The rapid rise of the AfD and other populist parties in the east suggests that this approach has backfired. vegetables And the Free Democratic PartyThe New Democracy party, the smallest of the three parties in Germany’s national coalition, faces the prospect of being excluded from all three state parliaments, according to recent opinion polls. To get seats, parties must win at least five percent of the vote.

“The democratic parties – the SPD, the CDU, even the Greens – have never managed to establish themselves in the east the way they did in the west, and that of course makes it easier for a party like the AfD to infiltrate and take advantage of the more fickle voters,” says Johannes Kiss, a sociologist at the University of Leipzig.

Although reunification radically transformed the former East German economy and raised living standards to levels unimaginable under communism, resentment over the West’s de facto takeover of the country is still palpable in many corners. Since reunification, the region has lost 15 percent of its population as many former East Germans, especially women, moved to the West.

The frustration caused by such developments is often exacerbated by national politicians’ treatment of the region, which today has a population only one-fifth the size of the former West Germany, as the “other.”

“We have to explain things more in the East than in the West, but I am happy to do that and I like going there,” CDU leader Friedrich Merz He said to the interviewer In May, in a sign of his party’s hardline stance on Russia.

At the time, Merz said he was aiming for first place in all three states, but that is now likely out of reach. Even in Saxony, where the CDU appears to be narrowly ahead, the AfD is ahead in some recent polls.