I very much agree with you. The East of Europe has very recent memory of how not to run countries, the West is already forgetting those lessons and repeating past mistakes. For now the West is still ahead economically, but I suspect that this will not last indefinitely. You can pretty much draw a line through 'Helmstedt' (the site of the old autobahn border crossing between 'East' and 'West' Germany) and use that as the pivot point. On the left of that pivot the swing is steadily downwards whereas on the east of that up to the Russian border there is slow but fairly steady progress.
Of course the map is not the territory and you'd have to account for the situations further North and South with different pivot points but on the whole this seems to be how it is today.