Angry East Germans Fuel Move to Right
enough to make it the leading opposition voice in Parliament. It is now represented in all of the country’s 16 state legislatures.
But support for the AfD in the East is on average more than double that in the West. Among eastern men, the party is the strongest political force, with 28 percent having cast their ballots for the AfD last year.
Eastern Man, a figure long patronized, pitied or just ignored in the West, is in the process of again reshaping German politics.
No one more embodies the frustrations of eastern men — or has been more the object of their ire — than Ms. Merkel, an eastern woman who rose to the pinnacle of power and provides a reminder of their own failure.
Ms. Merkel never became the ambassador for the East that people yearned for: Living standards in the region still lag those in the West, even after what is perceived as a traumatic economic takeover.
Mr. Dehmel calls her a “traitor” and worse.
After reunification, Mr. Dehmel recalled, western men in suits and Mercedes-Benzes arrived in his eastern home state of Saxony, soon running businesses, running universities, running the regional government, “running everything.”
And that was before more than a million asylum seekers, many of them young men, came to Germany in 2015.
“I didn’t risk my skin back then to become a third- class citizen,” said Mr. Dehmel, now 57, counting off the perceived hierarchy on his fingers: “First there are western Germans, then there are asylum seekers, then it’s us.”
One-third of male voters in Saxony cast their ballots for the far right last year — by far more than any other place in the country.
“We have a crisis of masculinity in the East and it is feeding the far right,” said Petra Köpping, minister for integration in Saxony.
When Ms. Köpping took office in 2014, she thought her job was to integrate immigrants. But as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers began arriving in Germany a year later, a middle-aged white man heckled her at a community meeting.
“Why don’t you integrate us first?” he had shouted.
That question prompted Ms. Köpping to tour her eastern home state and interview angry men. The disappointed hopes and humiliations of 1989, she found, still fester.
Some three million jobs, most of them in traditionally male industries, were lost over two years. The working- class heroes of Socialism became the working- class losers of capitalism.
East German men were abandoned by their newly united country practically overnight, Ms. Köpping said.
And they were left behind by the women.
Communism created a class of women who were independent, often better educated and working in more adaptable service jobs than eastern men.
After the wall came down, the East lost more than 10 percent of its population. Two-thirds of those who left and did not come back were young women.
It was the most extreme case of female flight in Europe, said Reiner Klingholz, of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.
In swaths of rural eastern Germany, men outnumber women, and the regions where the women disappeared map almost exactly onto the regions that vote for the Alternative for Germany.
“There is a gender element to the rise of the far right,” Mr. Klingholz said.
Only 16 percent of the Alternative for Germany’s registered members
Bitterness over Merkel’s rise, and the female flight west.
are women. And only 9 percent of female voters cast their ballot for the party last year, compared with 16 percent of males.
Mr. Dehmel’s hometown, Ebersbach, once a thriving textile hub on the Czech border, lost seven in 10 jobs and almost half its population after 1989. Schools closed and train services were cut. To halt the decline it merged with neighboring Neugersdorf.
There were two women for every three men ages 22 to 35 when Mr. Klingholz and his team visited the town in 2007. That generation is 11 years older — the core voting age of the Alternative for Germany.
Oliver Graf is one of them. He works in construction and volunteers for the local fire brigade. He says he hardly knows anyone “who does not vote for the AfD,” the strongest party in town.
At 37, Mr. Graf says he is ready to start a family. But he is single, like several of his friends. It’s a topic of conversation, he said. As he put it, “it’s hard to meet someone.”
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Dehmel was buying ammunition for his rifle at the local gun shop. Gunther Fritz, the gun shop owner, said it was no coincidence that the slogans on the streets in 2018 are the same ones as in 1989.
“We got a sense of power back then, and we’re not going to let anyone take that away from us,” he said. “The West was handed democracy after the war; we in the East had to get it for ourselves.”
“You watch,” he added. “We brought down one system. We can do it again.”