The two things have become inextricably linked, he said.

The AfD has both tapped into the East-West division and exacerbated it by actively styling itself as an Eastern identity party. “The East Rises Up!” reads one of its campaign posters. “Complete the revolution,” another urges, a reference to the 1989 protests that brought down Communism and ushered in democracy and capitalism.

“East German identity is part of the AfD’s identity,” said Norbert Kleinwächter, a national lawmaker for the AfD, who was campaigning in Forst one recent evening. “There are Westerners and Easterners — their experiences are very different.”

Such messaging plays well at a time when voters in the former East have started telling pollsters that they identify as “East German,” something few did even under Communism. Over 70 percent of West Germans simply feel “German,” a recent survey by the Allensbach institute showed. In the East, that was true of only 44 percent.

In Brandenburg and Saxony, the two states that vote this weekend, polls give the AfD up to 25 percent support. On Sunday, when voters elect a new regional legislature, the party could come first in one or both regions.

In Forst, a once prosperous textile hub on the Polish border that lost thousands of jobs and half its population after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AfD is already No. 1.