ANATOLI CALUTCOV, who was born in the Soviet Union, slotted right in when he moved to Dresden 20 years ago. Visiting western parts of Germany always felt a bit strange, he says, but Dresden was like home—perhaps because it used to sit in the communist East German republic (GDR). Business is still brisk in Kalinka, the Russian food shop he runs, even if these days his Russian customers have been largely replaced by Ukrainian refugees.
Saxony, the east German state of which Dresden is the capital, holds an election on September 1st. Although Mr Calutcov is impressed by Michael Kretschmer, Saxony’s conservative premier, he will opt for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (bsw), a new party named for its founder, a charismatic MP and former communist. The bsw, an offshoot from a hard-left party, blends leftist economics with conservative positions on culture. Crucially for Saxony—as well as Thuringia and Brandenburg, two eastern states that also vote next month—the bsw has a doveish line on Russia that, when Ms Wagenknecht turns on the demagogy, can be hard to distinguish from Kremlin propaganda. (Russian media celebrate her as a hard-nosed teller of truth to power.)
As campaigning hots up, Ms Wagenknecht is making the political weather. The bsw is polling in double figures in the three voting states. The hard-right Alternative for Germany—another pro-Russia party—could come first in all three. But because it is shunned by every other party, the BSW has a good chance of entering government in Saxony and elsewhere. She is already laying down conditions for potential coalition partners: they must echo her call for negotiations to end the Ukraine war, and reject the federal government’s recent agreement to station American missiles in Germany from 2026.
Ms Wagenknecht is a “black box”, a sceptical Mr Kretschmer tells The Economist from the Dresden state chancellery. But such is her party’s momentum that he has begun to emphasise his own (long-held) “pro-diplomacy” positions, thereby irritating his pro-Ukraine Christian Democrat colleagues. Mr Kretschmer says Germany should lean on China and India to bring Russia to the negotiating table. But he also says Germany should cut military aid to Ukraine. “Peace can’t be reached on the battlefield, only with diplomacy,” he says. “We must end the killing.” Many observers expect him to form an unholy alliance with the bsw after the election.
Ms Wagenknecht calls the elections a “vote on war and peace”. In fact they are about education, housing and policing; state politicians have no foreign-policy powers. But the Ukraine war has come to stand for something else in parts of the east, says Jan Claas Behrends, a history professor at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt on the Oder. He sees scepticism towards Ukraine as a legacy of East German “peace propaganda” blended with stick-it-to-the-elites defiance and anti-Americanism. Such claims do not necessarily trouble the insurgents. “If people in the east who share our views are told that everyone who thinks like that is a Kremlin asset, they recall propaganda they heard in the gdr,” says Fabio de Masi, a bsw mep.
These views are far from uniform across the east. But polls there consistently find less support for Ukraine and warmer feelings for Russia. Parties that, to varying degrees, oppose Germany’s backing for Ukraine command close to, or more than, half the vote in the states voting in September. Meanwhile the Greens, the staunchest opponents of Mr Putin’s war, risk ejection from all three state parliaments.
For the BSW to enter government in Saxony or elsewhere would not directly undermine Germany’s solid support for Ukraine. But, says Sarah Pagung, a Russia analyst at the Körber Foundation in Berlin, it could strengthen the hand of those in the ruling Social Democrats who are uncomfortable with Germany’s stance on the war. That in turn might influence the party’s position in next year’s federal election. Perhaps more important, next month’s votes could illustrate something that is troubling politicians across Germany. Namely that 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eastern and western Germany appear if anything to be growing apart. ■
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