As the establishment political center in Germany clings to power, sociopolitical disunity and profound disaffection have created a new East-West divide.<\/p>\n
The elites\u2019 use of \u201cfirewalls\u201d and \u201cmiscounts\u201d against opposition parties perpetuates that divide and an unsavory two-tier society.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been more than three decades since the German reunification<\/a> of 1990. Between Kiel and Freiburg, Dusseldorf and Dresden, many today have no firsthand recollection of the country\u2019s Cold War era\u2014much less its division. A divided Germany is history\u2014East and West are reunited\u2014or are they?<\/p>\n October 3 was a public holiday in Germany\u2014Day of German Unity. And yet, not insignificant differences and palpable tensions between the former East and West Germanies persist.<\/p>\n Gareth Dale, associate head of the department of social and political sciences at Brunel University of London, contends<\/a> that the wrenching transition to a market economy\u2014in which\u00a0more than four out of five businesses<\/a>\u00a0were sold to West Germans\u2014has not been easy to forget.<\/p>\n \u201cThe German government under Kohl implemented a plan, essentially, that involved a pretty rapid de-industrialization of the East,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Eastern enterprises were sold off in a fire sale \u2026 It\u2019s 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\u2014there were enormous Rust Belt areas that grew up in Saxony-Anhalt and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n Unemployment rose steeply as\u00a0thousands of industrial enterprises\u00a0were sold off or shut down. In the decades that followed, almost two million people\u2014most of them highly educated\u2014would migrate from east to west, leaving the country suffering from a drastic case of \u201cbrain drain.\u201d<\/p>\n Marcus B\u00f6ick, 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\u2019s east.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Yet, the fact that these two former national economies\u2014with their significant economic and social imbalances in 1990\u2014took decades to fuse should not be surprising. Some historians even suggest<\/a> amazement at how rapidly the process of reunification progressed.<\/p>\n 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\u2014and rightly so\u2014that for too many years all decisions were made by West Germans, less estrangement would likely have resulted. And certainly, exaggerated promises<\/a> of quick fixes, as voiced by\u00a0\u201cchancellor of unity\u201d\u00a0Helmut Kohl, were equally counterproductive.<\/p>\n Yet, history is often filled with ironies. In this case, the preponderance of Germans, East and West, have had one thing in common throughout\u2014being trammeled (sometimes trampled) by the neoliberal onslaught that has swept over most Western societies: the rapid transition from\u00a0state socialism\u00a0<\/a>to capitalism defined by\u00a0neoliberalism\u2019s cruelty<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is irrelevant as to whether one experiences the precarious nature of the Western claim of \u2014 \u201cwhat is in your best interest\u201d \u2014 in Berlin or Bonn; in this form of servitude, East and West are \u201cunited.\u201d<\/p>\n And herein lies the primary measure of the divide, today, between Germany\u2019s former East and West\u2014it is politics\u2014in particular the \u201cpeculiar\u201d politics that controls disposition of the will of the people. The Day of German Unity\u00a0means little today, given the status of the AfD (the new-right party Alternative for Germany), which outdistances all others in the polls<\/a>\u00a0and yet is kept in check by the political centrist establishment through a terribly undemocratic measure called \u201cthe firewall.\u201d<\/p>\n While the AfD is making inroads in Germany\u2019s West\u2014especially in the rustbelt region of the Ruhr\u2014it is the former East Germany that has become its bastion enclave. And it is still growing\u2014getting stronger with each election. For Chancellor Merz, whose own popularity rating has hit an\u00a0embarrassing 29 percent\u00a0<\/a>(and is dropping daily), the AfD\u2019s triumph is due primarily to former East Germans still\u00a0feeling, and rightly, that they are second-class\u00a0citizens<\/a>.<\/p>\n What Merz is refusing to acknowledge is that much of Germany\u2019s 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 \u201cfirewall\u201d\u00a0policy 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.<\/p>\n By the\u00a0\u201cfirewall\u201d\u00a0diktat, the translation of one\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Moreover, one will have to endure endless sermons of condescension on how \u201cdangerous\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Yet, an interesting political phenomenon has recently occurred. The AfD is now supporting its ideological opposite<\/a>, the new-left BSW (B\u00fcndnis 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 \u201cmiscounts.\u201d<\/p>\n But there also is the fact that both AfD and BSW are parties rooted in\u00a0the territory of the old East Germany<\/a>. In that sense, what was done to the AfD via the\u00a0\u201cfirewall\u201d\u00a0has been done to the BSW via the \u201cmiscount\u201d: essentially, discrimination against the electorate of both parties, whose votes have been relegated to a status subordinate to others.<\/p>\n If the corpus of Germany\u2019s traditional political establishment were genuinely interested in securing real \u201cGerman unity,\u201d they would drop their undemocratic policy of the\u00a0\u201cfirewall\u201d\u00a0against the AfD and initiate a recount of BSW votes.<\/p>\n But fear and insecurity over losing power often make politicians behave irrationally or worse; the centrist elites\u2019 efforts to cling to power produce not\u00a0onlysociopolitical 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\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n It is ironic today that far too many politicians in the West like to say \u201cEast Germans\u201d are not yet sufficiently\u00a0\u201cdemocratic.\u201d That is a statement by someone \u201clooking into a mirror\u201d in an effort to convince themselves. If there is a lack of democratic culture in Germany, it is amongst those who find\u00a0\u201cfirewalls\u201d\u00a0and massive\u00a0\u201cmiscounts\u201d\u00a0a permissible form of democracy. And what really frustrates many East Germans is precisely this lack of genuine democracy<\/a> in their politically dysfunctional and not-so-united Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the establishment political center in Germany clings to power, sociopolitical disunity and profound disaffection have created a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[3647,2000,299,1123,1824,391],"class_list":{"0":"post-530586","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-economics","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-featured","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-opinion"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115444674897409823","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}