Germany has a new Berlin Wall

It’s been more than a third of a century since the German unification of 1990. Between Hamburg and Munich and Cologne and Frankfurt-on-Oder, you’ll easily find adults who have no personal memory of the country’s Cold War division, and even quite a few who were born after it. Germany divided, in other words, is history.

And yet, it isn’t. That’s what this year’s Day of German Unity – a public holiday on October 3 – has, once again, made clear. For one thing, differences and even tensions between the former West and East Germanies have persisted.

Bodo Ramelow, vice president of the German parliament and himself from the former East Germany, has scandalized many of his colleagues by pointing out that the two kinds of Germans remain estranged. Indeed, Ramelow believes Germany needs a new hymn and flag because too many East Germans still cannot identify with the current ones, which were simply taken over from the former West Germany. A German cabinet minister, who also grew up in the East, feels that talk about East and West is intensifying again. Even one of Germany’s politically conformist main news shows, Tagesschau, admits that the “process of re-unification remains incomplete.”

In one regard, often deplored, this persisting disunity in not-so-united Germany is a matter of very basic and thus powerful things, such as income: On average, for instance, Germans in full employment in the East still earn almost a thousand euros or 17 percent less than in the West. This may have something to do with the fact that almost everywhere in the East, Germans feel that life is better elsewhere and specifically elsewhere in Germany. The young feel (and are) particularly affected: Youth unemployment is generally worse in the East, and it is there that you’ll find regions that set a sad national record at about 13 percent.

But these economic and social imbalances may be less important than they seem at first sight, for two reasons: They reflect trends that are winding down over time, and they do not necessarily make Germans in the East less satisfied than their compatriots in the West. Counter-intuitively, polls show that even East German regions where many respondents believe that life is better elsewhere also feature high degrees of life satisfaction.

Ultimately, the fact that two former national economies that, as of 1990, were extremely different have taken time to become more similar and fuse is no surprise. Looking back from the future, some historians – with their bias toward the longue durée – might even argue that the real story is how quickly they converged.

In this regard, what really mattered was less the actual speed of the process but its lopsidedness: if East Germans had not felt – rightly – that for all too many years all decisions were made by West Germans, less estrangement would have resulted. Exaggerated promises of quick fixes, as made by “chancellor of unity” Helmut Kohl, did not help either.

Ironically, in the final analysis the preponderant majority of Germans, East and West, have had something fundamental in common all this time – being trampled by the great neoliberal offensive that has laid waste to most Western societies, and then some. Does it matter whether you have been consigned to the precarity of the gig economy in Dresden or in Stuttgart? Not so much. That’s a kind of unity, too, presumably.

Yet this is where the really interesting divide between Germany’s former East and West comes into play. Because it is politics that really matters most now, to be precise, the politics of parties, elections, and representation. There is a reason why stodgily Centrist mainstream media flagship Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has lamented that the Day of German Unity is now the Day of the AfD, the new-right party Alternative for Germany outdistancing all others in the polls and barely kept in check by a bizarre “firewall” policy.

While the AfD is making inroads in Germany’s West as well – for instance, in the rustbelt region of the Ruhr and even among immigrants – it is the former East Germany that has become its bastion. On electoral maps its shape is now clearly recognizable in solid AfD blue. And it is still growing and getting stronger by the day. For Chancellor Merz, whose own unpopularity rating has hit a whopping 71 percent (and falling) the AfD’s triumph is due to former East Germans still feeling, wrongly, that they are second-class citizens.

That is typical. Thank you, Friedrich, for selflessly illustrating once again why many East Germans have had enough of Western condescension, whether of the hectoring pull-yourself-together or the psychologizing it’s-okay-to-be-angry kind.

What Merz is missing is that much of Germany’s current East-West division is not a relic of the past, unpleasantly persistent, too slow in going away, but ultimately just that – a sort of hangover produced by yesterday’s bad unification party, which will pass. In reality, it is contemporary German politics that is feeding the divide. By “firewalling” the AfD out of government, where, by the usual rules of German coalition building it should be even now, the establishment parties have, in effect, made its supporters second-class voters.

Vote, say, CDU or SPD and your vote may count toward constructing a government with ministers – or even a chancellor – from your favorite party. Vote AfD and forget about it: By “firewall” fiat, that translation of your vote into power has simply been ruled out. Your vote can only feed an opposition that is marginalized in every conceivable way.

And on top of it, you’ll have to listen to endless sermons on how bad, misguided, and backward you are. No wonder many Germans in the East still feel as if they are treated like less than full citizens, then. Because the “firewall” does exactly that as soon as they dare vote AfD.

It makes double sense, then, that the AfD is now supporting its ideological opposite, the new-left BSW (Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht) in its demand for a recount of election votes. It is highly likely that the BSW was excluded from the German parliament due to a scandalous and extremely suspicious accumulation of miscounts.

On one side, the AfD’s position is, obviously, tactical: if a full recount were to bring the BSW into parliament with dozens of seats, the current governing coalition of establishment parties would be finished. The AfD as the largest and, in reality, only effective opposition currently inside parliament, stands to profit: either by the forming of a new governing coalition that would bring down the “firewall” for good and include the AfD, or by fresh elections.

But there also is, across a great right-left ideological divide, the fact that both AfD and BSW are parties rooted in – but not restricted to – the territory of the old East Germany. In that sense, what is done to the AfD via the “firewall” has been done to the BSW via the miscount, whether deliberately or not: namely the de facto discrimination against voters of both parties, whose votes have been treated as of lesser power than others.

If the representatives of Germany’s traditional political establishment were really interested in securing the country’s unity, they would drop the policy of the “firewall” against the AfD and initiate a full recount of BSW votes immediately.

But as things are in Germany, the increasingly foul-play attempt of the radical Center to cling to power produces not “only” political disunity and fundamental disaffection, but also a new East-West divide. One that is not a legacy of the Cold War past – and easily blamed on former East Germany’s Communist leaders, who can’t talk back anymore. Instead, this divide is new and the ones to blame for it are those stubbornly handicapping a large share of the German electorate and, at the same time, one region in particular: the former East Germany.

It is ironic that all too many German experts love to charge East Germans with not being “democratic” enough. It’s the pot calling the kettle black. If anyone displays their lack of democratic culture it is those who find “firewalls” and massive “miscounts” normal. And what rightly frustrates many East Germans now is precisely the lack of effective democracy in big, united, and yet so unhappy Germany.