Steffen Mau, professor of sociology at Humboldt University of Berlin, recently published Unevenness seems (“United unequally. Why the East remains different”Ed. Suhrkamp, 168 pages, untranslated). In this fascinating essay, he explains in particular why the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) achieves its highest results in the Länder of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), which should be the case again on Sunday 1.Ahem September, during the regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia, where the AfD is credited with around 30% of voting intentions.
When Germans in Bavaria (Munich), Hesse (Frankfurt am Main) or Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart) elect their regional deputies, no one specifies that they are “from the West”. On the other hand, when we vote in the Länder of the former GDR, as is the case on Sunday, we are easily reminded that the voters are “East Germans”. Does this mean that Germany, thirty-four years after its reunification, is still a country divided in two?
In the 1990s and 2000s, the prevailing belief was that the East would “catch up” with the West. On an economic level, this was quite true. Twenty years ago, the unemployment rate in the East was 10 points higher than in the West; today, the gap is only 2 points. The image of an East Germany that has not recovered from the closure of the former GDR conglomerates must also be dispelled: in recent years, considerable investments have been made in the East in future sectors such as electric batteries or semiconductors.
But the economy is not everything, and in other areas the recovery has not taken place. I am thinking first of all of demographics. Apart from Berlin, the East has lost 15% of its inhabitants since 1990, while the West has gained 10%. The eastern population, older and with proportionally fewer immigrants, is also more male, sometimes with ratios of 120 to 130 men per 100 women in small towns and rural areas.
It is no coincidence that the AfD, of which only 20% of its members are women, has its highest scores in these territories where there is an overrepresentation of single men, many of whom are immersed in a patriarchal culture.
Already firmly established in Saxony and Thuringia, the AfD could achieve record scores there on Sunday. In your book, however, you insist that, at the political level, the uniqueness of the East is not limited to the particularly high results recorded there by the far right…
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