Survey
On good terms with Russia? Opinions differ
People in front of the closed Red Square with the Kremlin Wall and Spasskaya Tower in the background. photo
© Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/dpa
Should the federal government, for whatever reason, be on good terms with Russia? Every second German says no to this. A clear majority sees a threat in Russia today.
When it comes to proper handling Russia is going, the opinions of Germans in East and West differ. This also applies to looking back at the GDR.
In a representative survey conducted by the YouGov opinion research institute on behalf of the German Press Agency, 37 percent of those questioned agreed with the statement that “Russia is a country with which the federal government should be on good terms”. Every second participant in the survey expressed their negative opinion. However, approval was significantly higher among people in the eastern federal states than among those entitled to vote in the territory of the old Federal Republic.
However, the fact that more people in the East are calling for a cautious approach to dealings with Russia should not necessarily be understood as approval of the course taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched a war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. A look at the results of the survey shows that concerns also play a role here. According to a survey, there are more people in the area of the former GDR who see Russia as a threat to Germany than people who don’t see it that way.
According to YouGov, the largest proportion of AfD voters think that the federal government should be on good terms with Russia. This is followed – albeit at a great distance – by voters who checked the Left Party or the FDP in the last federal election. The proportion is even lower among the voters of the other parties represented in the Bundestag.
Mostly seen as a threat
Nationwide, 63 percent of those eligible to vote see Russia as a threat to Germany. 30 percent of Germans tend to agree or disagree with this statement. Only eight percent said they were undecided or gave no information.
Only 28 percent of Germans see Russia as a “potential partner” for Germany. 62 percent of Germans reject this assessment. Ten percent of the participants in the YouGov survey did not provide any information or did not dare to make an assessment. The agreement with this statement is significantly higher in the east than in the west.
The Soviet Union, whose center of power was Russia, played a formative role in the GDR. As part of the Eastern bloc, the GDR was economically, politically and culturally dependent on its “big brother” for decades.
According to a survey, almost every second person in the east is of the opinion that the political system of the GDR had more advantages for the professional life of its citizens compared to today’s Federal Republic. The proportion of those who believe that the disadvantages outweigh the disadvantages in the professional context is significantly lower. However, the results of the survey are only representative of adult Germans as a whole; they only reflect a trend for people in the east and west.
Different perspectives
In the West, where many only knew the reality of life in the GDR from reports and occasional visits to relatives, just under one in three believes that the GDR system had more professional advantages than disadvantages for the citizens of the socialist “workers’ and farmers’ state”.
As far as private life is concerned, which among other things was characterized by the lack of freedom to travel, the view of the GDR in the east is somewhat more positive than in the west. However, looking back at the GDR regime, which was swept away by the Peaceful Revolution in 1989, more people in both the West and the East see disadvantages for private life than advantages. Both in private and in professional life, the disadvantages of the defunct state carry somewhat less weight from the point of view of the voters of the AfD and the Left Party than from the point of view of the voters of other parties.
Former Federal President Joachim Gauck said last week on the ZDF program “Markus Lanz” that democracy in the West has allowed people to be individuals in free self-determination and, above all, to train personal responsibility – from school on. Gauck, who hails from Rostock, added: “Exactly the opposite is demanded in a dictatorship. Obedience and conformity like in the days of the princes will bring you to the top.”