East Germany – the promised land of the AfD
Posted by Thomas Klikauer
Given the seemingly endless string of AfD successes across Germany – particularly in the East – there is a very real possibility of the neo-fascist party achieving majority governments in several East German states.
That same threat looms over Germany nationally. In August 2025, it became a shocking reality. Germany’s Trentbarometer showed that, for the first time since Hitler’s Nazi Party in 1932, a far-right party – the AfD – had become the strongest political force in the country.
In 1932, Hitler’s NSDAP surpassed the social-democratic SPD (21.6%) with 37.4%, becoming the dominant political force in the Weimar Republic.
Ninety-three years later, the neo-fascist AfD overtook Germany’s conservative CDU (24%) with 26%. Even as the country’s leading party, the AfD would still require the conservatives’ support to govern.
Polling suggests a so-called hazelnut coalition – composed of the far-right AfD (symbolized by brown, recalling Hitler’s Brownshirts) and the traditionally conservative CDU (black) – could secure a federal majority, reaching 52% or more support among German voters.
The metaphor is unsettling: mix black and brown, and you get a dark-brown hue – an ideological blend of reactionaries and neo-Nazis.
Like all despots, the AfD claims to represent the “will of the people.” Its mythology centres on Björn Höcke, its de facto Führer-like figure. He hasn’t declared himself an angel, as mass-murderer Pinochet once did (at the age of 88), but the symbolism is clear.
Backed by a growing base of far-right voters, the AfD is pursuing a vision of ethno-nationalist governance – particularly in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, where elections are scheduled for 2026.
Even before taking power, the AfD has already rehabilitated terms like völkisch – a word closely associated with Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft, the so-called racial community of Aryan people.
The AfD argues that since democracy means rule of the people, a race-based definition of Volk is perfectly legitimate.
Democratic politicians, meanwhile, are among the AfD’s favorite targets. They are routinely accused of having lost touch with the true people. In response, the party promotes plebiscites and referenda – often fuelled by online hate platforms – as the direct voice of the Volk.
But this Volk is imagined as racially homogeneous – coded language for an Aryan identity. Today, nearly 25% of Germany’s population (around 21.2 million people) have a migration background. Yet, the AfD’s ideology calls for their forced “re-migration” – a sanitized euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
The social, cultural, and economic destruction such a policy would unleash is hard to overstate. And yet, 33% of Germans reportedly enjoy kebab at least once a month. Will the AfD replace Turkish kebab, Italian pizza, sushi, and curry with Graupensuppe?
Much of the AfD’s propaganda hinges on redefining Volk from a political to a biological category – separating Bio-Deutsche (racially German) from all others.
Here, the AfD’s pseudo-democratic rhetoric collapses into a Hitler-like blood-and-soil ideology, in which sovereignty no longer belongs to the demos, but to the ethnos – the race.
Hence, “Wir sind das Volk!” (We are the people!) morphs into “We are the Volksgemeinschaft” – a racial collective. This reinterpretation is aimed squarely at East Germans, many of whom still feel the sting of an unfulfilled transition from socialism to capitalism after 1990.
In many ways, the AfD’s rise is a revenge of the East. It is a reaction to Helmut Kohl’s empty promise of “blossoming landscapes” that never materialized.
Into this void steps a party that plays on both anti-communist nostalgia and resentment toward Western liberalism, weaving a potent and emotional narrative. This propaganda taps into real, lived experiences:
- High unemployment and job insecurity
- Decaying infrastructure and social services
- A rapidly aging and shrinking population
- The exodus of the young – especially women – to the West
- Persistent feelings of being second-class citizens – Ossis in Dunkeldeutschland
Within this context, the AfD has built a reactionary East German identity – a kind of cultural nationalism that is both defensive and exclusionary.
It appeals to older generations who remember the GDR, and to younger ones born after 1990, growing up in a region economically and ideologically distanced from the West.
The AfD offers not just political representation, but identity – an identity rooted in “the East,” resistant to multiculturalism, and hostile to perceived Western impositions: from the Euro to immigration to progressive values.
It’s a crypto-nationalist identity. It turns resentment into belonging. Its narratives are filled with bitterness toward Western arrogance, European integration, and demographic change.
The term Ossi has been re-appropriated as a badge of honour by right-wing actors. Unlike the supposedly “decadent” Wessi, the Ossi is imagined as technically competent, rational, and ideologically pure.
Of course, the notion of an “ideology-free worldview” is itself deeply ideological. But that doesn’t stop the AfD from using it as proof of its own supposed “normality.” In doing so, it casts all democratic parties – SPD, CDU, Greens, Die Linke – as misguided or illegitimate.
Their obsession with a “pure German heritage” (saubere Ahnentafel) draws directly from Nazi-era vocabulary. The fantasy of a homogeneous, racially pure people surviving only in East Germany is the AfD’s Promised Land – a dangerous and deeply reactionary echo of a non-democratic past.
From 1933 to 1990, East Germany had no real democracy – first under Hitler, then under Stalinism. The AfD exploits this history, fostering an authoritarian tradition repackaged as right-wing populism. Its propaganda constructs:
- a mythologized East
- ideologically distinct from the West
- a nationally liberated zone
- free of multiculturalism, liberal values, and foreign influence
AfD Führer Björn Höcke has perfected this message. The party’s unofficial motto for East-Germany might as well be:
“The West is everything you don’t want to become.”
In this narrative, the West is feminized, multicultural, corrupt. The East is pure, strong, untouched. What was once post-reunification euphoria has curdled into alienation and resentment.
The East/West divide functions as both a diagnosis of injury and a source of belonging – dividing “us” (the innocent, native, pure) from “them” (the migrants, the elites, the corrupt).
It’s a worldview built on conspiracy fantasies: globalist elites, cultural Marxism, demographic replacement. These feed into a simplified moral structure: good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator. And in this logic, there are only two responses:
- Vote AfD – the political outlet
- Commit violence – the ideological endpoint
The AfD’s framing of “East vs. West” is not just regional – it mirrors Russia vs. the West, nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism, the Aryan Volk vs. the outsider. It offers a closed, authoritarian worldview with powerful internal coherence.
The result is an ideologically reinforced East German identity that corrals millions into a far-right filter bubble. Conspiracy fantasies replace complexity. Identity replaces policy. The AfD offers emotional comfort, not political solutions.
It turns kebab-loving voters into imagined defenders of Germanic purity. It turns the trauma of reunification into a nationalist weapon. And it does so under the false promise of normality.
Photo: (Source: https://www2.lunapic.com/editor/?action=candy)
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