Germany’s State Elections Are Likely to Reveal a Still-Divided Country

Anna Wenske, 69, worked for decades at the national theater of East Germany, where she was born and still lives. “After the reunification, everything went kaput,” she said. She lost her job and her savings; it took her years of part-time work to reach a kind of equilibrium.

Now she resents what she considers the easy path offered to refugees while Germans suffer.

“Too many people exist on this planet and everyone wants to come to us,” she said in a sunny Weimar, “and we tell everyone welcome and we have nothing left for ourselves.” When it comes to Ukraine, she said, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia lied when he said he would not invade, “but I don’t trust the United States any more than Russia.”

When her state, Thuringia, holds elections on Sunday, she says she will probably support the Alternative for Germany party. The radical right ethnonationalist party, known as the AfD, plays with Nazi-era language and its state branch has been classified by domestic intelligence as right-wing extremist.

But she is also tempted by a newer party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, named for the former Communist who founded and leads it. Though the party abhors Nazism and supports the Constitution, it holds many of the same views as the AfD. “When I listen to Sahra, somehow she touches me,” Ms. Wenske said.

Germany is facing three critical state elections — Saxony also votes Sunday and Brandenburg on Sept. 22 — all in the former East Germany, where polls show such grievances are pushing many voters to the extremes, whether left or right. The expected results are already causing much hand-wringing in Berlin about the future of German democracy and the country’s failure to integrate east and west even 33 years after reunification.