Revolution im Osten? The Political Economy of AfD Support in East Germany

Revolution im Osten? The Political Economy of AfD Support in East Germany

German Politics

1990-2026

Keiran Roberts

Thirty-five years after German reunification, the five eastern Länder voted in a manner unmatched by any western state. This dissertation argues that two causes operate in sequence rather than in competition. The transformation of the 1990s left a region that converged on western income levels until roughly 2019, then stopped, and that remains owned, headquartered, and administered from elsewhere. Forty-five years of separation determined the political form of grievance, producing a population that’s far more secular, ethnically homogeneous, and less attached to the churches, unions, and organizations that absorb similar grievances in the West. Using state-level and constituency-level data from the 2025 Bundestagswahl alongside aggregate series from 1980, the dissertation shows that district income strongly predicts AfD support in the east (r = −0.80, R2 = 0.64, n = 60) and only weakly in the west, while it barely predicts the combined Die Linke and BSW vote anywhere (r = −0.28 at state level). Two cultural correlations that appear to support a simple cultural thesis are shown to be more complex: irreligion reverses sign between subsamples, and migrant share cannot be cleanly separated from income. The conclusion is that authoritarian-leaning parties aren’t a single phenomenon, and that the AfD vote, in particular, tracks the accumulated economic position of a place rather than its current labour market.

German Politics