Twenty More Years

The government warned that the presence of right-wing extremist parties was growing in eastern Germany's regional parliaments and could have implications for the economy.

"Such tendencies are capable of negatively influencing the further development of the new [German] states," wrote Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee in the annual report on eastern German development, which he presented on Wednesday, Sept. 19, in Berlin.

The report said extreme right-wing parties had received mandates in regional parliaments as a result of a lack of democratic convictions and extreme right-wing beliefs which stemmed from a lack of democratic experience and not adequately facing up to German history.

Extreme right-wing parties are represented in the state legislatures of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, which are all in Germany's east, as well as in Bremen, in western Germany.

"It is, however, clear to the majority of the people in eastern Germany that the new states can only successfully pursue the pertinent economic and social route as a cosmopolitan and tolerant region," the report said.

Tiefensee, whose mandate includes eastern German development, called for more social cohesion, stressing the need for a lively society. "This is... important in order to deprive anti-democratic, radical right-wing and xenophobic tendencies of their breeding ground," he said.

No end in sight to subsidies

Eastern Germany's economy still can't survive without government aid, and it will continue to be aid-dependant for years, the minister explained.

"I think we will still have to calculate in categories of ten to 15, 20 years," he told public TV channel ARD on Wednesday.

But things are gradually improving. Tiefensee said the region's economy grew last year by 3 percent, the highest growth rate since the mid-1990s. During the same time, western Germany's economy grew by 2.7 percent, he said.

Still, unemployment in the East, at an average of 14.7 percent, was twice as high as in the country's West, Tiefensee said. However, the number of those without jobs in eastern Germany dropped in 2006 compared to the previous year by 134,000 to 1.48 million.

The opposition Green party was critical of Tiefensee's comments. "At this speed, in 100 years we will have equal standards of living in East and West," said parliamentarian Peter Hettlich.