Old ties to Moscow are helping the AfD turn eastern Germany’s alienation into votes

The AfD is polling at 37% before Sunday’s election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, while the CDU is below 7% and could fail to enter the state parliament. The immediate contest is regional, but the Financial Times finds that its strongest explanatory thread runs through eastern Germany’s distinctive relationship with Russia.

Nearly two-thirds of voters in the state regard Russia as little or no threat. Older residents remember Soviet-era cultural exchange and travel; many younger voters inherited a story in which reunification brought factory closures, outward migration and decisions imposed from the west. The AfD connects those experiences to opposition to NATO, sanctions and German aid for Ukraine. This is not simply nostalgia: it is a political account of lost status, sharpened by current economic anxiety.

SPD premier Manuela Schwesig is trying to distance herself from her earlier support for Nord Stream 2 and present the election as a direct choice between herself and the AfD. That repositioning exposes the establishment’s difficulty. For years, mainstream politicians treated commercial ties with Moscow as pragmatic regional policy; the AfD can now present their retreat as proof that Berlin subordinates local interests to a western consensus.

The result will not show that every AfD voter is pro-Kremlin. Immigration, distrust of national institutions and regional inequality also matter. But the reporting explains why Russia is unusually effective political material in the east: it fuses foreign policy with unresolved arguments about whose history and losses count inside reunified Germany.