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Reunification, 16 Years On

Still Lagging in the East

Germany's annual report on the state of its reunification has good news and bad news: Overall the economy has grown, but in the east it has shrunk . It could take decades before the "new federal states" catch up.

According to the new report on German reunification, unemployment fell and GDP increased by 1 percent for the nation in 2005. In the east German states, however, GDP declined by 0.1 percent. Wolfgang Tiefensee, the federal minister who presented the report to the German parliament on Wednesday, warned that the economic gap between the former east and west has begun to widen again.

Current statistics show that Germany has 134,000 more jobs now than it had last year and unemployment has dropped to 10.1 percent. While that's good news for the country as a whole, very few of the new jobs are in Germany's eastern states, where both general discontent and the influence of neo-Nazism have been on the rise.

Reunification has hardly been a quick fix for the former East Germany's economic woes. After 1990, the region's antiquated factories were bought for bargain prices by western companies, which then gradually closed them down, decimating industry and sapping the region of jobs. Unemployment now stands at an average of 18.7 percent in eastern states, double the average in the west (9.9 percent).

The reunification report shows that industry in the east has rebounded at a healthy rate of almost 10 percent per year, although that hasn't kept young people from moving west in search of work. And it hasn't prevented some regions, like the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania did on September 17, from voting a small fraction of neo-Nazi politicians into regional legislatures.

Reunification ended Germany's "post-war period" on October 3, 1990, by folding the old East Germany into the western Federal Republic. It was supposed to turn Germany into an economic powerhouse, but recovery has been slower than expected. Tiefensee estimated on Wednesday that it could take another "15 or 20 years until eastern Germany comes into its own as a self-sustaining economic power."

msm/spiegel/tageszeitung