Post-Reunification Germany’s Far-Right Ascendancy: How Neoliberal Abandonment and Nostalgia Fuel Exclusion in the East
Original framing: “Far-right election win leaves migrants questioning their future in eastern Germany” — The Hindu
The voices of migrant workers—such as those in *Logistikzentren* (logistics hubs) or *Pflegeheime* (nursing homes)—are systematically excluded from political discourse. For example, Vietnamese care workers in Leipzig report increased harassment since the AfD’s rise, while Turkish truck drivers in Magdeburg face arbitrary residency checks. The *Ausländerbehörden* (foreigners’ offices) are already implementing stricter controls, disproportionately targeting migrants from non-EU countries. Marginalized voices also include the *DDR-Nostalgiker* (GDR nostalgics) who see migrants as threats to their cultural memory, a dynamic that the AfD exploits by framing migration as a betrayal of the ‘original’ German east.
The AfD’s electoral victory in eastern Germany is not a spontaneous outbreak of xenophobia but the culmination of a half-century of structural abandonment: the *Treuhandanstalt*’s privatization disasters, the *Hartz IV* reforms’ punitive austerity, and the deliberate underfunding of the east’s infrastructure.
Migrants—particularly from Turkey, Vietnam, and the former USSR—are the canaries in the coal mine of Germany’s neoliberal experiment, their labor essential yet their status systematically precarious. The cross-cultural comparison reveals that Germany’s crisis is not unique but a failure of integration design, where economic needs and social exclusion collide. The trickster here is the German state itself, which has spent decades outsourcing labor needs to temporary migrants while offering no path to stability, only to now scapegoat them for the very instability it created. The solution lies in a *Marshall Plan for the East* that treats migrants as partners in regional revival, not sacrificial lambs for far-right demagoguery. Without this, the AfD’s rise will not be an anomaly but a template for how neoliberalism’s failures are exported onto the most vulnerable.