Friends disunited? East and west drifting apart as far-right AfD rides a populist wave

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".

- Philip Oltermann

How optimistic that image sounds 35 years on. Last Sunday's historic election results from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose eastern and western regions are, if anything, drifting further and further apart.

The far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is riding a populist wave. If federal elections were held tomorrow, polls suggest the party could become the second strongest group in the Bundestag. But only in the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has done after emerging top in a state election, on nearly 33% of the vote.

As long as the remaining parties manage to uphold the cordon sanitaire around the far right, its dreams of seizing power will probably remain merely aspirational. Nonetheless, the AfD's establishment as a regional force raises questions about Germany's political identity and how it contains the rise of such forces in the future.

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.