‘I’m white so I’m fine, but it’s been bad for my friends’

Worried Germans on both sides of the political divide in the capital city Berlin tell Tom Watling that they voted out of fear

- Tom Watling

Decades after the unification of Germany, the rise of extremist parties has divided the country once again, leaving the left-leaning capital surrounded by a sea of far-right supporters.

Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that has called for the “remigration” of millions of asylum seekers and advocates reopening ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, came second in the national vote on Sunday, winning 20.8 per cent of the vote. The centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which recently courted controversy for using AfD votes to push a proposal through the Bundestag on tougher migration policy, came first with 28.6 per cent.

The lion’s share of AfD’s votes, however, came from eastern Germany, where they won a huge majority of the states, losing out only in Leipzig and Berlin. By contrast, in the west they won just two states: Gelsenkirchen near Dusseldorf, and Kaiserslautern towards the border with France, both by a thin margin over the CDU. The CDU nonetheless won a large share of the rest of the western states.

The country is now one of two halves: the blue of AfD in the east and the black of the CDU in the west. The division is strikingly similar to the picture in the post-war years of East and West Germany. The rise of AfD, analysts say, comes down to a perception in the eastern half that reunification failed to bring about economic prosperity.