Erfurt (dpa/th) – According to a sociologist, many people in Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt have developed a right-wing populist mentality that will remain independent of AfD election successes. The academic Raj Kollmorgen said on Tuesday at a conference in Erfurt entitled “Right East?!”
At the latest since the Middle Ages there have been historical developments in what is now the territory of these three federal states that have contributed to the development of this mentality. Kollmorgen is a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Zittau-Görlitz University of Applied Sciences. One of his research focuses is post-socialist transformations.
Kollmorgen said that a particularly long-term experience of people in the three central German states was that the corresponding areas had been fought over for centuries. This has led to the exaggeration of one’s own identity, “because one has repeatedly seen oneself threatened by foreign rule”. The corresponding experiences were passed on within families over generations – with the result that right-wing populist thinkers still put their own identity above that of other people.
Above all, these people took with them the experience from the GDR that only protests on the street lead to changes. The AfD plays on exactly “this keyboard”.
According to Kollmorgen, around 20 to 30 percent of East Germans have now developed a right-wing populist mentality. “So we’re talking about a significant part of the East German population,” he said. Only this made the electoral successes of the AfD possible in the East. It is obvious that this party is more firmly rooted in the East, and above all in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, than in West Germany.
The conference was jointly organized by the Thuringian State Center for Civic Education and the democracy advisors from Mobit. According to a Mobit spokesman, 100 participants came from all over Germany.
