Sorry to play devil's advocate here, and I don't mind if I get a million downvotes, but the causes are well-understood and have been for a while. It's easy to dismiss AfD voters as a bunch of uneducated, disruptive rubes while failing to see how much employment in Eastern Germany is different from the one in the West. If you have a university degree, you'll up and leave first chance you get because wages are so much higher in the West. Else, you'll try to survive for decades on a string of one-year contract-low-skill-jobs somewhere out in the woods, as this is completely normalized in the East. The influence, even the very existence of labor unions and works committees is greatly diminished, too, compared to the West. Inflation and rent hikes hit just the same or worse, though. Towns and cities are getting depopulated big time, especially de-womanized. People in the East feel left behind by common-run big-city politicians, and AfD has been filling this gap very systematically and effectively.