FT: In Germany’s East, old ties to Moscow fuel AfD rise

Martina Mielke, a former crane driver at Rostock’s old Neptun shipyard, recalls partying with the Russian crew of a newly delivered ship during East Germany’s heyday.

“It was just like in a movie! ‘Sto gramm!’” said Mielke, invoking the Russian expression for a 100ml serving of vodka. “You weren’t allowed to chicken out. There was bread, bacon, black tea. They were so friendly.”

Her experience, and that of many others in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, points to a distinctive view of Russia in this part of the country — one the far-right Alternative for Germany has tapped as it surged in opinion polls, Financial Times writes.

The party, founded in western Germany in 2013, recently secured a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt, another former state in the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was known, and is on track to come first in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s regional election on Sunday, polling at about 37 per cent.

Even as Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government warns of Moscow’s escalating “hybrid war”, nearly two-thirds of voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern see Vladimir Putin’s nation as posing “little or no threat”, according to a poll published last week by local newspaper Ostsee-Zeitung.

By contrast, 59 per cent of voters in western Germany regard Russia as a strong or very strong threat, according to an ARD survey published this month.

“There are differences between east and west, on arms deliveries to Ukraine, on the perception of Putin and Russia, and that’s to do with history,” said Steffen Mau, sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin.

People in the communist GDR were more accepting of Soviet soldiers than those in other occupied European countries, given the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, including against the Red Army. After reunification, eastern Germans became citizens of a NATO member state, but scepticism towards the US-led alliance endured.

“East Germans were very cautious about the expansion of NATO towards central and eastern Europe,” Mau said.

That enduring affinity for Russia has been reinforced by the economic pain of Germany’s break from cheap Russian energy and lingering resentment over the upheavals that followed reunification.

Together, those forces have created fertile ground for the Russia-friendly, Eurosceptic AfD, just as Germany has become Ukraine’s biggest military donor under Merz.

An AfD win in the state of just over 1.5mn people could have national repercussions for Merz and his coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

The chancellor’s CDU has slumped below 7 per cent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and risks missing the 5 per cent threshold to enter the regional assembly. Ejection from the legislature in the home state of Angela Merkel, the former CDU chancellor, would be a serious blow to Merz, who is battling record-low polls and an internal rebellion in his party.

During his only campaign appearance last month in Kühlungsborn, a Baltic Sea resort, Merz was booed and heckled as a “warmonger”. Last week, Tino Schomann, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s CDU deputy leader, called on the chancellor to quit.

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