The AfD was originally set up by a nationalist-conservative group of west German economists and business representatives, for whom the federal government’s selected European policy at the height of the 2012 banking and sovereign-debt crisis did not adequately protect German economic interests. Added to this came something like a split in the CDU’s national-conservative wing, named after Alfred Dregger, which today finds itself embodied in the figure of Alexander Gauland (AfD Bundestag group leader).

As a litmus test for the intense nature of conflicts within the reunification process, this party first took flight when, from 2015, not least thanks to a way of thinking rooted in the old federal republic—namely the conservative dislike of the 1968 generation—it established itself more firmly in the east German Länder, under the leadership of Frauke Petry and Jörg Meuthen. There it linked up with local themes within a swelling critique of unification policies. Criticism of Europe worked as a catalyst for the amalgamation of west- and east-German protest voters, whose numbers grew rapidly on the back of the refugee crisis and rising xenophobia. The conflict between the CDU and the AfD could not be condensed in a more graphic and revealing scene than when on July 8th, the MEP Meuthen rose in the European Parliament and threw back at the chancellor—in her presentation of the planned recovery fund—the very arguments with which she had justified Schäuble’s austerity agenda over the previous decade.

Here we touch upon the interface at which the European and German unification processes are joined anew. Changes in the party-political spectrum often mirror deeper shifts in the political mentalities of an entire people. The change in European policy indicates, apart from Merkel’s informed sensitivity towards a new political constellation, public awareness of the growing historical distance from both the happy moment when we regained national unity and the grindingly harsh process of unification.¹

It would be too easy to deduce this historicisation from the spate, timed for the 30th anniversary, of historical books, journalistic reports and more or less personally-laced retrospectives—this flood of publications reflects in turn the fact of a change in mutual relations between the eastern and western parts of the country. If a greater distance is now being taken towards the problems that arose in the aftermath of German unification, this shift can be ascribed to the polarised views about this event in German politics.

Political regression, currently taking shape in the form of the AfD, has a confusingly ambivalent face: on the one hand it has acquired a shared, a pan-German character; on the other it meets in the east and the west quite different postwar narratives and ways of thinking. The historical distance makes both things much more obvious to us—that we share the same conflict with right-wing populism and that this conflict at the same time sheds light on the very different political mentalities that developed over four decades in the federal republic and the GDR respectively.

The dislocations in the political relationship between west and east Germany, which became manifest throughout the country, made us aware of the pan-German character of the subsequent process of clarifying what happened—above all with the drama that took place in February 2020 in Erfurt after the elections to the Thuringian state legislature. The blunt positions taken initially against the breach of taboo in electing a Free Democratic Party state premier with the aid of the combined votes of the CDU and AfD came from the mouths of Merkel and Markus Söder (CSU leader), an east German and a Bavarian—the normative edge to both their statements was surprisingly sharp. The chancellor spoke of an ‘unforgivable procedure that must be reversed’. She gave added weight to her intransigence by sacking the special government representative for east Germany (who had been in favour of the tacit alliance with the far right). These unmistakable reactions meant more than simply recalling the party’s rules on incompatibility.

Up to that point, political leaders dealt with ‘worried citizens’; now, they would have to end their disastrous flirt with what they had taken simply as misguided individuals. Given the chaotic political concatenation within the Thuringian party landscape and the vacillating behaviour of local CDU colleagues, the ambivalent strategy in play of too close an embrace (of the right) had to end straight away. The political recognition it gave a party to the right of the union (CDU/CSU) makes a difference compared with the mere fact that such a party exists. This means for the CDU giving up the opportunistic incorporation of a potential group of voters not officially targeted by one’s own political programme. At the same time, it means believing in a practice whereby voters who give voice to jackbooted, nationalistic, racist and anti-Semitic slogans have the right, as democratic fellow citizens, to be taken seriously—that is, to be criticised without mercy.