Merkel haunted by failure to unite heartland still split on Cold War lines
While the chancellor is expected to win elections, she will lead a Germany that remains deeply riven
Angela Merkel is all but certain to win a fourth term in power in German elections today, unless the polls have got it spectacularly wrong. But if she does remain chancellor, it will be at the helm of a Germany that is deeply divided.
In Weimar, you can see the crack that runs through German society. Two of Germany’s greatest writers, Goethe and Schiller, lived here. So did the composer Bach. The city was also where the ill-fated Weimar Republic of the inter-war years was proclaimed, in the National Theatre. If any city can claim to be the epicentre of German culture, it is Weimar.
But while Mrs Merkel enjoys some of the highest personal approval ratings in Europe, Weimar is seething with discontent. “It’s the refugees,” says a flower seller in the market square who gives his name only as Harry. “She brought all these people in and now we’ll never get rid of them.”
Weimar and the surrounding state of Thuringia lie in the heartlands of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD). In third place nationally, with around 13 per cent support, the AfD is second here with around 18 per cent.
The national polls look good for Mrs Merkel, but on a regional level the picture is different. For 45 years Weimar lay behind the Iron Curtain, in communist East Germany, and the pattern is repeated across the former East. In Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the AfD is on 22 per cent. The best it has managed anywhere in the former West is eight per cent.
More than 25 years after reunification, Germany remains divided along Cold War lines.
Four years ago, Mrs Merkel could claim she had finally banished the divide. The first chancellor to have grown up in the East, she won majorities across the country in elections. But this time it is different. “Things were better in East Germany,” says Harry’s wife, Heike. “We had a lot of problems, but people were happier. Harry has to work seven days a week, and we still can’t pay the bills.”
Ostalgie, nostalgia for the old communist East, and resentment of poorer living standards compared with the West have played a role.
This year voters are turning from the former communists to the AfD. Alexander Gauland, its lead candidate, has called for Germans to “reclaim their past” and “feel pride in the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars”.
Mrs Merkel has opened up a flank, both on the political Right and in the geographical East. West of the old Iron Curtain lies a different Germany.
Frankfurt, with its Manhattan-like skyline, is a symbol of Europe’s economic powerhouse, and a city of immigrants. Beneath the skyscrapers, Turkish restaurants jostle for space with Arab hairdressers.
“Frankfurt is a global city with a long tradition of coexistence with immigrants, and a good social integration policy,” says Matthias Zimmer, a CDU MP who is running for re-election in the city. “We’ve had immigration since the Sixties, which led to the modernisation of West German society. That has never happened in East Germany: what it’s experiencing now are the birth pangs of catching up with modernity.”
During the migrant influx, the small town of Giessen north of Frankfurt hosted the largest number of asylum seekers in Germany. Helge Braun, the local MP, says the town could cope because of its past. “We have a lot of experience with this sort of situation in Giessen,” says Prof Braune, who is also a minister in Mrs Merkel’s government in charge of the migrant issue.
“The Giessen refugee camp accommodated displaced people at the end of the Second World War, and refugees from East Germany during the Cold War.” By contrast, until Mrs Merkel’s decision to open the borders to asylum seekers in 2015, many East German towns and cities had never seen large-scale immigration.
Carsten Koschmieder, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University, believes the divide goes deeper.
“It’s about identity,” he says. “People in the former East have been though enormous changes in the last 20 years. Talented young people are moving to the West in search of jobs, and that makes it harder for those who get left behind. When people face that sort of upheaval, they look for an alternative stability in their national identity.” It is an issue that has been at the heart of the AfD campaign. The election has opened a national debate on whether Germany has a Leitkultur – a dominant culture – and the AfD has not hesitated to invoke the cultural icons of Weimar. “German culture is Goethe, Schiller, Bach,” Mr Gauland has said.
Many of the party’s pronouncements have been more controversial. “Not everyone with a German passport is German,” Mr Gauland has said. The AfD’s regional leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, called for a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s attitude to the Second World War and an end to guilt over the crimes of the Nazis.
Under Hitler, Weimar was glorified as a shrine to German culture. On a hill just outside the city lies a reminder of the dangers of such politics: Buchenwald concentration camp, where more 56,000 Jews, gipsies, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war were murdered by the Nazis. The original gate is still standing, a Nazi slogan picked out in the wrought iron reads Jedem das Seine: each to his own.
‘Talented young people are moving [from the East] to the West in search of jobs, and that makes it harder for those who get left behind’
Liam Halligan: Business, Page 2