POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 77
mans did not join political organizations such as the parties, unions, or
NGOs. Their experiences in the GDR, but also the general impression
that these groups were dominated by West Germans, undoubtedly played
a role in this reticence to become involved. Whereas the CDU and the
FDP could build upon the crumbling membership base of the bloc parties
at least, the SPD and the Greens were hardly able to build up a base of
support outside urban areas in the East. Those supporters who had been
the backbone of the protest movement, most of whom were highly active
in Bündnis 90, still lacked infl uence, despite the fact that the merger with
the West German Greens had been touted as exemplary for having taken
place “on equal footing.”^129 Within the political landscape, they actually
reverted to a role similar to the one that they had held before 1989 in the
GDR as critics of the PDS and guardians of the critical reappraisal of the
dictatorship. In conjunction with the West German political and journal-
istic establishment, they were at least able to adopt a strong historico-
political position that produced a canonized narrative of perpetrators and
victims in the GDR.
Yet, despite this seeming lack of political interest, the East Germans
submitted a signifi cantly higher number of petitions than the West Ger-
mans.^130 The strongly rooted tradition of making “submissions,” which
was a favored instrument for reporting local and individual grievances
in the 1980s, undoubtedly contributed to this penchant for petitions as a
form of political participation. In the 1990s, the number of petitions sub-
mitted yearly rose by almost twenty thousand. Voter participation among
East Germans, however, lagged behind that of the West. The diff erences
between East and West also remained pronounced in terms of voting
behavior and party attachment. The parties in the West could still rely on
their core constituencies in the 1990s, which largely remained loyal or
at most vacillated within the same political camp in major elections (i.e.,
between CDU and FDP, or SPD and Grüne). East German voters, by con-
trast, were more strongly swayed by which party subjectively promised
them the most benefi ts and therefore tended to switch between parties
more often. Voting preferences at the municipal and state level also re-
fl ected a tendency that favored strong, integrative “fathers of the nation”
who, in a certain respect, took up with the tradition of political dialog.
Former GDR citizens with church ties were disproportionately more suc-
cessful in winning over East German voters, as well as some experienced
West German “center” politicians. The looseness of these political ties
thus accounts for the great success of the CDU in East Germany in 1990
and 1994, as well as its electoral defeat in 1998.
The East and West German electorates also diff ered on a sociocultural
level. Whereas the CDU/CSU was most popular among voters with ties