QUEDLINBURG, Germany — Germany’s far right is betting that an unabashed embrace of nostalgia for life behind the Iron Curtain will help propel their rise to power in the country’s East. This is why on a recent Sunday in the picturesque eastern German city of Quedlinburg — a medieval town lined with timber-framed houses — Ulrich Siegmund, the charismatic face of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the region, mounted a blue Simson moped made in the former East Germany and zoomed off toward the rolling countryside followed by hundreds of riders on mopeds of the same brand, many decorated with German flags. For Siegmund and his comrades in the AfD, this heavy dollop of Ostalgie — a term for the persistent nostalgia for the former East Germany — is a way of capitalizing on a strong regional identity that has remained notably intact since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It’s also part of a broader political message for an electorate that in great part perceives the country to be in economic and social decline: a promise that the party will bring the people back to a halcyon time when things were supposedly simpler and better, even if that means life in a former dictatorship. It stands for a time when we stuck together in this country. And that is exactly the time I want back.” Siegmund drove out in front of the convoy with the broad smile that belies the radical politics of the AfD’s state branch, which has risen in popularity despite the fact that the regional intelligence agency has classified it as an extremist organization aimed at undermining Germany’s “free democratic basic order.” Born in Saxony-Anhalt in 1990, one year after the fall of Berlin Wall, this moment of riding, Siegmund said, was all about “freedom.” The gathering was organized by the AfD ahead of the Sept. 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt, a small largely rural state of some two million people in which the party is leading in polls by a wide margin and may be on the verge of gaining real governing power for the first time since its founding in 2013 as an anti-euro party.
For AfD leaders, a victory on that scale would be a major breakthrough, giving a party that has been ostracized by the political mainstream a governing foothold that would, or so they hope, destigmatize it and allow it to expand with victories across the country. In a subsequent election in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sept. 20, the AfD is also far ahead in polls. Many of the riders in Quedlinburg shared the diffuse sense of yearning for the past that Siegmund had evoked.
After the AfD began organizing Simson tours, however, he fixed it up and added some stickers, including one of AfD national leader Alice Weidel’s face superimposed over a German flag. Asked what he misses about East Germany, Krause quickly turned to the migration that came after German reunification. A lot of migrant “troublemakers” were “refusing to conform,” he said.
In recent years, however, the far right has mimicked the playbook, albeit in somewhat contradictory fashion, according to Wolle. On the one hand, East Germany “serves as a negative foil” for the far right, said Wolle, with AfD leaders often comparing the current German government’s attempts to exclude the party by maintaining a political “firewall” around it to the tactics of the communist dictatorship. At the same time, he added, the AfD “increasingly attempts to co-opt memories of East Germany for their own agenda and to stoke a certain hostility toward the West … And this certain eastern mentality or this new pride in being from the East is supposed to be translated into political votes.” Surveys show a strong degree of regional identity persists even nearly 37 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In some ways, the identity may even be growing as eastern Germany increasingly follows its own political path as a hotbed of AfD support and relative sympathy for Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Forty-three percent of people in the former East Germany see more differences than similarities between eastern and western Germans, according to a YouGov poll conducted last year — up nine percentage points from 2019. Just 11% said the similarities outweigh the differences.
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