Longing for Putin in East Germany
He used the alias ‘Platov’ to rummage through the archives of the dreaded Stasi, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. He worked in the city of Dresden, to which he soon adapted, both in his command of the German language and in his appetite for beer, the main reason he returned to Moscow with twelve extra kilos and a washing machine given to him and his wife by a neighbour.
Not all Germans have forgotten him, especially those in the organisations Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the booming far right, and the more recent Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), rooted in the far left like its own founder.
Both extremist parties are contesting regional elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, the first two on Sunday 1 September, the other three weeks later. According to the polls, they will not be in the same boat, as both could attract between 40 and 50 per cent of the vote, according to Deutsche Welle, which at the same time predicts the collapse of the Social Democrats of the SPD.
These extremes come into play precisely in their attitude to the war unleashed by President Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Both the leader of the BSW and the AfD candidate for Thuringia, Björn Höcke, considered the most radical in her party, advocate the immediate cessation of German aid to Ukraine. And while the regional elections have no candle to light in Germany's foreign policy, his open pro-Russian stance has an undeniable effect on all other issues of national debate. Höcke, who aspires to win and become president of the regional government, has gone so far as to say in a conversation with another AfD politician, Maximilian Krah, that ‘Putin represents hope for those who stand for a world of free and sovereign states without hegemonic influence’.
His colleague from the other end of the political spectrum, the aforementioned Sahra Wagenknecht, has gone so far as to claim that those responsible for the war in Ukraine ‘are the United States and NATO, a military alliance whose leading power has invaded five countries in violation of international law in recent years and killed more than a million people in these wars’.
These sentiments are increasingly shared by more and more East Germans, whose feelings of unfreedom and hardship under the communist regime of the GDR have faded, replaced by nostalgia for a more secure regime. This is revealed by an extensive study by the University of Leipzig, which concludes that ‘the longing for a strong, authoritarian leader [such as Vladimir Putin] to solve problems, especially social problems, is spreading, where changes in recent years in the area of immigration, the treatment of Islam and the new rights granted to the LGTBIQ+ movement are rejected by both the extreme right and the extreme left.
The report's director, Oliver Decker, noted in his presentation that ‘these formations offer themselves as the “strong party that a softened society needs”, which will finally crack down on mass immigration, “woke” madness, “wind turbine terror” and “the lying media”.
These tendencies, besides causing a corresponding social division in at least part of Germany, also support the heterodox stance of Hungary's leader Viktor Orban, who is increasingly distancing himself from the official stance of the EU as a whole.
Moreover, these extremist parties, the most strident in their condemnation of illegal and disorderly immigration, have gained new fuel from the recent terrorist attack in Solingen by Syrian refugee Isa al Hassan, who killed three people and injured nine others. Claimed by Daesh, the attack has even forced CDU president Friedrich Merz to call on the traffic-light government headed by Scholz to stop endless sterile debates and work with the opposition to take urgent decisions, such as making naturalisations more difficult and avoiding the massive recourse to dual nationality by many asylum seekers and refugees.