The East will weigh more heavily, potentially forcing Berlin into a new Ostpolitik and a different approach to both the military conflict in Ukraine and coexistence with Russia.

The elections to the European Parliament (EP) in Germany on 9 June not only polarised positions on the proxy war in Ukraine, with the victory of the hyper-atlanticist CDU/CSU on the one hand and the strong growth of anti-war forces around the AfD and BSW on the other, but also showed that the biggest political divide in the country is between East and West, i.e. between the former states of the GDR and the FRG.

Why, 34 years after the fall of the GDR, is this not only noticeable, but seems to be gaining in strength? Perhaps because the “reunification of Germany” was not really a reunification, but rather an annexation of the GDR into the structures of the Federal Republic of Germany. This was in line with Bonn’s plans for a “geopolitical compromise implicit in the Maastricht Treaty, whereby Europe gave Germany the green light for rapid reunification in exchange for the Europeanisation of the Deutsche Mark”. These are the words of former Italian Foreign Minister Gianni di Michelis, who led his country’s negotiations on the 1992 Treaty on European Union, which established the European Central Bank and the foundations of the single currency.

The Euro as an extended Deutsche Mark, with Washington’s approval

According to him, it was a kind of rebranding and adaptation of the German currency to the new scale of a Europe that would expand eastwards. “The real negotiations took place in absolute secrecy: German reunification would not have been possible without Europe’s consent,” he said. Thus, it took half a year to admit the GDR, with........

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