Social devastation and anti-immigrant demagoguery

Is it possible to understand the outcome of the elections without looking at the social reality in eastern Germany?

After the people and the workers imposed German reunification in 1989, the “holy alliance” of Helmut Kohl’s government (CDU) with the “socialist’ leaders” of the SPD and the former bureaucrats of the East, converted to the “market economy”, went on a rampage against social achievements. The body set up to privatise, the Treuhand, wreaked havoc. The small town of Sömmerda in Thuringia, for example, had a population of 25,000 at the time (less than 20,000 today). The Robotron factory (electronic components) employed 15,000 workers, and all the town’s social institutions were linked to it, from kindergartens to swimming pools to the Palace of Culture. The workers considered all this to be their “second salary”, convinced that the company belonged to them. In June 1990, everything was destroyed by the Treuhand. Thrown out of a job, some of the workers had to accept temporary works

work and underpaid odd jobs, while many young people left the region. Even today, in the Länder of Saxony and Thuringia, the employers have benefited from derogations from collective bargaining agreements. In Saxony, only 17% of companies and 42% of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. And even these have lower wages than in the West.

As for anti-immigrant demagoguery, all the parties have exploited the murder of three passers-by in Solingen on 23 August by an individual claiming to be a member of Daech. They raged against the right of asylum and the reception of immigrants. This is clearly the case with the AfD, which has made anti-immigrant demagoguery its trademark and is in favour of the mass expulsion of refugees. The AfD is a bourgeois party, campaigning for lower corporate taxation and tighter restrictions on the right to strike.

But the AfD has been listened to by the federal government. Two days before the elections, the SPD Minister of the Interior had twenty-eight Afghan refugees who had been refused asylum deported, to great publicity, and had them flown to the Taliban regime in Kabul.

Anti-immigrant demagoguery is also part of the programme of Sahra Wagenknecht, former chairwoman of the Die Linke parliamentary group, which she left to found, in 2024, a populist grouping in her own name, BSW (15.8% of the vote in Thuringia, 11.8% in Saxony), which claims to “limit immigration”, “abolish aid’ for refugees, etc.

In so doing, the far right and the Scholz and Wagenknecht governments are deliberately helping to divide the working class.