Anna-Lena Laurén: Anger is growing in eastern Germany, and so is the AfD

At an AfD campaign rally in Quedlinburg, a noisy procession of DDR-made Simson mopeds becomes a display of belonging. The mood is so warm and celebratory that it is difficult not to be swept up in it, Anna-Lena Laurén writes.

That is the AfD’s achievement, she argues: it has made voters feel that they count. Supporters who believe they have been treated unfairly can now move triumphantly through Saxony-Anhalt on their mopeds and vote for a party promising them recognition. The party tells them that established politicians betrayed them, while also speaking to everyday concerns such as fuel prices and comprehensive health insurance.

Laurén connects much of the AfD’s success to eastern Germany’s post-communist disappointment. Many eastern Germans feel democracy did not deliver everything they wanted, a frustration western Germans often dismiss as childish. Westerners point to the continuing additional tax paid by higher earners to help cover reunification costs. Easterners respond that western investors profited from their property markets and bought traditional companies at bargain prices.

The sense of having been exploited and humiliated is a feeling the AfD has seized. But the party’s rise is not only an eastern German story. It has western roots, having been founded in 2013 by western German economic liberals and euroskeptics who opposed Germany paying the debts of crisis-hit Greece.

Support is now growing in the west as well, despite German security services classifying the party as extremist. Laurén attributes this partly to the failures of the older parties, beginning with energy policy. Germany voluntarily abandoned nuclear power, a decision made under Gerhard Schröder and confirmed and accelerated by Angela Merkel. The planned replacement with Russian fossil gas became one of the failures feeding public discontent.