The East will weigh more heavily, potentially forcing Berlin into a new Ostpolitik and a different approach to both the military conflict in Ukraine and coexistence with Russia.
The elections to the European Parliament (EP) in Germany on 9 June not only polarised positions on the proxy war in Ukraine, with the victory of the hyper-atlanticist CDU/CSU on the one hand and the strong growth of anti-war forces around the AfD and BSW on the other, but also showed that the biggest political divide in the country is between East and West, i.e. between the former states of the GDR and the FRG.
Why, 34 years after the fall of the GDR, is this not only noticeable, but seems to be gaining in strength? Perhaps because the “reunification of Germany” was not really a reunification, but rather an annexation of the GDR into the structures of the Federal Republic of Germany. This was in line with Bonn’s plans for a “geopolitical compromise implicit in the Maastricht Treaty, whereby Europe gave Germany the green light for rapid reunification in exchange for the Europeanisation of the Deutsche Mark”. These are the words of former Italian Foreign Minister Gianni di Michelis, who led his country’s negotiations on the 1992 Treaty on European Union, which established the European Central Bank and the foundations of the single currency.
The Euro as an extended Deutsche Mark, with Washington’s approval
According to him, it was a kind of rebranding and adaptation of the German currency to the new scale of a Europe that would expand eastwards. “The real negotiations took place in absolute secrecy: German reunification would not have been possible without Europe’s consent,” he said. Thus, it took half a year to admit the GDR, with its 16 million inhabitants, which had emerged from a dictatorship and had an economy that didn’t meet EU criteria, while the applications of Spain and Portugal, already democracies, had to be adapted to the strict economic parameters of the EEC before they were approved after seven years.
In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in Foreign Affairs that “any expansion of Europe’s political space is automatically an expansion of US influence […] An enlarged Europe will extend the reach of US influence, without at the same time creating a Europe politically integrated enough to challenge the US on issues of geopolitical importance”. This was the former US National Security Advisor’s honest description of the EU’s instrumental role in Washington’s strategic expansion on European soil.
Thus, the GDR and many of its genuinely Germanic structures from the former Prussia were absorbed and eliminated in an FRG dominated by Frankfurt School education, consumerism, mass immigration and Americanised culture. Over the years, this has led to low-intensity reaction movements around the idea of “Ostalgie” (a play on words to describe nostalgia for the East), with a collective identity that has characterised the entire former GDR, including East Berlin.
The end of the war and the reestablishment of relations with Russia
Curiously, this is also where anti-war sentiment is currently strongest, following an institutional trend in Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia, but also among large sections of the population in the Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Austria. This contradicts the Western narrative, which insists on the truism that “the countries of Eastern Europe have great resentment against Russia”.
Coincidentally, it is also in Eastern Germany that there is the strongest reaction against the multicultural model imposed by the EU/NATO, visible in the anti-immigration vote of the AfD and also of a new left that is now emerging in the form of the BSW, with which it has some points in common. It was also here that the major demonstrations against the refugee crisis of 2015/16 took place. Later, with the COVID-19 crisis, it was also in the east that the first large demonstrations against government measures took place. More recently, farmers’ protests have included GDR flags, less a sign of separatism than a clear symbol that “not everything was so bad in the old days”.
«Ossis» and «Wessis»: two world views
A survey by Infratest Dimap, a polling institute specialising in political opinion and electoral studies, published six months after the start of the Russian operation in Ukraine, shows that on some issues related to Russia and the US, the responses are significantly different. For example, in the East the “Ossis” tend to view Russia more favourably, while in the West the “Wessis” tend to be more distrustful of Russia and more sympathetic to the US. When asked, “In terms of culture, mentality and history, are you more attracted to Russia or the US?”, 25 per cent in the East said Russia, 23 per cent the US and 46 per cent neither. When asked the same question in the West, only 7% preferred Russia and 42% the US, while 47% were not attracted to either country.
Sensitivities are again divided when asked about the negative content of news about Russia in the mainstream press or about Western sanctions policy. In the East, there is a greater understanding of Moscow’s current positions, much criticism of NATO enlargement and a clear dislike of the warmongering attitude of Berlin’s political class towards the military conflict in Ukraine.
A new political scenario that could determine geopolitics
This makes it easier to understand the results of the European elections in the east of the country, with almost 29 per cent of the vote for the AfD, 14 per cent for the debutant BSW and 5 per cent for Die Linke. The three parties, which advocate the resumption of relations with Moscow, the return of Russian energy and an end to arms supplies to Zelensky, together make up almost half of the electorate in the territory of the former GDR. If it were a country, it could be said that the EU/NATO system would not find it easy to play its belligerent political game in a “new GDR”, as it does today in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Germany’s electoral map is currently a huge black spot (CDU/CSU in the west and Berlin) with small Greens and red gaps (SPD) and another large blue spot (AfD), which coincides exactly with the six states of the former GDR, with the exception of Berlin.
Elections will be held in three of the six eastern states in September (Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg), and if the results swing towards the AfD and the BSW as expected, the new electoral configuration could lead to new party alliances and open up a completely new political dynamic in Germany. In any case, the east will weigh more heavily, potentially forcing Berlin into a new Ostpolitik and a different approach to both the proxy war in Ukraine and coexistence with Russia.
Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt, especially for «New Eastern Outlook»