It's my understanding there were plenty of USSR nostalgics in the east given how long it took for the free market to "trickle down" and the east to catch up economically. They never did catch up all the way anyway.

Today the areas that were previous controlled by East Germany overwhelmingly vote for right wing parties though.

I believe the AfD political party in Germany won significant support in those areas of Germany that were once behind the Iron Curtain.

Yes, they won control of an entire state and almost won another.

People vote far right because they're fed up with the status quo, and perceive the far right can't be that much worse when everything is already so bad. Politicians who are not far right would do well to take this into account in their politics. Sadly, they don't, and history repeats.

I don't think that people are like... against unification in principle, but if you are looking at it from the perspective of the State.... lots of pain and money, and at least in the German experience there was plenty of decent state enterprises for West Germany to (glibly) pillage from. People will handwave about North Korean resources, but even those are more or less accessible via China.

And on top of that at the end of the day Germany now has this bloc that votes "the wrong way" in all of its elections. Glib analysis though.

The German split was resolved 35 years ago and is still visible. How much time would a reunified Korea take to equalize itself? If you're a person who cares only about the economics of it all, how long do you think it would take for the payoff of unification to occur? Just seems quite long.

Would you consider that half of the USA also votes the wrong way too? And the UK? London people tend to think the rest of the country votes wrong as well. There is a divide in most countries, I think Germany is not that different, except for the fact that it actually was split up before!