing 1 million voters to the AfD.
In other words, the AfD did not become the second-largest party solely because of its voters in eastern Germany. That claim not only misrepresents the reasons for the AfD’s popularity but also plays into a decades-long narrative of “east-bashing” in popular discourse. Having lived here for nearly six years, this attitude feels lazy and elitist; it also misdiagnoses the real reasons for the AfD’s menacing rise.
Germany has now been reunited for nearly as long as it was divided, but the four decades of partition still play a role in the country’s political, cultural, economic and social life. East Germany was merged into West Germany in 1990, with reunification “accomplished by fiat,” according to Gareth Dale, a political scientist at Brunel University of London, bringing with it sweeping transformations to everyday life in the eastern states. The government in Bonn said that leaders in the former East Germany were unqualified or insufficiently familiar with the practice of Western institutions, economies, cultural norms and laws for positions in the reunified state. As a result, easterners were largely shut out of leadership positions. While they comprise about 20% of the total population, eastern Germans are severely underrepresented in leadership. A study from 2023 showed only 1 out of 8 people in the country’s highest civil service, university, industry, media, culture, business and armed forces jobs are from eastern Germany.
Economically, the effects were even more damaging. The privatization of the former East German economy after 1990 radically altered property ownership and economic production. By the time privatization was complete, only 5% of businesses previously administered by the East German government had been sold to easterners, while 85% went to westerners. Western German states continued to attract the majority of capital investment and skilled migrants in the 1990s, with the east slipping further behind. This led to high emigration and further economic stagnation, while houses and whole buildings were abandoned in towns across the former East Germany. Substantial “solidarity” transfers, by which cities, districts and, until 2019, taxpayers contributed funds to the federal budget, boosted salaries and per capita GDP in the east to around 80% of those in the west in the early 2000s, but the economic gap between the two endures. While the last decade has seen increased economic output per capita and wage increases in the east, unemployment is higher at 7.8%, compared to 5.1% in the west, and the inherited wealth gap remains, with 98% of all inheritance tax paid in the west, according to the German Institute for Economic Research.
The combined result is that only a little over one-third of Germans feel east and west have grown together into one nation, with 60% sensing more division than unity. Even those who were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall feel that the west and east are culturally and socially distinct, given their different trajectories across the course of the 20th century. In the aftermath of February’s election, lingering resentments in western German states reemerged, with commentators on social media platforms like X and in the traditional media complaining that solidarity money paid to the east was a waste and that the wall should be rebuilt to contain the far-right contagion.
When I met my wife, who grew up in the east, I married into that division — my father-in-law even once jokingly referred to me as a Klassenfeind, or “class enemy,” a sobriquet sometimes used in East Germany during the communist era to refer to Western capitalists, including Americans. Bywords and family ribbing aside, I folded into life in eastern Germany over the last several years. I use my avocado-green, Erika-brand Model 105 typewriter produced in Dresden and eat six-minute soft-boiled eggs out of my neon-blue plastic egg cup in the shape of a chicken, made in Saxony; both are classic markers of so-called “Ostalgie,” or nostalgia for the former East Germany. But more than embracing material markers of some lost era, I’ve come to appreciate the countryside here in the east and the strong, collective mentality easterners cling to in the face of capitalist individualism, as well as the often friendly, relaxed and sardonically humorous atmosphere they foster over a beer or bratwurst.
The root causes of the far right’s popularity in the east must be addressed, but holding its residents solely responsible for the election results misrepresents political trends across Germany.
The AfD gained ground across multiple demographics. It poached support from the Social Democrats (SPD), winning 38% of the working-class vote, and improved its showing among women, 17% of whom voted for it (compared to nearly one-quarter of men). It made unexpected gains among first-time voters and garnered the largest share (22%) of the 25-34 age bracket. The party actually performed the worst among Germans aged 70 and older, winning just 10% of their votes.
Popular logic that lays blame on a single group — workers, those without university degrees, men, the young, the old or easterners — fails to appreciate the truth: A far-right party now claims one-fifth of the total electorate, the best result for any such party since the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s.
But what can explain the AfD’s popularity — in both the east and the west? Studies have reported mixed findings, in part because the rise has been so rapid and the party has only participated in four federal elections since 2013. Though the AfD has successfully harnessed various forms of anger and anxiety over immigration, climate change policies, COVID-19 restrictions and the war in Ukraine, as well as ongoing skepticism about the European Union, two factors above all seem to undergird its surging popularity: economic insecurity and perceived cultural threat.
High energy prices, a weakening labor force and low productivity growth — coupled with the specter of Europe’s largest economy facing a third consecutive year of recession — have made voters anxious. In the east, people express frustration with what they see as the failure of the previous two governing coalitions to increase real income or shore up shortfalls with economic aid to everyday Germans. But multiple polls ahead of the election indicated the economy was the primary concern for western Germans as well, which is a fair indicator that anxiety about Germany’s financial future played a factor in voting patterns across the country.
Timothy Carentz, who runs a coffee shop and is a Pentecostal pastor leading a ministry and care center in Kaiserslautern, one of two western constituencies the AfD won this year, told New Lines that people in his town felt the SPD and CDU/CSU, the two veteran parties that represented the center-left and center-right, had abandoned their core supporters. The AfD came in strong this election season, Carentz said, with pop-up tents on the square, literature handouts, stickers and brochures, with people in the cafe encouraging each other to “vote blue.” The AfD won 25.5% of the local vote, an increase of more than 13 percentage points from 2021. “They said they were disgusted that the government seemed to be prioritizing climate scientists and migrants over everyday Germans,” Carentz said. He added: “That’s why they say, ‘We are AfD now.’”
The AfD exploited the immigration issue, too. Perceived cultural threats and concerns about crime and immigration drove numerous voters to the AfD. A string of violent attacks in 2024 and the heated political atmosphere that followed boosted the far right and solidified German popular opinion around immigration in the lead-up to this year’s elections. In recent polling, the majority of Germans said they wanted their country to accept fewer refugees and asylum-seekers. That increasing anti-immigrant sentiment came as German police reported an alarming rise in registered attacks against refugees in 2023, a total of 2,378 — most committed by right-wing extremists — up from 1,248 the year prior.
Anti-immigrant sentiment was a major issue in the election campaign. Friedrich Merz, the CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor, said Germany needed to work with the AfD to pass a nonbinding motion restricting immigration ahead of the vote. But voters who chose the far right were also motivated by cultural anxieties about the sharp rise in documented antisemitic acts. Despite the AfD leadership’s antisemitic and antidemocratic statements, the party has positioned itself as pro-Jewish based on its support for Israel, with the party’s deputy leader Beatrix von Storch going so far as to say that the AfD’s “goal is to become the strongest party among Jewish voters [in Germany].” To convince those worried about antisemitism to trust the far-right party, despite its downplaying of the country’s Nazi past and arguably Nazi-adjacent rhetoric, the AfD shifts blame to so-called “imported antisemitism,” which suggests that migrants from Arab countries are responsible for the rise in antisemitic incidents. To that end, and because German law describes criticism of Israel as antisemitism, which is illegal, the AfD has successfully weaponized criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza to demonize Muslim migrants and left-wing activists.
These ploys not only played to xenophobic fears in the east but to Germans across the country who are increasingly unsure about the country’s border policy since former Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed in 1.3 million mainly Middle Eastern migrants and refugees a decade ago. Migrants are no more likely to commit violent crimes than any other Germans and have contributed significantly to Germany’s economy, culture and the fields of education, medicine and the arts. Nonetheless, there is a widespread perception among native-born Germans that the newcomers are unwilling to “integrate,” are a burden on social welfare programs and are more likely to engage in violent crime. Studies have shown that this xenophobia is stronger among eastern Germans than their western counterparts. This factor, when coupled with economic insecurity and the ongoing inequity between east and west, can go a long way in explaining why the AfD is more popular per capita among easterners. But a 2024 study from the University of Leipzig shows support for xenophobic statements has risen significantly in western Germany, too, where it is now approaching the levels seen in the east, while disparaging “those who are foreign” or expressing antisemitic sentiments is also becoming more mainstream across the country.
Higher percentages of support for the AfD in the east may stem from other sources, as well. Katja Hoyer, author of “Beyond the Wall,” a new history of the GDR, has suggested that eastern Germans are more quickly disillusioned with status-quo politics and “react more quickly when something feels wrong to them.” She also noted, along with others, that a lingering affinity for Russia, from the days of the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, may explain easterners’ skepticism about mainstream parties’ unequivocal support for Ukraine.
Another fact that undermines the “blame the easterners” analysis is that 68% of them did not vote for the AfD. The east is home to many groups, organizations and movements that advocate for more diversity. Thuringia, for example, hosts programs like the Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Achava Festspiele, a festival committed to tolerance and interreligious exchange with events in various locations across the state, including Weimar, Erfurt, Gotha and Eisenach.
I don’t want the AfD to gain any more traction in Germany — east or west. I love the fact that I live in a diverse democracy and particularly prize the makeup of my apartment building, which includes a German-American couple, a Czech single mother, migrant families from Greece and Nigeria and a native-born German construction worker.
Holding one region or group responsible for the AfD’s rise in popularity is an expression of deeply flawed reasoning that is belied by the data. The AfD saw increased support throughout Germany and the reasons for its upward trajectory are common to all Germans — if not indeed across the continent and perhaps even across the Atlantic Ocean. Right-wing populism has been on the rise in Europe for over 20 years and the AfD’s popularity is not an isolated occurrence. The anti-immigrant sentiment, skepticism about the political status quo and discontent with existing economic systems and policies that the party capitalized on mirror similar trends in Europe and around the world.
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