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Depopulation Is Eastern Germany’s Curse

Depopulation Is Eastern Germany’s Curse

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Elections are coming up later this year in three eastern German states – most of the former German Democratic Republic. In all three, the combined popularity of the far left and the far right is greater than that of the current governing coalition. In Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin, the far-right Alternative for Germany is the most popular party.

One reason for that, Felix Roesel from the Ifo Institute for Economic Research suggested in a report on Wednesday, could be that Germany’s post-Communist eastern states haven’t been able to reverse the depopulation trend that began back in the 1950s. According to Roesel, the number of people in the country’s east (including former East Berlin, normally not counted in official statistics as part of the east) has sunk to the level of 1905, and in some rural regions to that of the mid-1800s. Roesel wrote this could be a rarely discussed root cause of east Germans’ growing dissatisfaction:

The population decline that has persisted since 1949 may have a greater impact on eastern Germans than previously assumed. The situation is further aggravated by recent disappointments about the longed-for transformation to democracy and a market economy after 1990, which has changed nothing about the drifting apart of East and West, quite the contrary. The powerful long-term trend may overshadow all short-term successes, such as the current easing of the labor market and the increase in incomes since 1990.

The German government, which regularly reports on how the country’s east-west division is healing, has stressed in recent years that the population outflow from the eastern states has largely stopped. In 2016, the east even attracted 1,000 people more than it lost. But the increase was mostly due to Berlin, its Brandenburg suburbs and, to a smaller extent, Saxony, another state with elections this year (the third is Thuringia).  And besides, it’s probably a better idea to look at the population dynamics the way Roesel does – not at the internal migration numbers but at the growing difference between east and west. According to him, the population of the western states has increased by 60 percent since before World War II, while that of the eastern ones has dropped by 15 percent. And the gap keeps increasing, in part because western Germany receives more immigrants; in the east, both the relative poverty and the popularity of anti-immigrant political forces scare them away.

The depopulation is, of course, in part an economic problem. But it’s also a psychological one. The east of Germany is older than the West – and getting older faster. Rural communities especially are less vibrant as a result, and there’s a sense of defeat that breeds dissatisfaction with the German government’s cohesion efforts. Even the big eastern cities, such as Dresden and even Leipzig, often hailed as the new Berlin in recent years, are more provincial and less exciting because of the poor demographics. According to Roesel, had they grown at the same rate as the population of western Germany, each of them would be twice as big as today, with a population of more than 1 million.

Eastern Germany, of course, is not the only region in Europe that’s suffering from such dismal demographics. Nine of the 28 European Union member states saw their population shrink in 2017, with Lithuania losing almost 14 people out of every thousand and Croatia 12 out of every thousand. Not all of the population losers are post-Communist: Greece, Portugal and Italy are also on the list. Not all of these countries have embraced extreme, populist politics to the same degree as eastern Germany – at least not yet. The effect of depopulation on voting preferences hasn’t attracted much academic interest, but if Roesel is right, the decimation of communities could be a difficult barrier to overcome in fighting populism in many parts of Europe.

As a former East German, Chancellor Angela Merkel certainly should have done more to bridge the population gap between east and west in her 13 years in power. She might only have herself to blame if her party, the Christian Democratic Union, does as badly in this year’s state elections as polls suggest today.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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