The state elections this September are already the “experimental field for angry citizens” that the Chancellor warned about. In Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, less so in Berlin, it is about a widespread feeling of having been left behind by the “West” - and the question of who better addresses this state of mind: the AfD with its preference for the GDR anthem or the respective government party with its appeals to an East German special consciousness.
Both the Schwerin Social Democrat Manuela Schwesig and the Magdeburg Christian Democrat Sven Schulze are sending the message that the special needs and concerns of East Germans are not being sufficiently taken into account by federal policy. On the Russia issue, Schulze has to contact cabaret artist Dieter Hallervorden, where Schwesig's past as a tricky Nord Stream supporter is enough.
And both together rail against the federal government's pension plans, which allegedly disadvantage the East. In a joint paper with his colleagues from Saxony and Thuringia, Schulze lists a few other reform points that supposedly only have the West in mind.
In doing so, they serve a mood that they also promote with such statements. According to a survey, 75 percent of East Germans believe that the dividing elements outweigh the differences between the parts of the country. That's more than there has been since 2004. This is what the Forsa Institute determined for the Federal Foundation for Reprocessing.
The strange thing about it is that frustration is rising at a moment when material differences are lower than ever. The “blooming landscapes” that Unity Chancellor Helmut Kohl once promised have become reality. It's just the mood that's fading.
This is especially true if you don't compare apples with pears - as is usual in the debate - but actually compare things. In other words: urban centers with urban centers, rural areas with rural areas. “In most East German regions there is no longer a production backlog,” writes Martin Gornig, research director for industrial policy at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). The urban-rural divide has replaced the east-west pattern.
And the fact that the proportion of sparsely populated areas is larger in the east is not solely due to reunification. Relatively few people have always lived in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg and the Altmark. Interestingly, the AfD poll numbers here are somewhat lower than in previously heavily industrialized areas in the south of the former GDR. This may have something to do with fewer experiences of loss.
The fact that the productivity gap in rural regions is particularly small compared to comparable western areas also has to do with a specific industry: in agriculture, most large farms from the GDR era have been preserved in a changed legal form; they are much more competitive than the small farms in southern Germany.
And productivity is the decisive factor in determining what wages can be paid. Both wage and productivity levels in the eastern federal states are now only slightly below the western value at 84 percent - a difference that primarily reflects the more rural structure. This is what the figures put together by the employer-related Institute of the German Economy (IW) say for the unification anniversary last year. This does not even include Berlin with a value of 95 percent, which incidentally applies to many statistics about the alleged disadvantage in the East. That's like counting the Free State of Bavaria as artificially poor by simply ignoring the economically strong Munich in statistical terms.
The gap is even smaller when it comes to the topic that triggered the recent East-West debate: pensions. Anyone who has paid in for more than 35 years receives an average of 1,936 euros in the West and 1,835 euros in the East. That's an impressive 95 percent. Due to the pay-as-you-go system, this difference between wages and pensions is ultimately offset by West-East transfers within social security. The fact that the pension level is so much higher than the wage level is explained historically by the earlier entry into working life and the higher female employment rate. And from the fact that until a few years ago, East German employees received more pension points per euro paid in.
This preference for the East was then abolished under pressure from East German politicians because the slogan “pension equalization” was so popular. In fact, pensioners in the eastern federal states received slightly lower retirement benefits until then. This supposed disadvantage was more than offset by the strong appreciation of contributions in the long term. In this respect, Schulze and colleagues complain about an alleged pension gap, which they partly brought about themselves.
In the current debate, these politicians are now pointing out that their compatriots have to live on the statutory pension, while retirees in the old Federal Republic have additional income. But that is only a gradual difference, not a fundamental one: According to a DIW study from 2017, 71 percent of the household income of people over 65 in the East came from statutory pensions, but in the West the same was 57 percent.
What's more: The Federal Statistical Office recently published new data according to which pensioner households in the East, including all income, have an average of 2,270 euros per month. In western countries it is 2350 euros, just slightly more. So Friedrich Merz was right when he told his party colleagues, perhaps somewhat undiplomatically: “There are also a number of insured people in the West who have no retirement provision other than the statutory pension insurance.”
And he added an interesting postscript: the end of early retirement is “particularly in the interest of the countries in the East, which have an even lower labor force than many countries in the West.” In fact, the average age in the eastern countries excluding Berlin is 47.3 years, significantly higher than the 42.4 years in West Germany or the 42.5 years in Berlin. Saxony-Anhalt, a federal state that is shrinking particularly quickly, has already lost 24.9 percent of its population between 1991 and 2024; according to DIW forecasts, this could be 46.9 percent by 2070, also calculated from 1991.
Demographics are also one of the main reasons for the lower economic output per capita, which in the eastern states was recently at 72 percent of the West German level, with Berlin at 79 percent. The gap in productivity and wages is simply explained by the lower proportion of employed people in the total population. Emigration is now a Europe-wide phenomenon in the peripheral regions - and a driver of right-wing populist electoral success everywhere. An unfriendly political and social climate in turn leads to further population losses.
One thing in particular sets the eastern German states apart from other affected regions in Europe: their comparatively very good public infrastructure. After every AfD election success, political observers recently focused on the number of closed hospitals, tax offices and courts. The impression that the state is withdrawing is not borne out by the statistics. The number of state employees per 1,000 inhabitants in Saxony and Thuringia is approximately at the level of North Rhine-Westphalia, and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania it is even higher than in any other country. Only Brandenburg is left behind because it sends its citizens to Berlin for many services.
In the euphoria of reunification and to promote structurally weak regions, roads were built that would actually be superfluous according to a strict cost-benefit calculation. On average, fewer than 10,000 cars a day drive on the eastern section of the Baltic Sea Motorway, just before the Polish border. This is a volume of traffic for which a district road is sufficient elsewhere. Such luxury motorways only exist in the Eifel, where the routes towards the Belgian border were never finished.
The digital infrastructure is not lagging behind the roads, on the contrary: according to data from the Federal Network Agency, fiber optic coverage is only slightly worse than in the West, and 5G availability is even better. However, the willingness to use such digital opportunities is significantly lower: according to the information from the IW study, only 52 percent of East German companies used artificial intelligence, while in the West it was 71 percent.
Despite individual theater closures in the 1990s, there can be no talk of a widespread “dismantling of culture”. Of the - depending on the definition - almost 80 theaters with a lavish opera section in Germany, around 30 are in the east of the country, including Berlin. Twice as many as would correspond to the population. The two largest German orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra with 185 positions and the Dresden Staatskapelle with 161 musicians, are based in Saxony. Despite a denser schedule, the Bavarian State Orchestra in Munich only has 143 members, the (West) Berlin Philharmonic has 128 members, although they do not have to do any opera work.
Overall, the five eastern German states still consume 8.8 percent more than they generate themselves, in absolute figures that's 47 billion euros - and that's already counting out the salaries that East Germans receive in West German jobs. This is money that flows from West to East via public budgets, through social systems or via private channels. Some of the problems complained about today in Germany as a whole arose historically from these transfers, for example in the social systems or in the infrastructure.
And it will continue if you believe the forecasts. According to the DIW's predictions, in 2070 Brandenburg will have the highest tax revenue per capita among the regional states in all of Germany, with western German states such as Lower Saxony and Saarland also expected to be among the worst performers.
Today, eastern Germany is one of the most prosperous regions on the continent. According to an overview by the market research institute Regio-Data, purchasing power per inhabitant remains just below the West German level, but is higher than in most regions of Europe, especially in the south and east. Even the economic boom in other post-socialist countries has not yet resulted in Poles or Czechs being able to afford as much on average as people from Magdeburg or Halle. Even if that doesn't seem to improve the mood of many voters.
