Paging @BansheeOne for his insights into these recent developments. Thanks.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Blackmore,

Why are conservatives always labeled "far right?" It's rare to read "far left" describing liberals.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/g...t-party-olaf-scholz/

Someday we may have an objective media.

Europe is entering the "Bad Enough" phase I've referred to over the years.

For true change to come, things have to get bad enough so that a sufficient percentage of the population is compelled to take action.

We shall see. It will probably take more time.

Interestingly the Right + Left in Germany have common ground:

quote:

Despite being on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, BSW and AfD both call for stronger controls on immigration and an end to Berlin’s support for Ukraine amid its conflict with Russia.

First, there were no major surprises. The Saxony results were pretty much copy-paste from recent poll numbers, though there were some quirks.* In Thuringia, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) got some three points more than predicted at the expense of their new left-wing mirror Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and some also-rans, but it was all within the statistic margin of error. Overall, this picture had been stable in polls for six to nine month since the BSW appeared on the scene. So there seems to have been no real influence of recent events like the Islamist stabbing attacks in Mannheim and Solingen (both in West Germany) or last week's ostentative deportation flight of 28 criminals to Afghanistan, which had reportedly been negotiated by the federal government with the Taliban via Qatar for months, clearly timed to happen just before the elections.



Refresher below on the German party system, quite diverse at this point, to understand further explanations. Skip to bold line further down if already up to speed.

Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - center-right, the party of long-time chancellors Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel. They frequently get called "conservative", but really are neither by international comparison nor by self-description. While conservativism is one of their official ideological pillars, the other two are classical economic liberalism and Christian social teachings. Were ruling Saxony in a coalition with Social Democrats and Greens.

Social Democratic Party (SPD) - center-left, the other of the two (formerly) big parties, Germany's oldest, currently leading the federal government in a coalition with the Greens and Free Democrats. They've been in decline ever since then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder enacted welfare reforms out of necessity 20 years ago, which pissed off their left wing. That Olaf Scholz got elected current chancellor is just because his CDU and Green competitors who were supposed to decide the race between them fucked up their respective campaigns.

Free Democratic Party (FDP) - classical liberals, pro-market, fiscally conservative, with an atrophied civil rights wing. They've mostly formed coalition governments with the CDU, but sometimes also with the SPD. In the current federal government with SPD and Greens they are the odd man out, frequently quarreling over budget issues due to their financial philosophy, but mostly agreeing on social liberalism.

Greens - progressives with roots in the environmentalist, pacifist and feminist movements of the 1970s, though between their original fundamentalist and realist wings, the former has all but vanished in the quest for compromise to attain power. Not much of their pacifism has survived the world's crises of the last 30 years in particular. They've mostly formed coalitions with the SPD, but sometimes with the CDU, even as the majority partner in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg.

Left Party - an amalgam of the successors to the former East German communist state party and those West German leftists who got pissed off by Schröder's welfare reform. They used to be strong in East Germany, capitalizing on resentment against the West over the effects of reunification, even leading the last two Thuringia state governments. Like other leftist parties in the West, they were however increasingly divided between traditional socialism and fashionable woke ideology, resulting in the recent split-off by the BSW.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) - started out as a liberal-conservative party of mildly eurosceptic academics during the Euro crisis 15 years ago, but progressively slipped to the right, pushing out their founders and subsequent leaders considered too moderate by the growing nationalist wing. They were in decline from the infighting, but got saved by the 2015/16 refugee crisis. Increasingly displaced the torn Left Party as the party of East German identity by adapting their "back to the good old times" spiel to nostalgia for the former DDR, until they got new competition by the BSW.

Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) - established last year by the eponymous lady, long the pretty hardline face of the Left Party. She used to be the articulate Stalinist working the talk show circle, then became the leader of the traditionalist camp accusing party leadership of abandoning workers to chase young urban voters with woke ideology. The last straw was that she thought they were not pro-Russian enough on the Ukraine war. Her new outfit is designed entirely around her and to be under her control; like in classic communist parties, you can't just join, but first get a sort of candidate status until you have proven yourself worthy to be admitted as a full member.

Election comment resumes here.

Politically, the BSW is a nominal left-wing expression of contemporary anti-globalism, while the AfD is a nominal right-wing one with the same themes: against the American-created and -dominated current global system and the Western liberal values it promotes, thus anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-Israel, anti-immigration, anti-interventionist, pro-Russian and pro-Chinese. You can call that a practical demonstration of the horseshoe theory, though the German term frequently used is Querfront; coined in the 1920s by the Strasser wing of the NSDAP (i.e. the socialist part of National Socialism) which dreamt of a revolutionary alliance between Nazis and communists. It never happened of course after Hitler secured total control of the party.

As usual in a multi-party system, just winning a plurality gets you nothing if you can't form a coalition with a majority. The present results make that very difficult, not dissimilar to the outcome of the recent French elections with its roughly equal left-wing, right-wing and centrist blocs. The CDU has ruled out going with the AfD, just as they long have for the Left Party despite much nagging from SPD and Greens who had no problems with having a minority government of theirs being tolerated by the post-communists in the state if Saxony-Anhalt just four years after reunification, and enter into a formal coalition with them after eight.

There is no such official stance on the BSW, which is technically a new party, and might be more amenable to the CDU with its anti-woke stance. Sahra Wagenknecht is making it hard though by having demanded a commitment to stopping aid to Ukraine as a condition for entering any coalition after campaigning heavily on a "peace with Russia" platform - even though that's obviously no issue for state-level politics at all. In Thuringia, she could theoretically form a government with the AfD if both acknowledged they're just two ends of anti-globalist ideology connected behind the back of the conventional political spectrum. However, while the AfD has at least not rejected the idea outright, Wagenknecht has.

I could add that Thuringia has historical form for radical state governments. Besides the first one led by the Left Party ten years ago, it saw the first coalition between Social Democrats and communists in 1923 along with Saxony, which got both of them put under direct federal and military control over fears of revolutionary action; and the first including the Nazis in 1930. No such dramatic consequences are to be expected after the current elections, mostly because the conditions which led there are specifically East German, and the region has insufficient mass to affect the entire nation like the communists and Nazis of old did. However, it's sure going to be interesting if and how the resulting political deadlock will be overcome. Particularly because Brandenburg will have its elections in three weeks, and the remaining two East German states next summer.



* The Saxony Left Party evaded dropping out of the state assembly despite not making the state-wide five-percent vote threshold by way of two of their candidates winning their respective districts directly, which triggered a rule saying they get to enter according to their total share of the vote. The small conservative Free Voters there also won one district directly, which exposed that election authorities had initially failed to mind a recent change in the state's election law about the method to distribute seats among parties, and assigned the two biggest ones one seat respectively which should have gone to the two next-smaller ones. For the AfD that meant they dropped just below one third of the seats, meaning they can't block decisions needing a two-thirds majority. If you want some real election nuts and bolts, google d'Hondt and Sainte-Laguë methods (known in the US as Jefferson and Webster respectively).

BansheeOne, I appreciate your posts and local knowledge over the years. The coalition governments are so different than what we have here.

If you want to hear something really funny, the left and uninformed western press always refers to the AFD as fascist and racist, yet Dr. Alice Weidel the co-chairman of the AFD is in a same sex relationship to a woman originally from Sri Lanka and they have 2 adopted children. Crazy world we live in isn't it.

I always appreciate bansheeone's posts, and X's Grok AI, responding to my questions about AfD and its policies gave a response much like bansheeone's.

However, I think this post at powerlineblog.com poses a different picture, based on what AfD says about themselves and their economics and migration policies. They make a lot of sense to me:

Link: powerlinblog.com

quote:

The press, even relatively moderate outlets like the Telegraph, call the AfD “far-right” and try to tie the party to the Nazis. Does that make any sense? You can read the AfD manifesto here. In American terms, I would describe the AfD platform as centrist. I don’t agree with everything in it, and some members of the party may well be objectionable in one way or another. That would not be surprising, given that opposition to mass immigration has been banned from mainstream parties and from polite discourse.

But far-right? Reminiscent of the Nazis? That is ridiculous.

Fascists want high taxes, high government spending, and government control over the economy and pretty much everything else. AfD’s platform calls for the opposite:

We want to reform Germany. This is not possible without a comprehensive reform of tax laws. We advocate a simpler and fairer taxation system, which primarily reduces the tax burden of middle and low-income earners.
***
We want to limit the power of the state over the citizen. To this end, duties of the state should be reduced, as well as state access to the incomes and assets of its citizens. The AfD does not want to burden its citizens with more taxes and duties. Analogue to the German debt ceiling, we want a mandatory ceiling on taxation and duties to be incorporated in the German Constitution. This will define the maximum permissible tax rate as a percentage of the gross domestic product.

Also:

Free market competition produces the best economic results. The unsubsidised supply of goods and services, which is most beneficial to buyers and sellers alike, is always set to win the day. Therefore, the AfD contends that the stronger the competition, and the lower the ratio of government expenditures to gross national product (state spending ratio), the better it is for everyone. Indeed, competition gives people the freedom to develop, to grow and to act self-reliant, to acquire private ownership of goods and means of production, to enter into contracts under their own responsibility for their own benefit and for the common good, to choose between different suppliers, products, services or jobs, and to take advantage of profitable opportunities, but also to take responsibility for potential failure.

In some ways the AfD platform is more liberal than I would like, but on some issues, like energy, it is excellent–much better than any party platform in the U.S. But the “far right” AfD is anathema to establishment Germans. Because in Germany, as throughout Western Europe, “far right” simply means skeptical of mass third world immigration.

How radical is the AfD platform on immigration? You can read it for yourself, but I would describe it as sensible and realistic.

In view of its geographic location, its history, its people and its dense population, Germany is by no means a classic immigration country, least of all a target of mass migration as seen in 2015. In spite of this, migration into Germany has occurred for decades. Germany has turned into an immigration country without any legal framework. Canada and Australia set good examples of how these countries manage immigration with social and employment considerations in mind.

I couldn’t agree more. I would be delighted if the U.S would adopt Canada’s immigration laws, and then enforce them.

The German “maverick approach”, however, has promoted immigration into the German social security systems and the low-wage sector, but not into the qualified job market. We want to change this: We demand a paradigm shift regarding 1) the influx of asylum seekers, 2) the way how the free movement of people is handled inside the EU, 3) the immigration of skilled labour from third countries, and 4) the integration of immigrants belonging to these three categories.

The AfD platform is realistic with regard to the mass influx of “refugees”:

For this reason, current German and European asylum and refugee policies cannot be continued as in the past. The ill-fitting term “refugee” used for all the people who enter Germany irregularly with the aim to stay here forever, is characteristic of this misguided policy. It is necessary to make a distinction between political refugees and people fleeing from war on the one hand, and irregular migrants on the other. It is the AfD’s view that true refugees should be granted shelter as long as there is war in the countries of origin. Irregular migrants, who are not persecuted, have no right to claim protection, contrary to refugees. Once the reasons for fleeing, such as an end to wars, or political and religious persecution, no longer applies, shall residence permits of refugees be terminated. These refugees need to leave Germany.

As things stand, Germany’s ruling “conservative” party will rather form a government with the left-wing (but also immigration skeptic) BSW party, which polled only a small percentage of the AfD totals, rather than with AfD.

For years, Europe’s political and cultural elites have tried to rule opposition to mass third world immigration out of bounds, ostracizing leaders and parties who object to their obviously failed immigration policies as “far right.” But despite their views being suppressed by nearly every means short of incarceration, it is evident that those parties represent the majority opinion on immigration in most western European countries. As the immigration crisis continues to worsen, their views can no longer be ignored.

As to whether AfD is pro-Russian, I don't know. I do know that Hungary's Orban and our Trump have been accused of being pro-Russian.

Here's the thing. The fighting between the original conservatives of the AfD and what they called "national bolshevists" who took over the party wasn't so much about particular policies. Though you could mention some of those, like the former's economic liberalism vs. the latter's "back to the welfare state" of the pre-Schröder era, or indeed communist East Germany, as part of the "good old times" they're holding up. But the real dissent was over whether the AfD should be a traditional platform party, where delegates meet and agree on a manifesto, or changes to same, which guides their policy; or a movement party, which is all about seizing on whatever popular grievances and be against whatever the "system parties" are for IOT generate revolutionary momentum, and overcome the system.

There are historic examples on both the Left and Right for this, from the pre-revolutionary communists and the Nazis with their "Führer principle" (who also talked of "system parties", and after seizing power refered to the Weimar Republic as "the system era") to Geert Wilders' one-man-party in the Netherlands and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, in turn the direct role model for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. A good illustration is the failure of the AfD leadership to unequivocally condemn the 7 October terror attack on Israel; they took four days to issue a milquetoast statement of "mourning all war dead, everyone must de-escalate now, diplomacy is the call of the hour".

Which sounded ironically similar to what German Muslim associations uttered, and for the same reasons: condemning Hamas would have pissed off a substantial share of their clientele who are anti-Israel, crossing into anti-Semitism; in fact surveys show their voters with such sentiments to lead among all parties. Just not for religious reasons but because, anti-globalism. Of course in turn that pissed off the remaining conservatives in the party who pointed out that massacred civilians or killed terrorists are no "war dead", and the party line used to be you don't engage in diplomacy with Islamist terrorists, you hunt them down and eliminate them.

Between that and the incessant pro-Russian and pro-Chinese shilling (see the saga of the guy they made top candidate for the EU elections which resulted in Marine Le Pen having them kicked out of the far-right group in the European Parliament, as detailed on the French elections thread, as far as I can see everyone who could charitably still be called a conservative has quit the AfD at this point. Along with other bad PR it also depressed their national poll numbers from about 24 percent early this year to about 16. Though they are now recovering slightly, and most of what they lost was snapped up by the BSW; which as noted has rather similar policies, but being nominally left-wing doesn't come off as a bunch of raging Nazis.

Fascinating. I read this and conclude that were the U.S. not locked into a two party system, our politics would likely resemble much of this. Each party likes to think of themselves as a "big tent", but the truth is there are some pretty uneasy relationships in both our parties.

Well, district-based first-past-the-post voting tends to promote two-party setups, as voters will see binary choices between the biggest of the pack as the only ones with realistic chances; though the UK and France prove that's not a given. At this point I think that the US has merely shown greater inertia to partisan fracturing that has developed elsewhere in the Western world. Probably indeed helped by comparatively lose organisation of, and great political range within, both major American parties. Back at uni, a professor of mine described them as "losely encoupled anarchy" with considerably polical overlap, depending upon the region (New England vs. Southern Democrats, etc.).

The latter is probably no longer true due to the polarization of the last 30 years; or maybe the polarization in public debate is just obscuring the diversity within the parties which still exists. What remains surprising to a European used to the head of the biggest party typically also being the head of government and the head of the runners-up opposition leader is the weak national organization, with the national committees of either big party seemingly mostly responsible for channeling campaign money here and there rather than making policy.

It used to be that West Germany had just two major parties, too, CDU/CSU and SPD; refered to as "people's parties", which is somewhat equivalent to the American term of the "big tent" for covering a broad range of politics; though not to the same degree as in the US, probably because the latter was lacking a well-established true left-wing part of the spectrum occupied by social democrats/democratic socialists in Europe. Then there was the FDP which inherited the traditions of both economic and civil rights liberalism from different parties of the Weimar Republic, presented an alternative for voters who didn't find themselves in either big party, and would sometimes join one or the other to provide a majority in parliament. They never won a district directly though, and in a pure first-past-the-post system would have never figured.

That state of things was only challenged with the emergence of the Greens in the late 70s, which ultimately go back to the generational unrest of the 60s, a feeling that the established parties no longer adequately represented the entire people, nor that the latter could adequately participate in the democratic process; or that the latter itself was imperfect. Which led to the new social movements of the 70s (and a side of terrorism), part of which eventually coalesced into the Greens. There were other fringe and protest parties since the 60s, mostly on the Right, but they never made it past the state level. Today's Left Party was of course an inheritance from East Germany, the remnants of the former communist state party which survived on nostalgia and resentment of the West by a non-trivial part of East German voters.

Ironically, the genesis of the AfD shares a lot with the Greens', if 180 degrees out of phase politically: the underlying feelings of lacking representation and democratic participation, even of an imperfect system, leading to new social movements but with different issues - national/financial sovereignty and immigration instead of environmentalism and feminism, though the pacifism part is somewhat similar (and invites similar acrimony over being influenced from Moscow and other points east). And like the Greens, the AfD as the resulting party has arguably put its mark on national politics long before and without being in government, as other parties scrambled to take on the issues feeding their emergence, tightening laws on environmental protection/immigration etc. to try taking away from their appeal while at the same time denouncing them as radicals.

Meanwhile in the US change of the political landscape seems to happen largely within the existing parties; again probably due to inertia of the established system. From a European point of view, politics are actually becoming more familiar though. 30 years ago, the only true leftist on the national scene recognizable to European eyes was Bernie Sanders, a classic 70s-style social democrat in the mold of Willy Brandt or Olof Palme. These days you ... well, still have Sanders, but also the Squad girls who are more reminiscent of the enthusiastically clueless youngsters joining professional politics from the youth wings of the German Greens and SPD, maybe even the dying Left Party.

OTOH, the modern American Right is also showing distinct traits of their European counterparts - personality-centered, anti-immigration, anti-interventionist, but accommodating on issues of public welfare/healthcare, etc. Which is unsurprising, because its progenitors like Steve Bannon took their clues from observing role models like Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Geert Wilders' PVV, Nigel Farage's UKIP, and Viktor Orban's Fidesz. Maybe like much of the rest of Western culture in a globalized world, American and European styles of politics are converging; there have long been definite US influences on the European style of course. But then both sides have inspired each other ever since they became distinct entities, again unsurprising due to the common heritage.

Here’s an American viewpoint on these elections.

https://www.americanthinker.co...knecht_alliance.html


The takeaway from it is this:

The terms “left” and “right” originated during the French Revolution, when the revolutionary members of parliament sat to the speaker’s left while the monarchy-supporting members sat to the speaker’s right. The former wanted a change to the system; the latter wanted to maintain the status quo.

However, none imagined liberty as we do in America, and that’s true despite the revolutionaries’ motto of “liberty, brotherhood, and equality.” Both sides were about control, and that’s continued to be how the system works in Europe. The American notion of liberty, which is freedom from government, is not a European concept, where “left” and “right” mean pure communism versus less pure communism.

Bansheeone, thank you again for your thoughtful posts. I always learn something from you.
My direct exposure to German politics was in the mid-60's. I studied at the FU under Richard Löwenthal. A year after I left Red Rudi Dutschke and his gang, who included a Chilean named Gaston whom I knew but was not fond of, took over the Mensa of the FU. Since then I have followed German politics only from a distance and intermittently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB3HedQCoJs

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:
However, it's sure going to be interesting if and how the resulting political deadlock will be overcome. Particularly because Brandenburg will have its elections in three weeks, and the remaining two East German states next summer.

Brandenburg elections today. Latest polls see the ruling Social Democrats neck-and-neck with the AfD at 25-27 and 27-29 percent respectively. CDU 14-16, BSW 13-14, Greens and Left Party probably out with 4-5 and 3-4 respectively. Outside chance for the conservative Free Voters at 3-4, too. Neither of the latter getting in would put majority as low as 41 percent, so might just allow a grand-ish coalition between CDU and SPD. If the Greens slip in, they could join in a "Kenya" coalition; there's a German habit of designating political three-way alliances after the colors of the involved parties and appropriate national flags, in this case red, black and green.

About even odds for an AfD-BSW majority if again, they could just acknowledge that their politics are essentially the same despite being nominally right- and left-wing respectively. But looking at Thuringia and Saxony, where nothing seems to be moving on the coalition-building front three weeks later, everyone appears to remain locked into ideological exclusionism, resulting in a French stalemate. As a footnote to the Saxony elections, there was one of the odd minor attempts at election fraud which sometimes pop up at the state and municipal level here.

Specifically, a 44-year-old man from the city of Dresden is being investigated for allegedly harvesting 154 mail-in ballots in the 9 June municipal and 126 in the 1 September state elections in four districts, pasting over the original crosses and substituting new ones for the fringe right-wing "Free Saxons" party. This guy was elected for that party into the municipial body of a Dresden district in June; his actions reportedly had no impact on state election results. He's a nursing professional, so while it has not been reported how he harvested the ballots, suspicion is that it was from people he attended to, either in institutions or at home. I can recall four similar cases of up to 300 mail-in votes in the last ten years, involving candidates from CDU, CSU, FDP, Greens and Left Party, some of whom collected ballots in door-to-door canvassing.

Meanwhile there have been some obvious attempts to appease protest voters at the national level, notably the introduction of spot checks at all German borders in a bid to be seen doing something against illegal immigration. So far this has been done only on the eastern and southern borders which are the main immigration routes; whether doing the same in the west will add any significant results is questionable. The main point would be actually rejecting people nominally applying for asylum, which is fraught with constitutional, European and international legal problems. Unsurprisingly, neighbours Austria, Poland and even Greece, which is one of the main countries of entry into the EU, have already protested such thoughts.

Opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the CDU - who was essentially confirmed this week to run for chancellor next year after his co-partisan state premiers of North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria withdrew their (so far informal) bids for the good of the common cause - is driving the government to seek for legal ways with his demands to that effect, which are not impeded by practical obstacles to actually implement them. Other voices from CDU/CSU, but also government coalition partner FDP, even call for debate about actually abolishing the constitutional right to asylum, not a trivial prospect. Such discussions tend to go a lot like gun control debates in the US, for similar reasons.

Constructionalists will point out that as enshrined in Article 16a of the constitution, this is an individual right that's part of the German equivalent of the Bill of Rights, which is especially protected against change by legal theory; and even so has been infringed upon a lot already, particularly by a 1993 amendment declaring all German neighbour countries safe states, and the 1997 Dublin Agreement entering the same principle into European law by making the EU country of first entry responsible for refugees - though also protecting their interests with bureaucratic rules on how to send people who still move on back to them. Meanwhile living-document-type advocates argue that Article 16a was conceived of at a time it would have applied to just a couple refugees from communism crossing the Iron Curtain, and the framers didn't know about fully automatic high-capacity black rifles ... eh, immigration.

Overall, things seem to move towards another gradual step of tightening rules in a process that has been going on since 1993, but more urgently since the 2015/16 refugee crisis based upon changing popular perception even among former critics. Revolutionary change is probably not to be expected for abovementioned legal reasons. And regardless of the specific issue, knee-jerk measures to avoid defeat in state elections seem historically unadvisable due to being both useless in the near-term and unforeseen effects down the road. Exhibit A: the Merkel II cabinet doing a 180 and getting out of nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster because the Greens, for the first time, were set to win a state premiership in Baden-Württemberg on popular anti-nuclear sentiment. They won it anyway, and ten years later the same popular sentiment was that we could really have used a couple nuclear power plants in the energy crisis just as we decommissioned the last three.

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:
Brandenburg elections today. Latest polls see the ruling Social Democrats neck-and-neck with the AfD at 25-27 and 27-29 percent respectively. CDU 14-16, BSW 13-14, Greens and Left Party probably out with 4-5 and 3-4 respectively. Outside chance for the conservative Free Voters at 3-4, too. Neither of the latter getting in would put majority as low as 41 percent, so might just allow a grand-ish coalition between CDU and SPD. If the Greens slip in, they could join in a "Kenya" coalition; there's a German habit of designating political three-way alliances after the colors of the involved parties and appropriate national flags, in this case red, black and green.

Unlike in the other two recent elections, Brandenburg results partially diverged significantly from projections. In particular, the Social Democrats did quite a bit better with 30.9 percent; mostly at the expense of their current coalition partners from the Christian Democrats who ended up at their worst-ever 12.1 in the state. The SPD thus narrowly beat the AfD (29.2) to top place. Others: BSW 13.5, Greens 4.1 and Left Party 3.0, both of the latter out as expected. Early in the evening it looked like the Greens might trigger another one of those exemption rules and enter with all their votes by winning a district directly again, but in the end it didn't happen. The result was heavily driven by a polarized campaign between SPD and AfD, incumbent state premier Dietmar Woidke of the former stating he would resign if the latter came out on top even if he still could form another government.

It probably didn't help the CDU that their candidate Jan Redmann was caught riding an E-scooter with a BAC of 0.125 early in the campaign, and that his co-partisan, Saxony state premier Michael Kretschmann, had a joint interview with his Brandenburg colleague Woidke while both were canvassing for their respective return to premiership. The Brandenburg CDU was sufficiently pissed after the election to tell Woidke they weren't available to continue the previous coalition government. Not that it would have really mattered, and in the end few people where happy about the strong SPD result at the expense of possible coalition partners, because the only path to a majority left for them was going with the new left-wing populist BSW. Which mirrors the situation in Saxony and Thuringia, where the options also are either AfD-BSW, or CDU-BSW; and in the case of Thuringia, everyone else including the Left Party, too.

That won't be an issue in Brandenburg of course, because for the first time ever, the Left dropped out of an East German state assembly there. Which is hard for a party which build itself up as the guardian of East German identity and used to poll as much as the AfD does today, until the latter - and more recently the BSW - took it over. Though part of the problem is biological; many of the old DDR citizens stuck in "Ostalgia" who made up a large part of the party's members and voters simply died away, and as noted earlier the attempt to win the younger generation by going woke eventually tore them apart, resulting in the emergence of the BSW.

Speaking of which, it has been widely commented upon that the AfD was the strongest party among all age groups (and most so among those 35-44) except for those 60 and over in all three elections, the latter going heavily for the incumbent lead parties. The trend has been noted in various surveys and test votes of teenagers for some time for some time, and again particularly in the East. Which has led to some consternation, because the young have long been assumed to be natural left-wing voters, especially for the Greens. To the point that the current national government coalition of SPD, Greens and the classically liberal FDP had agreed to lower voting age in federal elections to 16; already the case in some states, in some more for municipial elections, and as of this year also nationally for the European elections.

There have been various attempts at explanation for the change: taking the young for granted while not actually listening to them; youthful protest against the political establishment which is now considered left-wing, and particularly exemplified by the Greens with their success in pushing issues; going with fashionable trends at an impressionable age before you settle in your political beliefs; the AfD beating other parties in strategic use of trending social media like TikTok; the young being actually most exposed to real or perceived failures of established politics in their lives; and for East Germany, grudges against the West being passed down family generations, even though the young never experienced the supposed "good old times" of the DDR or the economic upheaval after reunification.

I guess it's probably a little bit of all that. It's notable of course how much it resembles the youth revolt of the 60s, if 180 degrees out of phase politically. I've noted before how similar the Greens and AfD are in their genesis from general unease about the political system and democratic participation, new social movements with not a little influence from ideologically adverse foreign sources, to emergence of a party; but so far the countermove to the right has been a revolt of the middle-aged fearing both material and loss of identity in a changing world. That it has now moved backwards to the younger generation is interesting. It might of course conform to the eternal rules of prejudice between the young and old, but is clearly a warning signal for the state of the system as it's now, no matter where you're coming from.

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:
Saxony and Thuringia, where the options also are either AfD-BSW, or CDU-BSW; and in the case of Thuringia, everyone else including the Left Party, too.

Well Thuringia was off to a rocky start just constituting the state assembly, with the session descending into pandemonium over election of the speaker. Rules of order so far just stated that the strongest party, now the AfD, has the right to nominate a candidate. The other parties had filed a point of order clarifying that they, too, can do that. Of course the constituting session was traditionally chaired by the oldest member, also an AfD guy, who insisted that points of order could only be filed after election of the speaker, and rejected or ignored attempts to the opposite.

The CDU eventually called upon the state constitutional court, which issued an injunction reprimanding the speaker-by-seniority for violating the rights of the assembly, and ordering him to allow the motion. Which resulted in election of a CDU members as a compromise candidate between all other parties. Whether that foreshadows an eventual CDU-led state government by a coalition including them all remains dubious; national BSW leader Sahra Wagenknecht has doubled down on her condition that any agreement including her party must involve a statement against more aid for Ukraine and against the basing of US medium-range missiles in (West) Germany, even though that's clearly not a state issue. There are those who say that Wagenknecht is really not interested in taking over actual government responsibility, and wants to preserve her party's comfortable opposition role until the national elections next year.

Recent events continue to have an impact at the federal level anyway, mostly on the Greens which are seen as the biggest losers (the Left Party having long been in decline anyway). Their two national co-chairs resigned this week in a move widely seen to clear the way for current Green minister of the economy and vice-chancellor Robert Habeck to move the party even more to the center and turn it into another big-tent party. Which looks not very realistic at current poll numbers, but Habeck is apparently planning to run for chancellor next year; a job that went to current foreign minister Annalena Baerbock last time, who promptly messed up her campaign after a promising start.

Next the national board of the Green's youth wing resigned en masse, also declaring they were quitting the party as a whole and would initiate formation of a new left-wing youth movement. Like all party youth wings, they were rather more hot-headed and radical than the mother party, but had been in particular opposition to the government politics the Greens had to go along with as part of the national ruling coalition. Lately they especially criticized the tightening of European immigration rules, though they were complaining about a lack of leftist values in general.

The Greens have of course long gotten a reputation as the party of well-off urban elites, pushing core politics like fighting climate change on the back of low-income voters. In turn, centrists in the party have rolled their eyes about Marxist class-struggle rethoric coming out of the youth wing. Resignation of the latter's national board was quickly followed by that of three state boards, so this was not just a conflict of personalities. It's not the first time a youth wing splits from its mother party on a grand scale; in 1982, the rather left-wing Young Democrats dumped the classically liberal FDP after the latter went from coalition with the Social Democrats to the Christian Democrats, more right-wing members having formed the Young Liberals earlier.

Whether the idea of forming a new left-wing youth movenment will hold any water is questionable though. Lately everyone has been trying to form alternatives out of discontent with party politics felt too centrist on both the Left and Right, but only Sahra Wagenknecht seems to have succeeded (on the second attempt, one has to add, after having tried to establish a non-party movement modeled after the French Yellow Vests in 2018). Former domestic intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maaßen, estranged from the CDU, also tried to establish his previous inner-party opposition club of the Values Union as its own right-wing party between CDU and AfD, but got predictably ground up between both in the recent state elections.

There are suggestions that homeless Young Greens could follow the example of their Austrian brethren which also split from their mother party in 2017, and the next year joined the youth wing of the Austrian communists, having had some success with grass-roots work since. In Germany, the youth wing of the dying Left Party may be up for such a marriage. Anyway, all those perturbations made me think about comparison with the US again, which is undergoing some of the same dynamics in society, but largely contains it in a two-party system. But I will make that another post, as this one's a lot longer than I wanted to already again ...

As I was saying above ...

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Meanwhile in the US change of the political landscape seems to happen largely within the existing parties; again probably due to inertia of the established system. From a European point of view, politics are actually becoming more familiar though. 30 years ago, the only true leftist on the national scene recognizable to European eyes was Bernie Sanders, a classic 70s-style social democrat in the mold of Willy Brandt or Olof Palme. These days you ... well, still have Sanders, but also the Squad girls who are more reminiscent of the enthusiastically clueless youngsters joining professional politics from the youth wings of the German Greens and SPD, maybe even the dying Left Party.

OTOH, the modern American Right is also showing distinct traits of their European counterparts - personality-centered, anti-immigration, anti-interventionist, but accommodating on issues of public welfare/healthcare, etc. Which is unsurprising, because its progenitors like Steve Bannon took their clues from observing role models like Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Geert Wilders' PVV, Nigel Farage's UKIP, and Viktor Orban's Fidesz. Maybe like much of the rest of Western culture in a globalized world, American and European styles of politics are converging; there have long been definite US influences on the European style of course. But then both sides have inspired each other ever since they became distinct entities, again unsurprising due to the common heritage.

The Squad girls apart, lack of established true left-wing groups in the American systems means that those dynamics mostly happen on the Right; with the somewhat significant exception of positions on Israel among younger leftists actually threatening the voter potential of the Democrats. Still those have no realistic alternative to go to, and none is in sight. So their only leverage is threatening abstention to make Democrats accommodate their demands - a dubious prospect since American voters of both big parties remain overwhelmingly pro-Israel, and critics are mostly found among independents and third-party voters. And as the late great Douglas Adams put it, abstaining or voting third-party in a two-party system always means the danger that the wrong lizard will win.

Then again, change in the Republicans shows that sufficient voters can very well make a party drop politics which were defining it 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. Not just that, but in the absence of an established left-wing alternative, the GOP has hoovered up the entirety of social issues which drive change on both the European Left and Right. As noted before, both of the latter may be very different in underlying ideologies, but not their social policies and the way to implement them. Around the Millenium, the reply of European centrist governments to globalization was cutting working and welfare cost to stay competitive in the international market. Which along with identity issues caused the backlash feeding the emergence of new left- and right-wing parties today.

OTOH the US already was at level of healthcare, welfare etc. the Europeans never managed to drop to. Copying European safeties as a reply to feelings of unequal distribution of the gains and cost of globalization within society was pretty much out as "socialism", demanded only by the likes of left-wing protesters against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle. The most any government could achieve was introducing a healthcare scheme under Obama that's kinda like in Switzerland, but without Swiss to make it work. Anti-globalism and social criticism needed to take on a European right-wing guise until it could enter US politics in a big way. The American Left still has no answer to that, so the big changes keep happening on the Right. Pretty interesting when you think about it, because by definition going back to revolutionary France, the Left is supposed to be all about change, and the Right about preserving or even going back on the status quo.

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Originally posted by BansheeOne:
The Squad girls apart, lack of established true left-wing groups in the American systems means that those dynamics mostly happen on the Right; with the somewhat significant exception of positions on Israel among younger leftists actually threatening the voter potential of the Democrats. Still those have no realistic alternative to go to, and none is in sight.

Well, with Muslim leaders endorsing Trump over his promise to bring peace to the Middle East, the above is clearly no longer entirely correct. It may still not encompass the younger anti-Israeli leftists I refered to as a whole, but surprised me anyway. It definitely shows continuing change within the existing American two-party system, and another parallel with parts of the European Right who are agnostic, or at least flexible, on the issue of Israel and the Middle East.

Anyway. Back in the East German state election fallout zone, everyone keeps focussing on foreign and defense as opposed to state issues. In the Brandenburg probing talks, the previously-ruling Social Democrats agreed rather quickly with the nominally left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance on a preamble to the draft coalition agreement stating that "the Ukraine war will not be ended by more arms deliveries", and the parties were "seeing the basing of [US] medium-range and hypersonic missiles on [West] German soil critically"; they started official negotiations to form a government today.

In Saxony and Thuringia, with both Social and Christian Democrats involved in talks with the BSW, things were more rocky, in large part due to interference from BSW founder and national head Sahra Wagenknecht. At one point she demanded that the CDU state chapters distance themselves from their own national leader Friedrich Merz, who had just demanded delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine in the Bundestag again. The appropriate reply would probably have been that progress would be made if the local BSW chapters distance themselves from Wagenknecht.

Which is what kinda happened in Thuringia. There, parties agreed on a preamble stating that the parties were united in their "will for peace", acknowledging "fears that Germany might be drawn into the war" and people in the state were "critical or adverse" to missile basing, but also outlined differences in opinion: CDU and SPD were seeing themselves in the Tradition of Western integration while the BSW stood for an uncompromising peace policy, and had different perception of the necessity for arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Wagenknecht promptly called that unsatisfactory for remaining below the level of the Brandenburg formula, and a power struggle is currently underway between the national and state board. This reinforces the impression that Wagenknecht is really not interested in state issues, certainly not if participation in governments on that level dilutes her messaging in the run-up to national elections a year from now. It was met with copious public criticism, also directed at the Brandenburg SPD for simply bending to the BSW's wishes.

But as I noted before, East German Social Democrats had no problems with having themselves propped up by the successors of the socialist DDR state party mere years after re-unification. Figures that after decades of incessant accusations that CDU/CSU were just chomping at the bit to enter into similar coalitions with the far Right (which they never did), they uncritically accepted foreign policy positions shared between the BSW and far-right AfD.

The whole thing, combined with a recent German-Russian dust-up on a new naval headquarters on the Baltic Sea, also kinda inspired me to an opinion piece I published on our bi-monthly defense magazine's website this Friday. It's about as satiric as my editor-in-chief could bear, really. Obviously there are a lot of very German references, and some bits might be lost in translation, but I thought while I'm at it, I would put it up here, too.

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Wish for 2025: We Cannot Allow A Troll Gap!

What passes for security policy discourse on the internet in particular has long since become completely disconnected from reality. Trolls dominate the discussion. Large parts of the public who get their information from "alternative sources" can no longer be reached with arguments based on facts. All that remains is irony, if not sarcasm. Maybe even satire!

Recently, another wave of internet outrage swept from Russia into the German mainstream media: the establishment of the Commander Task Force Baltic headquarters with assigned representatives of NATO partners in Rostock was violating the Two-Plus-Four Treaty. As well known, Article 5 of this treaty states: "After the completion of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the territory of the present German Democratic Republic and Berlin, German armed forces may also be stationed in this part of Germany, which are assigned to military alliance structures in the same way as those in the rest of German territory, but without nuclear weapons carriers. [...] Foreign armed forces and nuclear weapons or their carriers will neither be stationed in this part of Germany nor deployed there."

Now one could discuss at length what constitutes "armed forces" in the sense of the treaty, and whether, for example, liaison officers at other Bundeswehr commands in Berlin and the surrounding area, or the military attachés at the embassies there, are also included. But of course that is not what the wave-makers are aiming for. Reports have been floating around on German-language pro-Russian websites for some time now about initiatives according to which Russia could "terminate" the Two-Plus-Four Treaty because of alleged violations by Germany. The fact that one cannot simply terminate international treaties without appropriate clauses in them, and that the step would actually have no practical consequences, is also irrelevant. It's all about the message "Germany is violating the treaty, and that's why Russia could now station troops in the former GDR again!"

Trolls are retaliating

And so Russian internet trolls are now happily retaliating against Western accusations against Russia for its war of aggression in Ukraine: Germany is "remilitarizing" the former GDR. NATO is "deliberately destroying the entire security architecture and literally trampling on treaties and international law." All that remains is "the right of the strong." The Russian Foreign Ministry then summons the German ambassador about it. He is of course paid to listen to such nonsense, and is not the actual addressee anyway. That is the broad public, who in the end no longer believes anything at all because of all the alternative facts. And that is why actors like Russia can do whatever they want. That is the troll apocalypse.

At this point, film fans will inevitably think of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." When the only question left is how to survive the inevitable impending nuclear war, Peter Sellers's eponymous character, a former Nazi scientist, suggests housing a select elite in mineshafts. From there, they are to repopulate the world with many beautiful women. After the Soviet representative expresses his sympathy for this idea, the American Chief of Staff, in the spirit of various procurement-policy-motivated statements about "arms gaps" during the Cold War, calls out: "Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"

Use Germany's troll potential!

For the same reasons that it is a preferred target of pro-Russian internet trolls, Germany itself has enormous offensive troll potential. It just has to use it. We cannot allow a troll gap! So perhaps the next NATO exercise in 2025 should, in the spirit of "train as you fight", take place in a world of alternative realities and with extensive involvement of social media. A mixture of the Wiesbaden "Tatort" and Sophie Scholl's Instagram diary with plenty of AI-generated deepfakes, at the same time with the chance to simulate difficult conditions for alliance defense.

The exercise situation could look like this: In a strategically important part of an alliance partner that is crucial for organizing joint defense, pro-Russian parties seize power and declare the Two-Plus-Four Treaty invalid. Let's call this region "Querfrontland". Querfrontland concludes a pact with Russia with a secret additional protocol on the division of the respective spheres of interest. On this basis, both parties attack Poland. A wild mix of World War II and the Ukraine War develops, garnished with plenty of internet memes.

A Querfrontland warship fires on the Westerplatte and calls on the crew to surrender, but is later sunk in the Baltic Sea in a guided missile attack. The attackers' supplies get stuck in a huge traffic jam before Warsaw. NATO lands on the Warnemünde beach with Operation Dragonlord. The Querfrontland government flees to Iran. Russia complains that no one takes its nuclear threats seriously. The Polish army marches on Moscow. In a viral video, Putin accuses the entire Russian general staff of incompetence during a briefing in his bunker. Then Peter Sellers jumps up from his wheelchair and shouts: "My Führer, I can walk again!"

The troll principle

Half of the audience probably won't understand the historical references, and the other half nothing of the internet pop culture quoted. But that doesn't matter: When it comes to successful trolling, it's a downright matter of principle that the target audience has no idea about the background and gets upset about stupid arguments, distortions of history and Nazi language, to the delight of the trolls. The only important thing is that they start to doubt the basics of reality and common sense. And to seriously ask themselves, for example, whether the enemy is really crazy enough to use nuclear weapons just because his little colonial war is going pear-shaped.

For too long, pro-Russian trolls have unchallengedly spread the belief that Putin is this kind of guy, whom you thus better not contradict because otherwise he might blow up the world. Basically the personified Soviet doomsday machine from "Dr. Strangelove". It's time to overcome the fear of such alternative realities and close the troll gap. Starting today, we're trolling back!