Three and a half decades after reunification, a line runs through Germany where the Iron Curtain once stood. Instead of barbed wires and dogs, that line now divides Germans by measures like income and unemployment — and increasingly by the willingness to vote for extremist parties.

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.

“One important aspect of this is that many East Germans have never really connected emotionally or mentally with West German democracy,” said Benjamin Höhne, a political scientist who studies eastern Germany.

On top of that, many of the metrics where eastern Germany still lags behind the western part are the very factors that make voters more likely to vote for the far right, Mr. Höhne said. The AfD also has close links to Moscow.

On Sunday, only 42 percent of Germans in the east voted for traditional West German parties, including the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, which look likely to form a governing coalition.

The rest voted either for the AfD, Die Linke, which itself is a successor of the old Socialist Party that ran the East for nearly four decades, and a small splinter party run by a former Communist. [Continue reading…]