Putin’s next coup

BERLIN — Vladimir Putin may be smarting over Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region this month, but this weekend he’ll likely be celebrating territorial gains farther west — in Germany.
Russia-friendly parties across three eastern German states — Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia — are poised to score substantial gains in regional elections in September, two of which are set for Sunday. 
The pro-Russian Alternative for Germany (AfD) has a strong chance of finishing first in all three states, and the recently formed leftist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) surging, Moscow stands to reestablish a strong foothold across a broad swathe of the former East Germany, a region it dominated for decades during the Cold War.
If the forecasts are borne out at the ballot box, the results are bound to stir deep anxiety across Germany. An extremist landslide would both expose the degree to which the efforts of Germany’s political establishment to repair the country’s East-West divide have failed and shake Berlin’s already-wobbly tripartite coalition to its core. 
A sweep would also mark a personal victory for Putin: The Russian leader cut his teeth as a KGB spy in the 1980s in Dresden, an experience that left him with an enduring fascination for all things German. A biographer even once dubbed him “the German in the Kremlin.”
All told, the Moscow-friendly parties, which straddle the far right and left of the political spectrum, are expected to capture at least 50 percent of the vote across the regions, according to the latest polls. In one state, Thuringia, the parties are forecast to fetch as much as 65 percent, with the AfD finishing first at about 30 percent.
Though not all of the parties are as overtly pro-Russian as the AfD, they share in common two narratives pushed by far right: that NATO shares blame for the war in Ukraine and that a peaceful solution would have been possible if only the West were serious about diplomacy.  
Germany’s mainstream governing parties at the national level — the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Free Democrats (FDP) — have been relegated to also-ran status, with polls forecasting a cumulative result of about 12 percent in Saxony and Thuringia, and 27 percent in Brandenburg. Even when including Germany’s largest centrist force, the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), the combined polling of the mainstream parties doesn’t exceed 50 percent.
That’s an extraordinary decline for the centrist parties that have shaped eastern Germany’s political life since reunification. In the early 1990s, West German establishment forces effectively colonized the East, dispatching their own political veterans to run Saxony and other states. Even today, more than 40 percent of the top-tier political class in Germany’s eastern states hail from the West.
The rapid rise of the AfD and other populist parties in the East suggests that approach has backfired. Both the Greens and the FDP, the smallest of the three parties in Germany’s national coalition, face the possibility of being shut out of all three state parliaments, according to the recent polling. To gain seats, parties have to garner at least five percent of the vote. 
“The democratic parties — the SPD, CDU and even the Greens — never really managed to establish themselves in the East in the same way they did in the West and that makes it a lot easier of course for a party like the AfD to slip in an take advantage of a more volatile electorate,” said Johannes Kieß, a sociologist at the University of Leipzig. 
Even though reunification fundamentally transformed the economy of the former East Germany, raising living standards to a level unfathomable under communism, resentment over the West’s de-facto takeover of the country remains palpable in many corners.  Since reunification, the region has lost 15 percent of its population as many former East Germans, in particular women, moved west. 
Frustration over such developments is often amplified by national politicians who treat the region, which is today only one-fifth the size of the former West Germany in terms of population, as “the other.” 
“One has to explain things a bit more in the East than in the West, but I’m happy to do so and like going there,” CDU leader Friedrich Merz told an interviewer in May, referring to his party’s hard stance on Russia.
At the time, Merz said he was aiming for first place in all three states, but that’s now likely out of reach. Even in Saxony, where the CDU appears to be leading by a thin margin, the AfD is ahead in some recent polls. 
Though Merz’s party remains competitive there, it may only have managed to do so because the CDU state premier, Michael Kretschmer, opposes spending billions on military aid for Ukraine and has made advocating for peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv a centerpiece of his campaign. 
Kretschmer also paid a visit to Moscow in 2021, inviting Putin to visit Dresden, where the Russian leader was stationed when the Berlin Wall fell.
“It would be a great honor, your excellency, to greet you in Saxony,” Kretschmer told Putin at the time.
That even a top mainstream German conservative from the East was willing to kowtow to Putin underscores the degree to which Russian narratives have taken hold in the region. Even if most Germans in the East have no illusions about Putin, the population has yet to overcome decades of anti-Western propaganda. For many, Moscow is no worse than Washington, which populist politicians accuse of working behind the scenes to pursue its own objectives in Ukraine.
“The USA is a superpower in decline that is fighting to preserve its global hegemony,” Sahra Wagenknecht, the leftist firebrand who leads the eponymous BSW said last month. 
For the most part, leftist politicians in the East are concentrated in the BSW and the Left party, the successor to the former East German communist party, and are less pro-Putin than they are pro-peace. 
“We need a European peace order that includes Russia,” Bodo Ramelow, the current premier of Thuringia and one of the more critical voices towards Russia in the Left party, said this month. “All of the participating countries should agree on a non-aggression pact and establish a community of defense.”
Critics dismiss such calls from the left as naïve. Pushing for the West to end arms shipments while telling Ukraine to suspend its fight and cede territory ultimately plays into Moscow’s hands and legitimizes its invasion of Ukraine, they say.
The bigger threat, however, remains the AfD, which would trigger a political earthquake that would reverberate well beyond Germany’s borders if the party wins in all three states, a prospect some say is more likely following last week’s knife attack in Solingen allegedly perpetrated by Syrian man with suspected links to the Islamic State. 
The AfD’s links to Moscow are well documented. Ahead of the European election in June, German authorities exposed what they allege was a Russian influence operation involving one the AfD’s lead candidates. Even so, the party finished second with 16 percent and performed particularly well in the East. 
Many senior AfD figures don’t hide their affinity for Putin’s authoritarian regime. 
Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia who many regard as the party’s spiritual godfather, has said that if he ever becomes German chancellor, his first trip would be to Moscow.   
Should that ever happen, which remains more than a long shot, it’s more likely Putin would visit him first. 
Before relations between Moscow and Berlin turned sour, Putin was a frequent visitor to Germany — including to his former hometown in the East.
“I’ll be honest, I come to Dresden with a special feeling,” he told an audience during a 2009 visit to the city to receive the Order of St. George, an award to honor prominent figures who “fight for good in the world.”
“This is without question one of the centers of European culture, a city rich in history with its own special charm,” Putin said. 
Nette Nöstlinger contributed reporting.