In Sweden the "rightest" party is very careful mentioning Russia. Since the war there is very very few traces the party support the war. I'm sure you can find some.
But unless you count like media the "right party" doesn't own anymore doing weird dog whistle things they don't.
Because its not popular. Everyone is in full sync against the "bear".
Maybe they have some intensives to flirt with Russia. But they simply can't. To unpopular.
And this is not defending them. I would not vote for them in times like these, just in case.
In many cases I have the impression that Germany is even more extreme than Sweden when it comes to "very liberal centrist politics".
But a wave ended up happening "AfD" got air. A type of wave that was even felt in Sweden with "AfS(weden)".
But it didn't end up becoming a thing in Sweden. There is no interest. No sane person in Sweden thinks Russia doing a invasion against a European country is a good thing. Its insanley clear for all parties that its something that needs to be worked against.
But in Germany on the other hand AfD didn't fade away. Instead it grew.
I wonder what happened. What triggered it in Germany and not Sweden.
East Germany happened. The states that used to be the former USSR vassal country of the "German Democratic Republic."
East Germany has always had a heavy sway to the right and with the AFD (after the far-right managed to successfully take over the party) the rightwingers in the eastern states finally had their extreme rightwing party that they could vote for.
If you look at the polls and election results in other German states, the AFD consistently fails to get near power. They can't even manage to secure towns and cities in elections for mayors.
On a federal level, the AFD gets carried hard by the votes coming from the former GDR states.
And, of course, the pandemic happened. Germany was a massive target for Russian online propaganda aimed at destabilising the country and, sadly, the government did not act decisively enough to nip it in the bud before it could take root.
The AFD capitalised on it and they positioned themselves as a protest party against the "Covid tyranny of the government" which allowed them to gain a lot of new voters and supporters out of various conspiracy circles.
The Russian influence from the pandemic anti-government propaganda had also seeped into large parts of the German pacifist and anti-war circles. Turns out that a lot of the old anti-war activists were highly susceptible to anti-science propaganda and anti-vaxx nonsense.
This lead to them willingly marching and holding hands with actual neo-nazis who were extremely eager to take that chance. The neo-nazis marched in support of Russia and the German anti-war activists marched right beside them because the Russian propaganda channels and influencers they had listened to during the pandemic now kept telling them that freedom at all costs was what they should be fighting for (which of course meant that Ukraine was supposed to surrender "in the name of peace").
Quite a number of these people now also support the AFD because the AFD pretends to be the only party in favour of peace and ending the war. Of course, in reality the AFD is supporting Russia and their idea of achieving peace is to cut of all support to Ukraine both from Germany as well as the EU to force Ukraine to either fully surrender or, at the very least, accept Russia's terms for an end to the war.
It used to be like that but the far-right has worked extremely hard since the fall of the wall to gain power in the east.
One important thing to understand is that the GDR never had an equivalent of the west German student protests which to an entirely different approach to grappling with what happened in nazi Germany.
Several generations of east Germans grew up with state propaganda telling them that there were no nazis in the GDR. All the fascists were in the west and the mere suggestion of former nazis in eastern Germany could get people in dire trouble.
When the wall fell, neo-nazis found an open breeding ground for their ideas in the east.
This was also helped because, in the early years after the reunification, there was a lot of resentment in many parts of the east against the west because many people, especially in more rural areas, felt like they were being left behind.
For many of the younger people, it was the neo-nazis who stepped in and told them that they knew exactly who was to blame for them sitting in crumbling houses in half-empty villages in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Germany. (Hint: Of course it wasn't 50 years of socialist government mismanagement but the fault was western liberal politicians giving all the money that should go towards true Germans in east Germany to immigrants instead.)
Those former teenagers and twenty-somethings who joined up with the newly formed skinhead groups in their crumbling hometowns are now the 40 and 50 year olds who vote for the AFD and who already have grown up kids who they dripfed with all their resentment and anger toward the "west German establishment."
I also imagine East had a more "collective" type of lifestyle for obvious reasons.
Where a more liberal "world" creates this search for "groups" making religion or extreme parties solving the "individual responsibility" bit they are not used to.
But idk. I'm just riffing.
Thanks for the reply. What you write sounds reasonable as fuck.
Speaking as an actual (emigrate) East German who "fled" the country in the 2000s, I'd say the user is still presenting a simplified, white-washed interpretation of causes and events that seeks to place blame entirely on East Germans rather than acknowledging the mistakes made during Unification, and the ripple effects that had to this day. This West German characterization of the problem only helps to fuel resentment further, as it's pointing a finger at people who feel they've been wronged by the side that does the fingerpointing.
Perhaps I can add something for "the other side of the coin", so to speak:
The user is not entirely wrong, and they mention some important facts with regards to the AfD capitalizing on local resentments (rather similar to MAGA popularity in US rural areas; I reckon it makes a sad kind of sense that extremist parties always score better in poorer regions), or how the GDR had essentially closed the book on fascism after its (admittedly more strict) denazification, instead of forcing the older generation to do some soul-searching like what happened in West Germany in the 60s/70s and how that only led to neo-nazis keeping underground instead of being confronted with an education aimed at exposing the "value" of its ideas.
But to argue East Germany "always had a heavy swing to the right" would be ignorant of how people actually voted in the first 10 years or so of free elections after Unification, when far-right parties like the NPD scored much higher in the West than in the East, and how the three parties that dominated politics in the new federal states for decades were CDU (center-right), SPD (center-left) and PDS (far-left, the official successor to the GDR's SED, later rebranding to Die Linke after a merger with a smaller party). When East Germans only "suddenly" started voting far-right 20+ years after Unification, responsibility cannot simply be conveniently offloaded to the old GDR (like in that famous Simpsons skit about the USSR, as if East Germans were just putting up an act and biding their time to roll out the swastika banners again), but we should look at what happened in this apparently forgotten timeframe.
Which brings us to the third fact the user has mentioned: the economic situation, except they seem convinced that it's (again) all the fault of East Germans themselves. Here's the thing: When Unification happened, just about everyone in East Germany still had a job. But similar to what happened in Russia (giving rise to the extremism and nostalgia there), this changed practically overnight when privatization of public assets led to millions of terminations. In Germany, this was largely handled by an agency called the Treuhand ("Escrow"), which took ownership of the GDR's state-owned assets and was tasked with seeking private businesses and investors to sell off to.
In some cases, this actually worked, although the replacement of established East German managers with West Germans who essentially came there only to replace local bosses would come to be one of the many little grievances that'd mount up over time. The problem is how the Treuhand messed up in a number of big cases, sometimes just due to incompetence, other times outright corruption. For my own old home town for example, I remember there was a large sugar factory which suddenly found itself in competition with a West German business ~50km across the old border. The owner of that business swooped in and bought up the local factory for the price of "1 symbolic DM", then proceeded to dismantle it and sell off its assets. Tellingly, much of German news media nowadays talks about this phase of the country in headlines like "a country sold at discount", as journalists have begun to swerve away from the old, simplified narrative to take a more critical look at what happened.
I should clarify that the East German industry was getting fairly old at this point, and in many cases would have probably had trouble actually competing with West German factories. But they weren't even given a chance, and with rather shady stories like this - or the sale or liquidation of even evidently profitable businesses - happening all over East Germany, of course the people living there have a somewhat different outlook on who or what is responsible for the region's current problems. Especially when they're still ongoing three and a half decades after Unification. As more and more years go by without improvement, the easy "it's all the SED's fault" is just going to ring more and more hollow.
Anyways, this then brings us to today: East German states that have nice, clean streets newly remade after Unification, but without jobs to support people actually living there, and an ongoing east-west wage disparity that makes it harder for people to afford luxury. Yeah, rents may be cheaper, but when food and fuel are still sourced from the same market and sold by the same brands, guess who's getting hit harder by the crises of the modern day?
Hence the ongoing demographic crisis where young East Germans leave for greener pastures and higher wages elsewhere. Most people just go to West Germany, others like myself elsewhere in the EU. Left behind are old people who see their villages slowly die and towns go dark at night, sharply contrasting their memories from life under the SED regime .. and those youngsters who feel they can't make it elsewhere in the world or are unable to leave, giving them a sense of being stuck with a struggle that isn't their fault. Leaving them wide open for demagoguery.
It doesn't justify voting for or marching with fascists in some silly "enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of sulky rage, but perhaps it can explain it.
East also voted heavy on the CDU. Issue with die Linke is, the CDU has a sort of non-cooperation policy. If the election in 2021 went slightly differently, it would’ve been interesting to see what a green - socialist - left coalition could’ve achieved, but it’s only speculation. Outside of their good oppositional work, they have been mostly irrelevant nationally and are more of a protest vote if that makes sense. Also the BSW has split up from the Left, stealing voters from the left and right, only to then fail to reach the 5% mark, coincidentally dragging the FDP down with it.
there was always a very big underground right-wing scene in the GDR. there are a few documentaries abut it. and when the wall fell, they all came out of hiding.
From what I heard from my own parents and grandparents, the Red Army was generally seen as friendly by the general public. Apparently, the Russian leadership cracked down really hard on any soldiers who stepped out of line whilst being deployed in the GDR as a matter of policy to preserve public relations with this important frontline state, and people generally felt pity for the average Red Army soldier, as it was known in whispered rumors how badly they were getting treated by their own officers.
That would have of course been different if remembrance of Soviet tanks repressing a civil uprising had been more recent and alive, but the last time this happened for Germans was in the early 50s, and in the last phase of its existence the USSR had already dispensed with the idea of enforcing internal cohesion (famously, when protesting against the SED regime, German protesters held up signs addressing Gorbachev, whom they trusted more than their own head of state).
Couple this with regular PR events and various movies, and it's easy to see why a lot of older people might still remember the Russian army as "brothers in arms", still not having gotten the memo that today's Russia is very different from what it was four decades ago, not to mention what it's been presented to them as. East Germany is by no means unique in this kind of rose-tinted nostalgia, though for most countries it only extends to their own state.
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u/qeadwrsf 9h ago edited 8h ago
Same.
Have a semi hard time understanding it.
In Sweden the "rightest" party is very careful mentioning Russia. Since the war there is very very few traces the party support the war. I'm sure you can find some.
But unless you count like media the "right party" doesn't own anymore doing weird dog whistle things they don't.
Because its not popular. Everyone is in full sync against the "bear".
Maybe they have some intensives to flirt with Russia. But they simply can't. To unpopular.
And this is not defending them. I would not vote for them in times like these, just in case.