In the German federal elections on 23 February 2025, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) achieved the most significant results in the former East German states, with percentages roughly double those of the CDU Source. In last year’s European elections, the AfD was also the leading party in the regions of the former GDR, albeit with lower percentages.

The electoral map of Germany still paradoxically looks divided by the Iron Curtain, but the territories of post-communist Germany now vote en masse for a party that no longer claims, but certainly does not repudiate or hide a Nazi ancestry.

AfD rhetoric and analysis of the vote

Even many independent analysts tend to read this phenomenon in terms basically in line with the AfD’s rhetoric: the poorest part of Germany votes for the party that is most radically opposed to the policies and parties accused of being the cause of German impoverishment and of being guilty of the three deadly sins of the nationalist religion: Europeanism, globalisation and immigration.

The ‘economicist’ explanations of sovereignist revanchism are the most common, because they are on the surface the most rational, as they are linked to material causes, even when, as in this case, they conceal and exorcise much more tragic and painful explanations, which do not take the socio-economic one as an independent variable from other equally determinant variables, such as socio-cultural or political-ideological ones.

The East German paradox

It is curious, but today even, indeed especially, reactionaries seem to be devoted to Marxist doctrine and to interpreting every political phenomenon as the inevitable result of structural causes of economic domination or usurpation and to dismissing all so-called superstructural (political, legal, philosophical…) trappings of political struggle as mere stage masks.

However, it is difficult to see the former East Germany as a victim of Europeanism, immigration or globalisation. Europeanism was the gateway to German reunification and liberation from post-Soviet captivity.

Immigration (with all the integration problems it entails) also in Germany, as in the whole of Europe, is concentrated in the most economically prosperous areas and thus in the west, not the east. Globalisation, as long as the German locomotive was running at full speed, was the ATM that enabled the most generous welfare in the world to be ensured even in the eastern part of Germany.

The weight of the communist legacy

Perhaps then it should be accepted that the ease with which East Germany fell in love with neo-Nazi demagogues is the same reason why it remained so fond of post-communist demagogues for so long, as well as the same reason why it has failed to recover a significant competitiveness gap in the thirty-five years since reunification: because decades of communist domination have left traces in the spirit and minds, and because these traces are passed on culturally and re-emerge powerfully in times of crisis.

The extreme and superior sensitivity of vast swathes of Eastern European public opinion to authoritarian seductions and anti-democratic suspicion certainly harks back to pre-Soviet roots, but even more decisively to the Soviet past. Communism, from this point of view, was not only a historical tragedy, but an anthropological, moral and spiritual catastrophe, which even after the end of the USSR and the fall of the Wall influences political-cultural and economic-social behaviour in vast areas of the former Soviet empire. The negative communist pedagogy has not stopped doing damage.

Comparing Totalitarianisms

In democratic Europe since 1945, we have been accustomed (wrongly) to consider Nazifascism and communism as opposing phenomena, when in fact they were equal and opposite and united by their hatred for the rules of open society and the rule of law and for the pluralistic and anti-statist nature of liberal-democratic constitutionalism.

In fact, only the epigones of that liberal culture, which since the 1920s denounced the ideological trap of these different twins of twentieth-century totalitarianism, are not at all surprised by the electoral results in the former East Germany, as if it were a coincidence or a paradox, and instead draw from it yet another confirmation of that old anti-totalitarian diagnosis.