GERMANY: Some 15 years after they tore down the Berlin Wall, one in five Germans now wishes someone would rebuild it writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
One in four westerners and one in eight easterners wish the country had never been reunited, according to a representative survey in today's Stern magazine.
The revelation came as editors of Germany's leading satirical magazine Titanic founded a new political party with the aim of dividing the country once again.
"No one has any intention of erecting a wall - except us," said Titanic editor Martin Sonneborn, playing on the famous words of the East Berlin Politburo in August 1961, days before dividing the city in two.
The party's plan is to capitalise on voter anger towards the established parties stemming from tough economic reforms despite continued economic stagnation and an unemployment rate that remains fixed at 10.5 per cent, even twice that in some eastern regions.
The German gloom is reflected in the final report of a government commission which concluded that the rebuilding of the east had, until now, been a €1.25 trillion failure that is dragging down the west of the country.
The party plans to redivide the country, allowing western Germany to revive itself with the billions it would otherwise transfer to the east. The east could develop better by establishing itself as a special low-tax economic zone, the party says.
"No one should be shot on the wall. But the east and west would be better off if they were politically and economically separate," said Mr Sonneborn.
The party already has 400 members and is hoping to have at least 1,000 before it fields candidates in an upcoming series of state elections.
But what started as a PR gag began to look deadly serious as news of Stern's survey became public yesterday. It showed that only 27 per cent of easterners and 41 per cent of westerners were happy with the current political system in Germany.
The survey results suggest that a decade and a half of unification has done little to unite Germans.
Nearly a third of easterners were of the opinion that too little money had been invested in the east, while over a third of westerners thought the east had received too much money.
As Mr Sonneborn put it yesterday: "We only want to build a wall that's already standing in the heads of Germans, east and west."