Elections likely to serve up a reminder that, almost 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the waters of the Elbe still run deep

“Imagine Europe as a pair of lungs,” says Reiner Haseloff, the state premier of Saxony-Anhalt, as he stares from the top deck of a river cruiser at the winding waterways below. “The Elbe is where the two lungs meet.”

The river that cuts a roughly diagonal line from the North Sea to the Polish-Czech border has been more than just a waterway for at least 21 centuries.

As historian James Hawes traces in a recent book, Roman emperors dared not venture beyond the Elbe and in the middle ages it formed the eastern border of Charlemagne’s empire.

Hawes shows how this cultural barrier persisted into modern times, with drastic effect: the Nazi party made its breakthrough in the conservatively minded lands of East Elbia and the iron curtain, which placed the river predominantly in the communist east, merely adding a military dimension to a century-old cultural divide between the largely Protestant, eastward-looking Germany of the Elbe, and the more Catholic, west-facing Germany of the Rhine.



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The country’s federal elections on 24 September are likely to serve up a reminder that, almost 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the waters of the Elbe still run deep. “The geographical centre of Europe lies east of the Elbe,” says Haseloff, a politician in Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. “Underestimating that fact is a problem that runs through all democratic parties in Germany, including mine.”

If Alternative für Deutschland becomes the first overtly nationalist party to enter the German parliament since 1961, it will be largely due to its success in the east. Averaging around 7% in the old west in the latest polls, the party stands to gain between 11% and 22% in all eastern states apart from Berlin. Already in second place in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony and Thuringia, the AfD has realistic hopes of replacing the leftwing Die Linke as eastern Germany’s main voice of protest.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Merkel and Stephan Weil, Lower Saxony’s premier, observe the swollen Elbe in 2013. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

East of the Elbe, where the chancellor has scheduled a disproportionately high number of campaign rallies this month, is also where her decisions at the height of the refugee crisis have found their fiercest criticism.

A survey from April 2017 suggests social attitudes to the issue in the former East German states remain more in line with eastern European countries, such as Hungary, than with the western part of the country.

A ferry trip across the Elbe between Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern illustrates the divide. In Hitzacker, a 16th-century spa town on the western banks of the river, the roads into the centre are lined with posters for the Christian Democrats and the Greens.

Straight across the river in Dömitz, however, every other lamppost is clad in the blue and red of the AfD’s election posters. The party, which campaigns for tighter border controls and wants to copy Switzerland’s referenda-based model of direct democracy, managed to grab 20% of the population’s vote in state elections last year.

Hitzacker’s social mix is unusually diverse for the country’s most sparsely populated region: many middle-class urbanites who protested against a nuclear waste disposal site in nearby Gorleben in the 1970s later retired here among farmers and older landed gentry. Half-timbered buildings on the town square house an organic greengrocer, a homeopathic therapist and a shop selling ceramic flower vases that cyclists can attach to their handle bars.

Gerhard Harder, a former teacher from Hamburg, says that during the 2015 refugee crisis “everyone mucked in. Some older ladies were literally fighting over who could take in individual refugees.” The only regret is that many asylum seekers have since moved away to bigger cities.

Such views are harder to find in Dömitz, which used to be the biggest port between Hamburg and Magdeburg.

The mayor, Helmut Bode, a CDU member and part-time driving instructor, says the East German state actively discouraged the social mix that marks out Hitzacker. “The SED [East Germany’s governing party] had no interesting in making the border zones attractive to live in. The last thing it wanted was to have intelligent or creative people living so close to the west.”

Economic restructuring after 1989 left many of the town’s buildings in the hands of owners who lived elsewhere and were reluctant to invest in their maintenance. One of the two factories closed down; the other downsized. In the last three decades, Dömitz’s population has fallen by a third. A large shopping centre in the heart of the town lies empty and the museum has had to close earlier this year due to disrepair.

In 2015, Dömitz took in 30 refugees. “Some of them were very educated too,” says Bode. “But in the end they moved on because they couldn’t find any work.”



Quick guide How does the German election system work? Show Hide The first vote Germany’s recently amended electoral system, combining direct and proportional representation, is fiendishly complicated. Its 61.5 million voters get two votes on a single ballot paper: the first for a local representative, the second for a party. Roughly half the Bundestag’s seats are guaranteed to go to the 299 representatives of the country’s electoral districts, each chosen by their constituents with their Erststimme, or first vote, in a straight first-past-the-post contest. The second vote The rest are allocated according to the national vote share won by every party that clears a 5% threshold in the second vote, or Zweitstimme – which is also used to determine the overall number of seats each party winds up with: if a party scores 25% of the national vote, it must get 25% of the seats. Sometimes parties return more Erststimme representatives than they are entitled to, according to the Zweitstimme. So to compensate, the other parties get extra seats – which means the Bundestag, theoretically made up of 598 representatives, could expand to as many as 800 (it currently has 631). Who elects the chancellor? Once a governing coalition has been formed, which can take up to a month, Germany’s president (a largely ceremonial role) nominates the chancellor – usually the leader of the largest party – who is confirmed by parliament in a secret ballot.

Yet economics only goes some way to explaining the new cultural divide. Die Linke dedicates three full pages of its election manifesto (pdf) to how it would bring about “equal living standards in east and west”. Meanwhile the AfD, which threatens to usurp it, calls for abolishing inheritance tax, one of the mechanisms for bridging the wealth gap (pdf) between east and west.

Members of the party’s eastern faction tend to emphasise a period in which the east used to dictate terms to the Germany of the Rhine. Thuringia’s leader, Björn Höcke, has called for a revival of “Prussian values”, while the party’s joint election candidate Alexander Gauland has suggested that Germany’s policy towards Russia should be inspired by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian statesman and first chancellor of Germany, who was born on the banks of the Elbe.

André Poggenburg, who heads up the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, calls for a centralised education system focused on “classic Prussian virtues such as straightforwardness, a sense for justice, honesty, discipline, punctuality, orderliness, hard work and dutifulness”. He told the Guardian: “Let me make this clear: the AfD doesn’t want a revolution, but we want a thorough reform to make Germany more suitable to the mentality of the east and the impulses that are set here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest CDU and AfD federal election campaign posters. Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Opposition to such ideas, Poggenburg says, have to do with “the strong leftwing movement,” which “want to prevent anything that unifies and strengthens Germany”.

Asked what economic policies his party offers to bridge the divide between east and west, Poggenburg proposed that money currently invested in what he considers “unnecessary projects”, such as integration courses for asylum seekers, should instead be used to fund a new apprenticeship scheme for medium-sized businesses.

For Merkel – who was born on the Elbe but in Hamburg, the old west – one of the biggest domestic challenges in her fourth term will be to win back the trust of eastern Germans alienated by how she steered the country through the refugee crisis, including those in her own party. Haseloff, like Merkel a former scientist raised in the east, and once regarded as one of her close allies, has a line on immigration which is not always easy to distinguish from that of the AfD.

“If we care about preserving Europe’s inner coherence, then we need to find a solution to the migration problem that guarantees a certain cultural homogeneity and doesn’t overstrain the native population,” he says.

“And above all we need patience. The Bible says: God visits the iniquities of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation. Europe and Germany will need until the end of this century to eliminate the last vestiges of the old iron curtain.”

• This article was amended on 8 September 2017 to add references to James Hawes book which were lost in initial editing.

