Likely win in Thuringia and second place in Saxony highlight how eastern voters are asserting their own political identity
After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together to grow together”.
And in none of the western states do polls predict that the far right would challenge the established parties of the centre right and centre left as seriously as in Saxony, where projections have the AfD in a head-to-head race with the conservative Christian Democratic Union , with the latter slightly ahead in exit polls.
For years, the assumption in Germany has been that once the eastern states had “caught up” with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align. According to such reasoning, the rise of the AfD is cast as a protest vote against continued disparities in income, employment and living standards.
This might sound paradoxical, since the GDR was a single-party dictatorship without free elections and no division of state powers. Yet the GDR’s regime claimed the concept of democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically so.
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