My home state is set to hand a breakthrough to the German far right. It’s a disaster decades in the making | Marcus Böick

A sense of abandonment could make Saxony-Anhalt the first state government to be solely led by the AfD.

But the party’s hollow promises will only make a dire situation worse It was in the summer of 2004 that I stopped understanding my own people.

I was standing on a sweltering market square in Aschersleben, the town where I was born, picturesquely situated on the northern edge of the Harz mountains.

A large crowd of angry people had gathered in front of a stage to protest about the welfare reforms (or, as many saw them, welfare cuts) introduced by the Social Democratic-Green coalition government under chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

They chanted “We are the people!”, waved handpainted placards and seemed utterly beside themselves.

I had gone to secondary school nearby, volunteered at the local hospital and interned at the local newspaper: I knew this place.

And yet I found myself bewildered.

What, exactly, did these deeply aggrieved people want – standing on a freshly renovated, almost idyllic market square? Weren’t things going reasonably well for them? Where did this burning resentment toward the west come from? Wasn’t the east-west divide supposed to be disappearing by now? Marcus Böick is assistant professor in modern German history at the University of Cambridge Continue reading...