German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a senior figure within the country’s Green Party, has called on politicians to increase their focus on the country’s rural areas in the face of elections coming up in several eastern German states next year. With voters set to head to the polls in the more sparsely populated states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg in 2024, all of which were part of the former communist East Germany, Baerbock said that the reputation of the established parties had steadily declined in Brandenburg. “More and more representatives from independent initiatives are sitt…