In Former East Germany, the Hard-Right AfD Party Finds Most of Its Support

If East Germany were still its own country, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which has been linked to neo-Nazis and is being monitored by domestic intelligence, would have scored a convincing win in the elections on Sunday, with nearly one in three voters there casting ballots for it.

Only two of 48 voting districts outside of Berlin in the former East Germany were not won by the AfD. In a handful of districts in the east, the AfD got nearly 50 percent of the vote.

That division — and the sense that Germans still to some degree inhabit two separate worlds, east and west — has become a persistent feature of Germans’ voting habits. It is one that was manifest not only on Sunday but also when Germans voted in elections for the European Parliament last June.

The divide, analysts say, reflects not only a failure to fully integrate the east, but also its unique problems and culture, shaped by decades of Communist rule during the Cold War and close alignment with Moscow and the former Soviet bloc.