Germany's AfD win in Thuringia

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A far-right party’s stunning win in Germany’s regional elections over the weekend highlights a deepening divide between the country’s east and west, analysts say, reflecting eastern Germans’ frustration over feeling overlooked and dismissed by their western compatriots.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024 ... n-the-east
On Sunday, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won elections in the eastern state of Thuringia with 32.8 percent of the vote, a first for a far-right party since World War II. It performed strongly in neighbouring Saxony too, trailing just behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The three parties composing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition – the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals

I miss the old East German regime.

Walter Ubricht and Erich Honecker would have never let this happen.

Easier said when you never experienced it.

Unlike what had been West Germany, the states comprising what had been East Germany had a far shorter experience with Democracy, having gone straight from the Nazi regime to communism. I suspect there's a certain longing for an authoritarian government among too many people there.

I posted in another thread that east Germany was a "no go" destination for immigrants. the unemployed in east Germany have not taken kindly to refugees which has further precipitated the popularity of the AfD.

In all fairness the former East Germany is itself underdeveloped and (as you say) under employed, and its people have to either commute 100 miles into the west each day to thier jobs, or migrate to the west to get jobs. So resentment toward foreigners coming INTO that region by the locals is kinda understandable. The "reunified" Germany still hasnt brought the former East up to speed and fully integrated it into the former West.

On the other hand its as if the Eastern Germans were socially frozen during the decades of Communist rule, and now that they are "thawing out"...they are simply picking up where they left off in 1945 with a Nazi way of thinking in contrast to the west which has progressed on.

Apparently in east Germany there was a sharp spike in skinhead culture straight after the fall of the Berlin wall. A lot of unemployed youth were drawn to this subculture (the movement had its heyday in Europe/America in the 1960s/70s among teenagers but died off in the 80s). One of the problems in east Germany is skinhead gangs are still popular and are a specific hazard for refugees in east Germany to navigate when doing something simple like walk home from work or the shops.

Oh it's not just East Germany. Ukraine and Hungary have also allowed neo-Nazis to thrive. the testimony of literally thousands of students and visa workers from developing countries testify, there numerous examples where locals terrorised families trying to leave Ukraine following Russia's invasion.