RegionalE

source: Le Monde

EDITORIAL Posted yesterday at 11:49.

translation: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

Germany: avoiding a new wall

EDITORIAL. The far-right party came in at second place in the regional elections in Brandenburg and Saxony. This success of the AfD in the former GDR is a symptom. 

 It was not a surprise. Sunday 1 st  September, the extreme right party Alternative for Germany (AFD) received particularly high scores in Brandenburg (23.5%) and Saxony (27.5%), where regional elections were held . In these two Länder of the former GDR, the AfD will now be the second largest political force in the regional Parliament, as it has been since 2015 in Saxony-Anhalt and since 2016 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, two other regions also located east of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Nowhere in West Germany has the AfD has conquered such positions. In 2013, however, it was in the suburbs of Frankfurt, in the West, that about twenty economists and essayists  created this party, whose main platform was to advocate the end of the euro and the return of the Deutschemark. Since then, the refugee crisis has occured, the AfD has put immigration, security and Islam at the heart of its agenda, and the center of gravity of the party has moved to the East. "The AfD is the new Volkspartei [People's Party] of the East," Björn Höcke, leader of the party's extremist wing, head of the Thuringian federation, said on Sunday.

As Germany prepares to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this political divide that continues to divide the country is particularly worrying. It is all the more so since the AfD is not only stronger in the East; it is also much more radical. Andreas Kalbitz, who heads the Brandenburg Federation, attended neo-Nazi groups in his youth. Jörg Urban, the strong man of the AfD in Saxony, has brought him closer to the Islamophobic Pegida movement. Within the party, the two men belong to the  Björn Höcke wing, which is under "surveillance" by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, German internal intelligence.

Lack of recognition

The success of the AfD in the former GDR is a symptom. It feeds on concerns related to the socio-economic situation of the eastern Länder, where the population is aging faster than in the West, where unemployment averages 6.6% (vs. 4.7% in the West), where the average income per capita is 29 477 euros (against 40 301 euros in the West), and where are the headquarters of only 37 of the 500 largest companies in the country are situated. It also thrives on frustrations, the feeling of a lack of recognition and visibility. An example: of the 17 ministers of the federal government, only one, Angela Merkel, has her constituency in the former GDR.

A political party, Die Linke, and before it the PDS, itself heir to the SED, the ruling party in the GDR, has long worn the voice of protest in this part of the country. Sunday, Die Linke collapsed in Saxony and Brandenburg, leaving the AfD to act as the voice for the disappointed reunification, to the point of promising a Wende 2.0. ("Turning 2.0") , thirty years after the "turning point" of the years 1989-1990.

That this image is rude is not the problem. The result of the ballot boxes shows that it is effective. Three decades after reunification, Germany can not let a new wall stand. It can not allow such a democratic divide to grow, at the risk of a terrible historical regression.

Le Monde