This is bad.
I mean, third time’s the charm……. Right? 😳
Eh. Germany weren’t the colossal dickheads in WWI that they were in WWII. Frankly most of Europe had a part to play in sparking the first one.
WW1 was just a massive dick measuring contest.
A bunch of inbred royal fucks beefing over turf.
Which aptly describes basically every war in European history, honestly.
Kaiser Wilhelm was:
Expansionist and irredentist
Fervently anti-democracy
Rabidly anti-semitic
Trying to secure overseas colonies to exploit for resources
The Third Reich was the Second Reich without a noble class to fuck things up with inbreeding. It’s hardly surprising, a culture can’t change completely in the span of a couple decades.
That’s pretty much the European median for the time.
You’ll find that Britain and France, while imperialist colonizers, were mostly concerned with holding on to their territory and as solidly liberal and as pro-democracy as 2/3 of the founding nations of liberalism can be. One of Wilhelm’s explicit goals was dismantling the very idea of voting in Europe and returning the continent to absolute rule of the aristocracy.
Anti-semitism was ever present but it was only in Germany that the head of state has his hopes of justifying a pogram broken by the fact his pet scapegoats were provably volunteering for service at a higher rate than Gentiles. Though you must give Wilhelm that much, he was sane enough to listen when people showed him proof, some of the time.
“While imperialist colonizers” is doing a lot of work in the post. In my view, there’s little credit to be given out for offering liberalism to a tiny fraction of the population under your rule. So from a macro standpoint, Wilhelm hardly stands out.
I will give the British some credit for bowing to the inevitability of decolonization many years later, after WWII, with only a little bit kicking and screaming. (France, not so much.)
Sure, people who criticize liberalism (leftists) tend to point out that liberals have a very, very specific definition of “human” when it comes to their track record of human rights, especially before WW2, and if you held the historical liberal nations to account of that fact liberalism has only actually existed fairly recently.
With that in mind, they get credit for the reality of liberalism as it has been practiced for most of its history. Mostly applied to property owning white men.
And obviously many of those issues were eventually addressed, at least in part. That progress is something that was directly against the ideology of the Second Reich, and no amount of hypocrisy from historical liberalism will change that.
Man how revisionist can you be? For a poor fucker in Algeria, India or Namibia it really didn’t matter who committed genocide and if they were liberal or supporting democracy back home. Sure that Prussian king was a particularly unpleasant fella, but they all committed genocide and all others sorts of atrocities in their colonies and I really don’t think it’s appropriate to downplay just how bad the British & French were and actually all other European colonizers for that matter.
Not my fault you think liberals are the good guys instead of the not-as-bad guys.
Not my fault you don’t know what revisionism is either.
Also not my fault you don’t know Wilhelm was planning on genociding his current and future African territories to make room for German settlers.
Feel free to check their sources if you don’t like the site.
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I don’t think I wanna find out how they would ramp up to the third try if the right wing takes over again.
As long as the trains running time…
This time, the populists want to abolish trains.
Funny thing being, the nazis weren’t good at running the infrastructure.
I mean, third time’s the charm… Reich?
Nice.
Mom, can we get Nazis?
No we have Nazis at home.
I’d much rather have the idiot kind of nazis than the 1930s kind.
How the hell do you think it starts‽ In the 20s with complete idiot nazis
That last time it started by Germany losing WW1 badly and getting a bit of shit handed to them. I don’t think anything comparable is happening right now. Germany is a stable liberal democracy with stable instutitions.
Germany is a stable liberal democracy with stable instutitions.
For now.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, the treaty of Versailles absolutely pushed Germany to the point of electing a genocidal populist candidate.
I guess the down votes come from people who don’t agree with the point that Germany is too stable at the moment for Nazis to regain power. And I agree. It’s naive to think like that.
The political climate is very tense and some people like to play with fire as long as they feel like they could personally benefit from this. E.g. conservative and right wing politicians imported the culture war from US as good as they could and thus additionally supported partys like AfD and BSW by validating and inflating their nonsense talking points.
Our “Verfassungsschutz”: “Watch out! They plan to overthrow the current system!!”
AfD voter: “Yeah, but the migrants”
I’d go even further. The AfD threatens the current (democratic) system. Most AfD voters vote for them for this exact reason. They want to “enact revenge” on a system they feel left behind by IMO.
“democracy doesn’t let me be racist enough, we should get rid of it”
~average AfD voter“Them rich folks of the AfD keep telling me that democracy made me poor and jobless. They are also telling me that they’ll bring back jobs, by removing all them immigrants. Guess I’ll vote for them.”
Who should I vote for after unhinged leoliberal capitalism made my life worse?
- Socialists: Vote for me, so I can tax the rich and spend money on programs to help workers like you
- Fascist: Vote for me, I promise to deport some brown people (but in reality I will just cut the taxes of rich people and be friendly with Russia)
Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.
However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.
- The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
- Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
- The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
- Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).
Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.
Plenty would gladly vote socialist, this is the east we’re talking about, you can see that by the stellar rise of the BSW: 15% in both Thuringia and Saxony, in their first elections. That’s actually unprecedented in Germany I think. Why not Die Linke? Less infected by the New Labour bug than the SPD, still awful though barely managing to be SocDems as opposed to DemSocs. 150% fed up with liberals, have a look at the complete collapse of FDP and Greens. Something something making everyone install heat pumps instead of giving municipalities money to invest in district heating which would even have been cheaper overall.
Put bluntly, from a west German perspective, the issue in Thuringia is that people by and large think you can change shit by whining, complaining, and being nasty to politicians. Now that’s a streak in all of Germany but Thuringia? Have a look at where their top politicians are from: Pretty much anywhere but Thuringia. MFs be like “rule better”, never “Ok I’ll do it”. The “rule better” part is definitely amply justified in Thuringia, their whole political system is dysfunctional, the state parties a clown show approaching American conditions. There should’ve been new elections years ago because the government didn’t have a proper working majority for important stuff, some CDU parliamentarians decided to ignore the health of the political system in favour of their own pensions and blocked those. CDU being corrupt is nothing new or specific to Thuringia, but this brazen? Sticking to “it’s technically legal” while the whole fucking state is shouting at you? Goshdamnit.
Just proves again that we should deport AfD voters instead
I’m really worried that the Verfassungsschutz talks and talks about the dangers the AfD poses, but they seemingly won’t actually do anything and I suspect by now it’s too late to prohibit them.
Yeah, it sucks. A party can’t be forbidden in Germany if it’s not “relevant enough”… But when they are relevant, it might be too late.
They have been “relevant enough” for a very long time now.
Yeah, but the Verfassungsschutz was sabotaged by Maaßen half of the time.
And AFD won’t “send migrants back” because that would remove their favorite Boogeyman. Expect don’t symbolic tinkering and not that much more, otherwise they have to start all over again with another minority to blame. It won’t improve these people’s economic situation. EU exit and austerity is back on the menu with AFD.
People in the comments attacking AfD voters as racists and rightly. However, no one wakes up one day and decide to be a racist from now on. There are reasons why these extremists gain political support and they draw it from a pool of people of which some wouldn’t even consider voting for them a few years ago. This shift reflects a social sentiment that everyone seems to be ignoring.
No one is ignoring the global sentiment. We get it, capitalists are fucking everything to squeeze every cent out of us and a few idiots get conned into blaming brown people instead.
Sooo they turn into racist slowly? That’s still not cool.
Fair point, I think we know it, just our politicians keep ignoring it. The elites backing moderate governments would rather see fascists on the throne, than to have a democratic, true leftist government.
Socialism endangers capitalism, fascism doesn’t.
The solution is definitely not ridicule and mocking, but it’s also not appeasing fascists. Anybody who wants to destroy democracy, has no place in a democracy. In the short term, we should ensure fascist don’t get to power by whatever means necessary, and in mid-/long term, we should enact social changes that decrease the support of these radicals.
Tbh I’m not sure this is possible peacefully (or at all), and maybe another world war will happen - though not because of Germany, more likely China/Rusia, maybe US if things go bad.
A lot of their voters couldn‘t even vote before. GenZ make up a big portion of extreme right voters because that‘s how TikTok works apparently. The young have a huge media competency deficit.
So, what’s that climate and what exactly are the solutions?
So, no one bothers to learn lessons from history any more…? Hmmm.
Issue is, they just change a few bits around to fool the people that are uneducated about the subject. I’m from Hungary, and one history teacher of mine taught me that Nazis did things for the sake of being evil, one other said “it was a punishment for the Jews killing Jesus”. Once you associate bigotry with being evil, any dumb rationale can make it look not evil in the eyes of these people.
it was a punishment for the Jews killing Jesus
This is peak logic. Glorify Jesus becasue “he died for our sins” but demonize Jews for killing him… Bitch, if they didn’t kill him you lack key aspect of your religion!
They think history is based and also lies and also rad as hell and should definitely be repeated. But that bad mustache man should win this time.
It doesn’t help at all that history is rewritten all the time and is provably inaccurate at least in detail in a lot of cases.
I’m not a holocaust denier or saying the Nazis are any better than what history shows them, but I also can’t in good faith say that history is written in stone while southern US states are banning books right and left and making taboo teaching subjects. I’ve seen pushes in some areas that try to eliminate slavery and push the indentured servant narrative wide enough to cover all slavery.
It can’t be as bad as it sounds, right?
Right?
Fuck.
They probably aren’t literally Hitler. But there is a lot of damage and awful shit they can do in between reasonable and Hitler. And they are much further towards the latter than anyone should be comfortable with.
The thing with Hitler: He still considered himself a patriot, even he didn’t solicit financial support from Germany’s worst enemies.
Well, the only good thing: The pro-democratic parties will probably build a government without them.
A lot of the time, it’s just name-calling, and not really Nazis
Bernd Höcke who leads AFD in Thüringen is a Nazi and this got confirmed by a court. He sees himself als some kind of incarnation or continuation of Hitler. AFD in Thüringen has won the election by a great margin. This is like defending NSDAP.
Sometimes though a judge has decided that it is factually correct to call the leader of a party a fascist because he is one
An AfD-sympathiser. Of course unable to discern reality from wish world.
Here is the (non final) result for anyone to lazy to check themselves:
Scheiße
So it’s still a minority by a significant amount. It could be much worse.
The long term strategy is to destabilise the CDU by forcing them into unfavorable coalitions. Which they have probably achieved this time. If the CDU looks bad enough in 5 years the AfD might get enough votes so that no government can be built without them
With how absolutely entrenched the CDU is in our political system, this is about as bad as you could reasonably expect it to be. The CDU is an overall incredibly dominant party and the others are often competing for second place, which the AFD has gotten now. Them actually competing on that level is frankly terrifying.
Is this projection only from exit polls or the actual count?
Also how does the whole ‘two votes’ thing work - from what I understand you have one vote that’s basically a singe transferable vote type and another for your local electorate that’s proportional representation (but I’m not sure what counting system is used)
It’s projected from the actual (then still unfinished) count but I think it uses some data from the exit polls to fill in the gap. So both?
We now have a preliminary official result. You can see it here: Saxony, Thuringia
@[email protected] has explained the basics of our electoral system pretty well: The first vote (Erststimme) is towards a candidate in a FPTP system to represent an electoral district and the second vote (Zweitstimme) for a party in a closed list proportional representative system. A party nominates a bunch of candidates and ranks them on a list. If they get enough votes to get a certain number of seats then those get filled first with candidates elected by Erststimme and then with candidates from the list starting at the top.
A party needs to win at least 5% of the Zweitstimme or win at least 3 seats using the Erststimme to be awarded any seats. This was done as a lesson from Weimar Germany where too many small parties made coalition building impossible which helped Hitlers rise to power.
But what if a party gets more seats via Erststimme than they should have? In that case we just start adding seats until the proportionality is maintained (those seats are referred to as Überhangs- und Ausgleichsmandate). That has lead to ballooning parliaments with our national parliament the Bundestag (small pronunciation guide: Bundes-tag not Bunde-stag - compound words can be tricky) being one of the biggest, right behind China. Recent reforms should curb that. We’ll see next year how well they work.
I don’t know exactly how their electoral system works but the baseline in Germany is mixed member proportional. That is, you have a FPTP vote for a district seat, and also a proportional vote. If parties get less district seats than their proportional result, members are added to parliament from party lists until the proportions work out.
I don’t think STV is used anywhere, the FPTP portion is kept in check by the proportional thing anyway. When things are more complicated than baseline mixed member proportional it generally has to do with voters being able to re-arrange people on the party lists.
Hicks exist in every country.
Sometimes they drive fancy cars.
Hicks exist in every country. They don’t always exist in the form of a “bring back the policies that destroyed our country the last time around” political party though.
Uhh, my experience must be different than yours.
I grew up surrounded by hicks who were still furious the North invaded them to take away their freedoms! (to keep slaves)
There are close to 200 countries. You live in only one of them. I stand by what I said.
I’m willing to argue out of those 200+ countries the vast majority have brought back old policies that fucked the country up before. The only ones that haven’t are either brand new countries or they just changed their name.
Jesus Christ, Germany, figure it out.
And which country are you from that you think you are entitled to throw the first stone?
As a German, I’d very much like to throw the first stone at AFD-voters. And the second… and third.
Nobody here is claiming their country to be without sin. This is a global problem.
Lets see how keen Germany is on stopping fascism in its borders again or if they’ll ooh and ahh as they wait for the state to talk about discussing doing something.
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Let’s see what they’ll achieve. Gonna be fun to watch.
Not so much fun to live through, I imagine. Especially if you have the “wrong” skin color.
Nothing will change except more people feeling emboldened by the results. This isn’t going to change much for non-whites in the state. If they were treated badly before, they’ll continue to be treated badly now. That isn’t going to change.
But I bet this party won’t achieve much in the next 4 years. Germany is a federation, Thuringia is a state. There’s not much AfD can do at that level that wouldn’t be rejected at national level, maybe even already by the state court. They can’t change the constitution, they can’t “ban immigrants” from their state, in short they can’t implement their “program”.
It’ll be a constant fight to get anything through and after 4 years, I bet they’ll have very little to show for it. All they’ll do is blame the other party for not cooperating.
But federal states have a lot of power on their own exactly because too much centralized power is dangerous. But the political system also wasn’t design to defend itself against a new fascist takeover in many ways, so if a federal state goes rogue that can have very serious consequences. Unfortunately I don’t have an English source for that but there was an article in German that covered all the possible ways how they could fuck shit up.
One thing I remember is that they could officially host people like Trump or even worse people and get representative resources for that. And they would have significant budget to do networking events with Nazis everywhere iirc. It would massively enable them to take over other federal states as well and legitimate themselves in national politics. If you look at Austria, they have broken the barriers a long time ago and their Nazi party is part of the government regularly, it’s absolutely bad and I’m very worried the same will happen in Germany.
I mean Franz von Papen thought something like this too in 1932 about Hitler and we all know how it ended.
I think, you misunderstand… They will probably not be part of the government(s). The other parties made that pretty clear. This is Germany. You need 50% of the seets. Does not matter who has the most votes.
And no, it wouldn’t be fun for lots of minorities.
Lol, sure. Look at the parties will form a coalition there. Wikipedia says CDU is center right (23%), Linke is far left (12% --> 35%)), SPD is supposedly social democratic and progressive (6% --> 41%), and BSW is all over the spectrum (15% -->56%). The only thing they have in common is that they are political parties.
I wouldn’t be surprised by AfD + CDU + BSW, honestly. They are politically much closer together than the other possible coalition.
If the Thuringian CDU gets into the government with the AfD they won’t be CDU for long. As in: They’ll be kicked out of the party.
On the contrary, their federal level seems to be softening their stance on Die Linke. And given the results they might not even be in the nasty situation of having to elect a Die Linke minister-president it’s gonna be Die Linke voting a CDU one into office.
I’m from Germany. If you want to bet with me that AfD will be part of the government, let’s do it…
From all 16 AfD sub parties, the one in Thüringen is the most extreme one. Proven to be far right… If you build a government with them, it’s pretty much political suicide for you.
If you add up numbers without understanding the local politics before and after the election, you might think that those 3 parties find together. But otherwise, it’s very, very, very unrealistic!!!
BTW: 5 years ago, even getting and relying on votes from AfD politicians in Thüringen crashed the Kemmerich government. It took only one day to collapse.
Do you think the 4-way coalition is more realistic? Isn’t BSW just AfD but with a left twist? Would the coalition just leave them outside and have a minority government?
Why 4-way? CDU + Linke + BSW have enough seats together as far as I know.
I don’t even think that they will build a coalition together. It will probably be some kind of 1-party-government or 2-parties-government, which is only accepted by the other(s)… Thüringen had a Linke (left) government that was accepted by CDU the last years.
By the way: BSW was pretty much one part of the left party “Die Linke” until one person did their own thing. No, it is not a AfD. They were only able to “steal” voter from the left party (Linke), but not really from the AfD… They might say similar things about migration and Russia, but one of the parties is classified as 100% far right. One party wants to distribute to the poor, the other wants the opposite. I’m not a fan of BSW, but comparing them with AfD like that is not fair.
And to answer the question above: Yes. I think, that those 3 parties working together against AfD is realistic. That’s what all of them are saying for like 10 years. Hoecke (who you can legally call facist by the way) in power would be way worse.
I don’t think they got it that wrong. It’s absolutely true that there’s a lot of overlap between AFD, CDU and BSW especially in Thüringen. Even the left party in Thüringen is pretty racist and Zionist. It’s a weird place. For now it remains a taboo to make a coalition with AFD but I don’t think we should take it for granted that this taboo holds.
Even the left party in Thüringen is pretty racist and Zionist.
What? You are talking about the Linke of Ramelow? I don’t think that this is what most people think about that party…
For now it remains a taboo to make a coalition with AFD but I don’t think we should take it for granted that this taboo holds.
True. I’ll go deonstrate on the streets as soon as I think, this could change and many others will do that, too. The “Collectiv” incident gave me hope regarding this.
Yeah I really want to like Ramelow because I always used to see him as an alternative from the left to actually channel the frustration of people into a productive direction. But he is participating in this bullshit regarding payment cards instead of giving refugees cash even though it’s just another way to harass refugees, and also an expensive way to do that. Also, just to gain sympathy he went into that „not all AFD voters are Nazis“ direction.
I know that’s not what most people think because as the polls show most people don’t give a shit about the racism, but it’s there and if a party calls themselves left I hold them to a certain standard that includes being anti-racist and unfortunately they’re not meeting that standard.
Good on you going to protests, I wish more people would do that, would donate to anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-surveillance groups, independent journalists, etc. I honestly think that we only have a couple years left until it’s too late to fight this anti-democratic trend.
Also, just to gain sympathy he went into that „not all AFD voters are Nazis“
Well… There are nazis and there are voters who vote for nazis. It’s also clear that he can’t say the opposite. If he says “Every voter of them is a nazi”, it will cost him votes, too… And it makes sure, that the number of base voters of AfD increases.
I would not call payment cards racism. There are of course different views on it, but I honestly prefer one solution over 16 different approaches how to distribute the money, which is usually the German way.
