This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Duitsland wankelt onder druk van immigratie, peperdure energie en industriële exodus.
With state elections due this coming Sunday in Berlin (both the capital and a city-state) and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Chancellor Merz is deep in the danger zone. Since his CDU’s bitter defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, “party friends” have been sawing hard at the legs of his chair. Against every East German and Prussian habit, a ballot-box revolution is taking shape. And it is being led by the very East Germans who, in West German eyes, were given everything, yet have turned into “complaining Ossis.” The Wailing Wall runs parallel to the old Wall between East and West.
Just over ten years ago, in July 2015, the German world still looked to be in order. In East Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU polled 35 percent; Die Linke — the descendants of the autocratic East German ruling party, the SED — 22 percent; the social-democratic SPD 21 percent; and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), then still a euro-critical party, 6 percent.
The roles are now reversed. In East Germany the AfD polls at 45 percent, the CDU at 12 percent, Die Linke at 15 percent, the SPD at 9 percent. A revolt of the Ossis against the political powers in Berlin is brewing.
The cause is Chancellor Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” in the summer of 2015, when Germany threw its borders wide open to asylum seekers from the Middle East, largely Syrians. Germans could finally do “the good thing.” Even Bild Zeitung opened its heart with the campaign “Wir Helfen,” #refugeeswelcome. Prime Minister Orban’s Hungary defended the Schengen border, in vain. Austria waved the refugees through and Germany became, all at once, the Mother Teresa of Europe.
The bill for that political naivety is now being paid. And it is being paid by the very East German voters whom many West Germans believe were put back on their feet with West German tax money. The East itself takes in few asylum seekers, because under a fiscal distribution formula it is mainly the richer states that have to.
It has proved difficult for East Germans to express an identity of their own, because forty years of the GDR (1949-1990) consisted of political bombast and armed border guards. Slogans from a football stadium are not representative, but they are relevant. Supporters of Dynamo Dresden recently chanted “Ost, Ost, Ost-Deutschland.” Was it an expression of an East German identity, of a unifying victimhood? Anyone who looks at the German Bundesliga sees very little East Germany. FC Union Berlin is the only one of the league’s eighteen clubs with a GDR past. RB Leipzig was founded in 2009, with Red Bull’s money.
The Bundesliga reflects national proportions. In the German national side there is currently one player, Maximilian Beier, who comes from the former GDR. Many East Germans feel that they do not belong, that they are “abgehängt” — left behind — and so an East German subculture takes shape, a rich source of votes for the AfD. And in part for Die Linke as well: a shelter for Germans who ran the GDR, who advocate radical socialism and who have meanwhile added antisemitism to their repertoire. Die Linke’s hard core is East Berlin, where the GDR cadres lived.
It is not only the wave of immigration that is breaking Germany apart. The manner of reunification also left East Germans embittered. Packaged as “reunification,” it was in truth a politely presented hostile takeover. West Germans find East Germans ungrateful for the roughly two trillion euros in net transfers that flowed from West to East for the “Aufbau-Ost.” The result is that the motorways in East Germany are better than those in West Germany.
After the fall of the Wall, the Treuhand was set up to privatize the GDR economy along Western lines. The Treuhand was run almost entirely by West Germans; there was only one East German on its main board.
West Germans saw East Germans chiefly as a nuisance, best kept at the lower levels. Through privatization, 84 percent of East German companies ended up in West German hands, 10 percent went abroad and only 6 percent stayed East German. In East German eyes the Treuhand was a “Kolonialbehörde,” a colonial authority. After the Second World War the Western powers gave West Germany more room for economic recovery than West Germany gave East Germany. East Germans have never processed this economic plunder. Anyone who studies the distribution of income in Germany sees that East Germany is one large low-income zone.
On top of that, neighbouring Poland, growing at 3 percent a year, is in the process of overtaking East Germany’s level of prosperity. Labour migration once ran from Poland to Germany; now the reverse is beginning. GDP per head in East Germany is around 30,000 euros, thanks in part to subsidies from West Germany. Poland, at 29,000 euros per head, is catching up with its neighbours without subsidies. The Polish economy is rising so fast that experts expect it to overtake the United Kingdom in 2031. Which would be an enormous fact.
Poland was set on the path of a liberal economy under the political and intellectual leadership of Leszek Balcerowicz, the former head of the Polish central bank. East Germany, after reunification, simply remained a planned economy. Germans used to joke about a “Polnische Wirtschaft,” a shambles. Now the Poles are laughing; for East Germans what remains is dry charity bread. That bites.
In the media, too, East Germans got nowhere. The Treuhand sold the East German media to West German media companies headquartered in Essen, Hanover, Cologne and Hamburg. West Germans determined the self-image of East Germans who, after the Nazi era and GDR rule, once again could not make their own voice heard. Reporting on East Germany was usually condescending and know-it-all. Through the financial supremacy of West German media companies, every outlet from East Germany had its neck wrung. East Germans were left to listen passively to West German stories about “Jammer-Ossis.”
This is culturally explosive enough for a political time bomb, but the mental detonation came only with the #refugeeswelcome of 2015, and from Angela Merkel of all people — the first chancellor of East German origin, who evidently no longer knew her own Ossis.
In 2015 the AfD switched weapons: from euro-criticism to criticism of the wave of immigration. Although East Germany takes in proportionally far fewer asylum seekers than West Germany, the phenomenon landed culturally much harder there. It showed the same reflex as Eastern Europe, which accepts no Islamic asylum seekers, from Poland to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (not even under the new prime minister after Orban). East Germany once had a wall around it; immigration was limited to a handful of political refugees. Unlawful emigration was life-threatening.
East Germans thus grew up in a small, walled-in world: a little house, a little garden, a little Trabant. The only foreigners who were stationed there in any number were Soviet soldiers, who were in any case kept far from the population.
In general, East Germans are not so much pro-Russian, but they see “American militarism” as the great danger — something drummed into them by years of anti-American propaganda in the GDR. That is visible today in the East German parties: Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht’s party BSW, and the AfD as well.
The last of these simultaneously enjoys good relations with the White House and follows the line of Donald Trump, who likewise argues for an end to the war in Ukraine. The Merz government, by contrast, is a pillar of support for Ukraine. The longer the war lasts, the thinner the support among a German population that is itself suffering financially under a disastrous energy policy and de-industrialization — also set in motion by Angela Merkel.
The cocktail of (Islamic) immigration, sky-high energy costs and an industrial exodus is meanwhile undermining West Germany too. The consequence: the AfD is beginning to grow there as a protest party, as the recent municipal elections in Lower Saxony showed, if less strongly than in the East. Some leading figures in the CDU and on the German left are demanding a “Parteiverbot,” a ban on the AfD. How democratic is it to ban the largest party?
A wobbling Germany in the middle of Europe automatically becomes a European problem. As Heinrich Heine put it back in 1843: “Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht.”
