On Unity Day, Germany’s Feeling Divided Again
The nationalist AfD is now the most popular party in the east, reflecting disillusionment with the unkept promises of 1991.
The right is on the rise.
Source: Picture Alliance/Getty Images
Germany is celebrating its national holiday on Wednesday. Yet this year, German Unity Day is less of a festive occasion. It’s been 28 years since the Berlin Wall came down, but a kind of invisible wall still separates the country’s east and west. For the first time, the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in polls taken in the ex-Communist eastern states.
Even though the economic gap between the country’s east and west has shrunk in the 28 years since reunification, the political chasm is widening. The east is swinging to the far right because many of its people still feel like second-class citizens, and the recent arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants has only intensified their sense of being abandoned by reunified Germany’s mostly western establishment.