Berlin (AFP)

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the contrast fades but remains, in all areas, real and beautiful between East and West Germany.

- Economy: the East still distanced -

"The situation in the East is much better than its reputation," Angela Merkel's government welcomed in late September when presenting the annual report on German unity.

Nevertheless, the GDP per capita of the five regions of the former East Germany still only represented 74.7% of the West German level in 2018. Since 2010, this gap has shrunk by 3.1 points, driven by a fabric of about 3,000 small and medium enterprises and the dynamism of Berlin, Leipzig or Dresden. And the former GDR left in 1990 from far away, with a bleeding from its industrial sector inherited communist collectivism.

The improvement does not compensate for the absence of large companies such as Volkswagen, Siemens or Bayer, whose headquarters are all to the west and employ tens of thousands of people.

No company in the Dax, the flagship index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, has its headquarters in the East.

The Länder of the former GDR also lag behind the western regions in terms of average wages: in 2018, an employee from the West earned on average 3,339 euros gross per month, against approximately 2,600 euros in the East , according to the Federal Employment Agency.

Productivity is also lower, reaching 82% of the West in the East.

- Employment: ditch about to be filled -

Accustomed to full state employment in the former GDR, the East Germans experienced in the 90s and 2000s the unemployment shock, with rates in some cities exceeding 30%.

But after peaking in 2005, unemployment has since declined significantly, in part because of declining population and an increase in part-time jobs (30.5% in the East, compared with 27.6% in 'Where is).

The unemployment rate in August 2019 was 4.8% in the West, against 6.4% in the East. And cities with the highest rate are now in the former West Germany, Gelsenkirchen (13.8 in April), Bremerhaven or Duisburg (12%).

The former GDR is also characterized by a slightly higher female employment rate than in the West (73.9% against 71.6%).

- disturbing demographic decline -

In a generally aging Germany, where the average age has increased from 40 in 1990 to 45 in 2018, the demographic situation in the former GDR remains problematic.

Since 1991, the population of the new regions has increased from 14.6 to 12.6 million, while in the West (including Berlin) it has increased from 65.3 to 69.6 million.

The dynamism of cities like Dresden, Iena or Leipzig, fails to mask the exodus and aging that hit these regions. The city centers offer the sad spectacle of shops and buildings for sale.

In some cities, such as Suhl (Thüringen) or Frankfurt (Brandenburg), the population has fallen by more than 30% in 30 years, with repercussions on public services and infrastructure.

The massive emigration of young adults to the west or abroad in the early 1990s led to a drop in the birth rate in the East, a phenomenon that will have repercussions for several decades, according to demographers.

The reception of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Germany since 2015 has not been enough to reverse the trend, especially since most of them have chosen the West.

- The East, stronghold of the extreme right -

Created in 2013, the extreme right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) achieves its highest scores in the East, where it now collects between 20 to 30% of the vote, against around 10% on average 'Where is.

In June, it took a united front of all the formations to prevent it from conquering in Görlitz its first important city.

The East, where the traditional parties and the ex-communist left are in decline, is also the cradle of the Islamophobic Pegida movement, which has gathered in recent years thousands of demonstrators every Monday in Dresden.

This situation is linked to the fact, according to political scientists, that many East Germans still feel they are "second-class citizens". According to a recent survey, 74% believe that "very big differences" persist between the two parts of the country.

© 2019 AFP