BAUTZEN (Germany): On the surface, Bautzen is a pretty east German city with carefully restored red-roofed buildings and winding streets where tourists enjoy ice cream at outdoor cafes on a hill above the river Spree.
But look beyond this picture-postcard image and many of Bautzen’s inhabitants are suffering the same disillusionment and despair that has made the east such a tough battleground for politicians seeking votes in Germany’s Sept. 18 election.
Sitting outside Bautzen’s labour office, Anja Hauke, 24, says she has been unemployed twice in recent years. She now works at a call centre but only until the end of the year.
“Things have become so bad, there’s no chance anything will improve,” she said. She had yet to decide how to vote.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats (SPD), the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Left Party, a new alliance including ex-communists, are locked in a three-way tie for votes in Germany’s east.
What happens here could be key — the east is a pivotal region that tipped the balance in Germany’s last four ballots.
But politicians will have to work hard for votes among people who feel they have been forgotten by the governing elite.
Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, unemployment in the east is twice as high as in the west, the population is shrinking and getting older and polls show voters have lost faith with Germany’s main political parties.
Almost 60 per cent of east Germans think their interests are being ignored by Berlin’s policymakers, a Forsa institute poll for Stern magazine showed earlier this month. Just under a third feel they are worse off now than they were under communism.
“If someone came along now like Hitler they would have a very, very good chance, although of course that’s also not the right way forward,” Hauke said.
Bautzen, about half-way between Saxony capital Dresden and the Polish border, is home to around 42,000 people, down from 52,000 in 1988.
It is the cultural capital of the Sorbs, a Slavic minority group, and the site of a notorious East German secret police jail during communism.
Despite widespread disillusionment with politicians, the city did get some benefits under previous governments. Some of the 1.2 trillion euros ($1.48 trillion) poured into the east since reunification was spent on refurbishing its buildings.—Reuters
