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    'Revenge of the East'? How anger in the former GDR helped the AfD

    In eastern Germany, voters who chose the far-right party hark back to an era when locals were better off and there were no refugees
    by Philip Oltermann in Oppach Sep 28, 2017 4 minutes
    Peter Hampel, right, with other AFD supporters in the back room of his former petrol station in Oppach, Germany. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt for the Guardian

    Two days after a historic vote saw an overtly nationalist party enter the German parliament for the first time in more than five decades, a group of over-60s vent their grievances over lunchtime beers and cigarettes in the smoky back room of a dry petrol station on the border between the German state of Saxony and the Czech Republic.

    The German government is throwing cash at refugees “while native pensioners can’t afford to buy a new pair of glasses”, they complain. Putin is Europe’s “only guarantor of peace”, they argue, and Germany is still “under occupation” by America.

    A retired lorry driver with a handlebar moustache cites a joke he read in the tabloid Bild, which says that in the wake of , Angela Merkel should consider handing Saxony to the Czechs in exchange for some of their toxic waste. “Let’s have it,” he shouts. “We’ll become Sudeten Germans again.”

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