eastern Germany

So it's not just your traditional voter base for a right-wing party or an extreme right party that's gone for the AFD.

Another interesting feature which was reported on in a post-election analysis by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Institute, the Kass Institute that does a lot of research, was 83% of the voters who voted for the AFD reported feeling that Eastern Europe, or sorry, Eastern Germany, or citizens from Eastern Germany were still regarded as second-class citizens.

So you can see there's a bit of a center periphery dynamic going on there, as Lipset and Rokhan would say.

And in the broader context that Professor Tan was mentioning, we've of course seen a rise of the AFD for the last few or three elections at the federal level.

I mean, the CDU has suffered a historic collapse, you can say, while the AfD has achieved one of the strongest results ever recorded by a far-right party in post-war Germany.

So the message from the voters was unmistakable that large parts of Eastern Germany and maybe even for Western Germany no longer believe that the CDU under Merz has answers to their concerns.

So in this regard...

Yeah, there was a defeat by the CDU and it will have longer consequences than which go beyond Saxony-Anhalt.

Let's play a short clip from the documentary you filmed on the ground in Saxony-Anhalt just before the election.

[gentle music] We are looking at a classic piece of Ostalgie or nostalgia for the Ostdeutschland era.

It's basically a Soviet monument which says, "Proletarians of the world unite," uh, which of course is a very popular, uh, kind of communist slogan.

And it's pretty apt thing to see in this part of Germany.

And they must have been about 25.

And one of them was just shouting, Ostdeutschland, Ostdeutschland, East Germany, over and over again, which of course, for me, I mean, you're a bit younger than me, which is so great to sort of get a different generational perspective.

I'm a certain age.

And I was a bit like, you weren't there when there was East Germany.

And I, I still...

You still need to get over again, Paul, actually, and we'll go to the Ostdeutschland again.

We, we need to get over to the ost because, I mean, the atmospheres there are just insane, although a little bit hostile to say the least, to be honest with you.

But definitely we need to do...