Russia divide resurfaces as AfD leads in Saxony-Anhalt

By Kirsti Knolle

NAUMBURG, Germany, Sept. 2 (Reuters) - For Rainer Huppenbauer, as for ‌many in eastern Germany, decades ​of living with Soviet ​troops led to a familiarity that has shaped their attitudes to a fault line that has divided German politics since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A wine merchant in the picturesque town of Naumburg, Huppenbauer says the experience had left many in the regions that made up the former communist German Democratic Republic with a feeling ‌that Russia was not their natural enemy.

"Citizens in the GDR learned to live with the Russians. Because that is better than fighting with them," ⁠he says. "Not because they are pro-Russian, they simply don't want a politics that tells them every day how dangerous the Russians are."

With the approach of regional elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, the divide in attitudes towards Russia, ‌which the government in Berlin has accused of being ‌responsible for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport, carrying out espionage and repeated undercover attacks on infrastructure, has again surfaced as a voting issue.

Opinion polls suggest the far-right AfD, an anti-immigrant party with strong support in the east that other parties accuse of being close to Moscow, could win power for the first time at state level.

The party has repeatedly ​called for an end to German support for Ukraine and a resumption of the energy agreements with Moscow that provided Germany with cheap oil and gas until supplies were abruptly shut off in 2022, when Russian troops attacked Kyiv.

Its programme calls for Russian language teaching to be expanded in schools and underlines the strong interest in "maintaining good relations with Russia, both economically ⁠and culturally."

"The current anti-Russian policy of the established parties, on the other hand, is not in Germany's interests," it says.

For Chancellor Friedrich Merz's coalition of conservatives and centre-left Social Democrats, such talk underlines accusations that an AfD-led government would favour Russian President Vladimir ​Putin, whom they accuse of waging a form of hybrid warfare against Germany.

Last year, the freshly sworn-in government ended decades of fiscal discipline to free up hundreds of billions of euros to rebuild Germany's armed forces in response to a perceived threat from Moscow.

FAMILIAR WORLD

In Naumburg, for decades ​tanks rattled over cobbled streets, Russian-speaking officers appeared in restaurants, and ordinary soldiers lived behind barracks walls.

Silke ‌Satjukow, a professor of modern history at Halle-Wittenberg University, says the AfD's appeal in parts of eastern Germany lies in a familiar world people in the West never shared. "From the cradle to the grave, every child in the German Democratic Republic heard that the Soviet Union was 'the Friend'."

"Roughly as many Russian ⁠soldiers lived here as the local population. That means, around 30,000 soldiers," says Naumburg Mayor Armin Mueller, a member of Merz's CDU party.

He arrived in Naumburg as a young town planner shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of many western German professionals who headed east, drawn by the career opportunities that came with having skills the east lacked.

LOST JOBS — LOST IDENTITY?

Stefan Zimmerer, a Naumburg native born in 1967, fled to ⁠the West German embassy in Prague in autumn 1989. He returned months after the wall fell. Later he watched western Germans arrive to run institutions and companies in his home town while East Germans lost their jobs.

Zimmerer ​said many East Germans are sick of being labelled as Putin's friends, Nazis, or ungrateful AfD voters just because they feel that national politics has turned a blind eye to local problems. "You immediately get put into a box, people don't talk to each other anymore, and people don't even dare to bring up the problem anymore."

The memory of the collapsed East German economy also still looms: At the end of 1989, around ‌9.8 million of the GDR's population of 16 million had a job. Ten years later the number had been cut in half.

In Saxony-Anhalt, unemployment peaked at 22% in 2003. Today, it stands at 8%. More than 30 years after reunification, people in the East have a quarter of ‌the wealth of West Germans, the 2026 Competitiveness Report East Germany shows.

Amid the current crises many East Germans do not trust the government in Berlin to protect the degree of prosperity they fought hard to build. They ⁠prefer detente with Russia, hoping to get back the cheap energy that helped ‌them reach the standard of living they have now.

"Russia is ​in their minds, and the thinking goes: let's keep them close to us, do business with them, buy their oil and gas and everything will remain as it was (before the Russian invasion of Ukraine)," says wine merchant Huppenbauer. "And those who promise them that are the ones who get elected."

(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle; ‌Editing by Sharon Singleton)

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