Will Germany Move to the Right (Keeping the World Company)

Aloha. Welcome to Keeping the World Company on Think Tech Hawaii. The title of this episode submitted by Manford Henningson, a regular participant in that series is nostalgia's ghost. How East German isolation fuels AFD and Putin. For this show, we are stepping in for Manfred. The success of the right-wing party alternative fur Deutseland AFD in the recent state election in one of the former states of communist East Germany Saxony onhalt has created nervous questions about the political future of Germany and the European Union the EU. There will be elections in two weeks in two other East German states, one of them being the capital Berlin itself and the surrounding Brandenburgg. Those elections will show whether AFD has become the majority party in East Germany or present a rather different picture but still add to the general nervousness about German politics. Still, these East German elections will not provide a representative picture of the political mood in Germany as a whole since the overwhelming majority of the 83 million German citizens live in the western states. >> The eastern part suffers still from the collapse of the communist state and its bankrupt economy. Despite the fact that the German government transferred billions of euros into the eastern infrastructure, still more than 2 million East Germans, especially young women, left to the west and contributed to the challenges of social life in the east. Germany's politics has changed in the 10 western states of the Federal Republic, whose constitutional order was created by a German constitutional commission while the American, British, and French occupation forces were watching. Manford watched what was happening as a 7-year-old boy in late April and early May 1945 in the temporary capital of the Third Reich, Manfred's hometown Fenceburg near the Danish border. Thousands of refugees from Prussia and other eastern provinces were passing by and looking for shelter. >> Overall, 14 million refugees fled the approaching Soviet army and many came to Schlesvik Holstein, which hadn't been touched by destruction. Many of them stayed and helped to make Fensburg and Schlesvig Holstein the part of contemporary Germany with the lowest support for the AFD. In September 1949, the two states and their different political cultures came into historical being and existed divided until 1989 when the Berlin Wall of 1961 came down and made unification of the two parts possible. In the liberal democratic West Germany, a preuncter processing of the Nazi past had taken place. Though the then chancellor Conrad Adenau prevented a radical cleansing of the judicial personnel and the upper levels of the civil service, he kept the main author of the Nazi race laws, Hans Globka, as his state secretary. Globka actually managed to place a person of his confidence in Ikeman's German defense team at the Jerusalem trial in 1961. He wanted to avoid being called upon by the Israeli prosecutor as a witness at the trial. In the East German GDR, the communist part of Germany that was occupied by the Soviet Union until 1990, the processing of the Nazi past had been even more preunctery, and the processing of the communist past never took place after the unification in 1990. The GDR nostalgia that sometimes becomes visible in the five eastern states and plays a major role in the success of the AfD's bionativist rhetoric in the east needs to be looked at more closely. It asserts that a communal narrative was alive during the dictatorial regime that provided social values of togetherness beyond the enforced culture of the regime. The anti-migrant language of the AFD reflects, however, a phenomenon that is not only part of the East German past, but covers all the former communist states in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union. >> East German citizens and the citizens in all communist states were cut off from the rest of the world. There was no way for them to discover the diversity of the world. Today, something else has to be added to this syndrome, namely the sickening support that the AFD provides Putin and his war against the Ukraine. This AFD support echoes the equally sickening support Vice President Vance gave the AFD at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. The celebratory comments Trump expressed after the election deserves special recognition. It confirms his ignorant and insulting behavior toward foreign nations, including the homeland of his own German immigrant grandparents. When his grandmother disliked America and wanted to go back, the German authorities refused their return because the grandfather had left his country as a draft dodger. >> Here are some questions that come to mind regarding the matter. Question, why did the AFD win nearly half the vote in Saxony on how did Washington react? We watched the AFD take almost 44% of the vote in Saxony Anhalt, a landslide by German standards. President Trump celebrated the result on Truth Social, writing, "Wow, the Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night, MAGA, and crediting it to Germany's immigration policy. We should read that reaction less as commentary on German policy than as a signal of the transatlantic sympathy for illiberal nationalism that we find so troubling. >> Question. Why won't the Berlin/Brrenburgg and other East German elections settle the question of Germany's political direction? >> We should keep the East German results in proportion of Germany's roughly 83.6 million citizens. The five eastern states hold only about 12.5 million against roughly 66 million in the 10 western states. Even a clean sweep by AFD of Saxony, Anhalt, Berlin, and Brandenburgg tells us about a shrinking demographically strained region, not about the Federal Republic as a whole. >> Question, what is GDR nostalgia and why does it help explain the AfD's Eastern appeal more than economics alone? We are looking at a generation raised inside a sealedoff state that offered a communal narrative of togetherness even as it denied basic freedoms and that left its citizens with little lived exposure to the world's diversity. Demographic research shows this isolation compounded a selective exodus. Roughly 10% of the East's 1989 population migrated west by 2007, disproportionately young women. So we are watching a hollowedout society reach for nivist certainty rather than a simple protest over unmet investment promises. >> Question, how did West Germany's own reckoning with the Nazi past fall short? And why does that matter for judging East Germany today? >> We should recall that Adenau's West Germany never fully purged its judiciary and civil service. His state secretary, Hans Globka, principal author of the Nazi race laws, kept his post and later maneuvered to seat a trusted ally on Ikeman's defense team at the 1961 Jerusalem trial precisely to avoid being called as a witness himself. If the West's own denazification was only peruncter by your account, we have to judge East Germany's near total failure to confront both its Nazi and its communist pasts as a deeper compounding deficit rather than a uniquely Eastern flaw. >> Question, how does the AFD's stance on Ukraine connect it to Vance's Munich speech and Trump's response to the election? We watched Vice President Vance tell the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 that Europe's greatest danger came from within rather than from Russia. A framing widely read as validating the AFD over Germany's mainstream parties. Paired with Trump's gleeful big night message after Saxony Anhalt, we are seeing the same alignment repeat itself. an American administration cheering a party that simultaneously downplays the threat from Moscow and echoes Putin's line on Ukraine, which is exactly the same pattern that we have found so alarming for the democratic future of both Germany and the transatlantic relationship. In Manfred's view, the AFD's rise in Saxony onhalt reflects lingering GDR nostalgia and decades of isolation that left East Germans unequipped to embrace diversity, not merely economic grievance despite billions in Western investment. He sees this East German pattern mirrored across all former communist states, now compounded by something more sinister, the AfD's disturbing alignment with Putin's war on Ukraine. That alignment, echoed by Vance's Munich remarks and Trump's gleeful reaction to the election results, reveals a troubling transatlantic sympathy for illiberal nationalism that he finds deeply alarming for Germany's democratic future. >> Okay, thanks. We'll have to leave it there for now. The title of this episode in our Keeping the World company series is nostalgia's ghost. How East German isolation fuels AFD and Putin. Thanks to our viewers for watching and for considering the views expressed in this think tech talk show. We'll see you again soon for the next one.