“The mistake of the parties that flourished in West Germany was to believe that they could import their model, as it was, to the East.”

Steffen Mau, professor of sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin, recently published Unequally united (“Unequally united. Why the East remains different”Ed. Suhrkamp, ​​168 pages, not translated). In this fascinating essay, he explains in particular why the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is achieving its highest scores in the Länder of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), which should be the case again on Sunday 1^is September, during the regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia, where the AfD is credited with around 30% of voting intentions.

When Germans from Bavaria (Munich), Hesse (Frankfurt am Main) or Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart) elect their regional representatives, no one specifies that they are “from the West”. On the other hand, when voting in the Länder of the former GDR, as is the case on Sunday, people are quick to point out that the voters are “East Germans”. Does this mean that Germany, thirty-four years after its reunification, remains a country divided in two?

In the 1990s and 2000s, the most commonly held idea was that the East would “catch up” with the West. Economically, this has been confirmed. Twenty years ago, the unemployment rate in the East was 10 points higher than in the West; today, the gap is only 2 points. Similarly, we must put an end to the image of an East Germany that has not recovered from the closure of the former GDR conglomerates: in recent years, there have been considerable investments in the East in sectors of the future, such as electric batteries or semiconductors.

But the economy is not everything, and in other areas, the catch-up has not happened. I think first of demographics. Berlin aside, the East has lost 15% of its inhabitants since 1990, while the West has gained 10%. Older and with proportionally fewer immigrants, the population of the East is also more masculine, with ratios sometimes of 120 to 130 men for 100 women in small towns and rural areas.

It is no coincidence that the AfD, of which only 20% of members are women, has achieved its highest scores in these territories where there is an over-representation of single men, many of whom are steeped in patriarchal culture.

Already firmly established in Saxony and Thuringia, the AfD could achieve unprecedented results there on Sunday. In your book, however, you stress that, politically, the uniqueness of the East is not limited to the particularly high results recorded there by the extreme right…

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