As the establishment political center in Germany clings to power, sociopolitical disunity and profound disaffection have created a new East-West divide.

The elites’ use of “firewalls” and “miscounts” against opposition parties perpetuates that divide and an unsavory two-tier society.

It’s been more than three decades since the German reunification of 1990. Between Kiel and Freiburg, Dusseldorf and Dresden, many today have no firsthand recollection of the country’s Cold War era—much less its division. A divided Germany is history—East and West are reunited—or are they?

October 3 was a public holiday in Germany—Day of German Unity. And yet, not insignificant differences and palpable tensions between the former East and West Germanies persist.

Gareth Dale, associate head of the department of social and political sciences at Brunel University of London, contends that the wrenching transition to a market economy—in which more than four out of five businesses were sold to West Germans—has not been easy to forget.

“The German government under Kohl implemented a plan, essentially, that involved a pretty rapid de-industrialization of the East,” he said. “The Eastern enterprises were sold off in a fire sale … It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that East Germany was just sold off to Western businesses and Western property owners. And that was painful for many people in East Germany because their factories, their workplaces, often went bankrupt—there were enormous Rust Belt areas that grew up in Saxony-Anhalt and so on.”

Unemployment rose steeply as thousands of industrial enterprises were sold off or shut down. In the decades that followed, almost two million people—most of them highly educated—would migrate from east to west, leaving the country suffering from a drastic case of “brain drain.”

Marcus Böick, assistant professor in modern German history at the University of Cambridge, agrees that the memories of those first years still weigh heavily across the country’s east.

In one respect, the persistent lack of unity in Germany is in large measure a function of pervasive circumstances and powerful effects, like income disparity. Wages in the East remain substantially lower than in the West. Data indicate that in many instances, East Germans earn roughly 20-25 percent less than West Germans. This wage gap reflects the lower average salaries and mirrors the prevalence of minimum wage jobs and lower overall employment quality. A significant segment of the eastern workforce, particularly in the lower income brackets, is more vulnerable to poverty risks due to these disparities.

Yet, the fact that these two former national economies—with their significant economic and social imbalances in 1990—took decades to fuse should not be surprising. Some historians even suggest amazement at how rapidly the process of reunification progressed.

But what really matters is less the facility of the reunification process and more how uneven and inequitable it remains. If East Germans had not felt—and rightly so—that for too many years all decisions were made by West Germans, less estrangement would likely have resulted. And certainly, exaggerated promises of quick fixes, as voiced by “chancellor of unity” Helmut Kohl, were equally counterproductive.

Yet, history is often filled with ironies. In this case, the preponderance of Germans, East and West, have had one thing in common throughout—being trammeled (sometimes trampled) by the neoliberal onslaught that has swept over most Western societies: the rapid transition from state socialism to capitalism defined by neoliberalism’s cruelty. 

It is irrelevant as to whether one experiences the precarious nature of the Western claim of — “what is in your best interest” — in Berlin or Bonn; in this form of servitude, East and West are “united.”

And herein lies the primary measure of the divide, today, between Germany’s former East and West—it is politics—in particular the “peculiar” politics that controls disposition of the will of the people. The Day of German Unity means little today, given the status of the AfD (the new-right party Alternative for Germany), which outdistances all others in the polls and yet is kept in check by the political centrist establishment through a terribly undemocratic measure called “the firewall.”

While the AfD is making inroads in Germany’s West—especially in the rustbelt region of the Ruhr—it is the former East Germany that has become its bastion enclave. And it is still growing—getting stronger with each election. For Chancellor Merz, whose own popularity rating has hit an embarrassing 29 percent (and is dropping daily), the AfD’s triumph is due primarily to former East Germans still feeling, and rightly, that they are second-class citizens.

What Merz is refusing to acknowledge is that much of Germany’s current East-West division is not a relic of the Cold War past. While unpleasant and slow in its demise, it will pass. The real problem is contemporary German politics. It is perpetuating the divide by employing the “firewall” policy and excluding the AfD from its well-earned rightful participation in the government. The establishment parties have, in effect, made their supporters second-class voters.

By the “firewall” diktat, the translation of one’s vote for AfD to wield power has simply been ruled irrelevant. Such a vote only goes to support an opposition that is marginalized in every way possible.

Moreover, one will have to endure endless sermons of condescension on how “dangerous” and misguided one is for casting such a vote. It is not difficult to understand why East Germans continue to feel that they are denied full citizenship.

Yet, an interesting political phenomenon has recently occurred. The AfD is now supporting its ideological opposite, the new-left BSW (Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht), in its call for a recount of election votes. It is likely that the BSW was excluded from the German parliament due to an increasingly suspicious accumulation of “miscounts.”

But there also is the fact that both AfD and BSW are parties rooted in the territory of the old East Germany. In that sense, what was done to the AfD via the “firewall” has been done to the BSW via the “miscount”: essentially, discrimination against the electorate of both parties, whose votes have been relegated to a status subordinate to others.

If the corpus of Germany’s traditional political establishment were genuinely interested in securing real “German unity,” they would drop their undemocratic policy of the “firewall” against the AfD and initiate a recount of BSW votes.

But fear and insecurity over losing power often make politicians behave irrationally or worse; the centrist elites’ efforts to cling to power produce not onlysociopolitical disunity and profound disaffection but a new, even deeper East-West divide in which Germany, itself, suffers. This tragedy is not a legacy of the Cold War past—and easily blamed on former East German Communist leaders; rather, this divide is newly devised, and the culprits are those centrist elites stubbornly holding on to power at all costs, politically undermining the will of a large share of the German electorate and one region in particular: the former East Germany.

It is ironic today that far too many politicians in the West like to say “East Germans” are not yet sufficiently “democratic.” That is a statement by someone “looking into a mirror” in an effort to convince themselves. If there is a lack of democratic culture in Germany, it is amongst those who find “firewalls” and massive “miscounts” a permissible form of democracy. And what really frustrates many East Germans is precisely this lack of genuine democracy in their politically dysfunctional and not-so-united Germany.