East Germans are nostalgic for the "good life" they had under communism despite a propaganda campaign to discredit the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the widow of ex-GDR leader Erich Honecker says in a new video.
Margot Honecker, who has lived in Chile since 1992, is shown in the video celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the now defunct East Germany with former exiles who sought asylum in the GDR after the 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet.
The group sings a patriotic East German song before Honecker, standing in front of the hammer and sickle of the GDR flag, gives a short speech in German to her "comrades" sitting around a table.
"There is a huge amount of opposition in Germany right now to the GDR," she says. "There is no talk show, no film, no news programme that doesn't try to discredit the GDR."
"But it isn't working," she adds. "Fifty percent of east Germans say they have a worse life under capitalism, that they had a good life in the GDR. They can say what they want but people are thinking more and more about what they had in the German Democratic Republic."
Once reviled as the "purple witch" for her tinted hair and hardline stances, Margot Honecker served alongside her dictator husband as minister for education in the GDR and was hated and feared by many East Germans.
The video appears to have been recorded on October 7, the 60th anniversary of the GDR's founding and roughly a month before Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Honecker, 82, mentions the results of last month's German election, including the gains of the Left party, a new far-left grouping that includes former members of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED).
"There are leftist powers (in Germany). They are active and they are receiving more votes," she says. Honecker warns that chancellor Angela Merkel's new centre-right coalition of conservatives and Free Democrats (FDP) will hurt German workers, lead to rising unemployment and welfare cuts.
"People won't tolerate this. The signs are good. I am optimistic," she adds. The Honeckers fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges in 1991, the year after East and West Germany were unified, but were forced to leave when the Soviet Union fell.
Erich Honecker was charged in Germany with crimes committed during the Cold War, but was released in 1993 when he became sick with liver cancer. He lived briefly with his wife in Santiago before his death in 1994.
