this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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I never wouldβve thought that a German state election would make world news.
It's the very state in which the Nazis came to power the last time around as well.
Not to be too gloomy here, but Germany regressing into this shit despite decades of very clear and open education on the atrocities committed by the third reich should be world news.
This is a very bad situation and there are no solutions on the horizon.
Most of Germanys richest families have inherited their wealth from Nazi times. Many still think that way and somewhat control the media. I certainly can think of a solution.
That's not the problem here. You are talking about a very small group of people. The voters of the right populists are unfortunately a lot more. It's a combination of many reasons, but i think the biggest reason is things went to shit for the last 20 years, need to be fixed now, cost a lot of money, communication from the government is bad. Resulting in the high taxes for the average are kept, combined with new mandatory costs forecasted by the right wingers (doesn't matter if true or not) making them feel like they would loose their standard of living, while all the stuff that would need public investments, like schools, housing, day care, health care,..., is still at the brink of collapse. And here come the rights with their simple solutions for complex problems, while the established parties have no better ideas than shifting themselves more to the right. Tldr: something must change fundamentaly really quick or Germany or better all the western countries are fucked very soon
Taxes are high, because there is almost no wealth tax in Germany. So it would be easy to lower taxes from work income, if one would rise the wealth tax. The massive income tax makes it impossible for most Germans to built up wealth. That is why 2/3 of German millionaires inherited their wealth. Hard work is not the way to riches in Germany.
Then the current government is activly paying back debt in an economic crisis. Last year debt to gdp went down for Germany and it looks like it will do it again this year and very fast. The reason for that is that new borrowing is massivly under inflation and the German economy has grown pretty fast in nominal terms(so with inflation included). This is what the current government focuses on. The money is there to pay for better infrastructure, it is just that especially the liberals do not want to spend it. They are the party most representic big money in Germany. Obviously this is morronic by any sane person, but the general German public is so incredibly uneducated on the basics of finance that they support it. They absolutly hate the idea of taking on debt even for investments. Even taking on loans to buy a house is seen as a moral failure for that person.
While all these address certain problems, the majority of voters for the AfD don't see these as their core issues for what they're voting. I do not see a solution as to how to get blatantly racist and often one issue voters back on the ballot for less extreme parties.
I'm not saying the changes you're proposing wouldn't help and wouldn't dent their numbers, but I'm very, very weary of the fact that being an open Nazi has become acceptable in large swathes of the population again. Not just that, it actively increases attractiveness of certain politicians in the polls.
COVID and Trump-Era Republicans (as in the CxU and AfD taking their playbook and finding plenty of success with it, didn't they even meet with DeSantis to pick his brain?) did an absolute kickflip with rationality by marrying far right ideology with anti-covid, anti-science, conspiracy theory rhetoric and opening up a huge new voter base.
It's a super complex issue ranging from our Cum-Ex chancellor to Otto Normalo feeling disenfranchised by foreigners, who we desperately need if we want to plug the holes in our economy and keep at replacement level (for all the good it'll do us) and not being able to afford families, homes, or anything beyond basic subsistence.
I fear a large group of their current voter base will not be convinced by any measure taken by any government that isn't the one THEY voted for. And they won't vote for anything except extreme anymore. Used to be primarily boomers, but I see it in plenty Gen X and Millennials as well already in my close and expanded social/work circles.
Absolutely agree - thanks sexy boy Lindner :) except for the last statement - almost everyone (who has a certain income) can afford a house only by taking a loan, so that's very common.
The funny/sad thing is. Most of the people who vote for the AfD are the ones who would be hit hardest by their decisions. They don't want to fix the stated problems. They want to make the rich richer and poor poorer.
Yeah, I really hate, we are adopting all the bs from the US - vote against your own interests, just to own the libs π although many might don't get that it's against their own favor...
There's a kinda simple solution. Ban the whole fucking party. There's currently a petition running to get the Federal Council to request the Federal Constitutional Court to examine a ban.
Which will only serve to harden the resolve of their voter base. You can ban the AfD, just like the NPD was banned. But these people don't simply go away and stop existing, just because the party they're currently voting for vanished. Instead, in the current climate of conspiracy theories and outright coup attempts by these groups, they'll take it as proof of them being oppressed and will radicalize further.
I don't think appeasement is the way, I simply don't see an easy or simple solution to the political mess we're in. Just like the AfD has zero solutions to the complex problems they pretend to be able to solve with "simple" solutions, none of the other parties have any functional approaches to dealing with the rise of the far right without alienating all those people that are supporting them.
First of all: the NPD was never banned, since it's to small.
Banning the AfD effectively destroys it and buys more time to really solve the problem. Banning parties can be very effective. The ban of the KPD was so effective that even 70 years later there isn't any established communist party in Germany.
Well, I remembered that wrong. But I don't believe that banning the AfD will solve anything short, mid- or longterm. Times are quite different today than there were 70 years ago, so that's not a great comparison.
I really wish there was an easy and complete solution to getting rid of the AfD and their ideology once and for all, or at least to a degree, where these kinds of parties don't spring up again just a few years later to gain popularity once more.
The resulting radicalization of their voter base would cause quite a bit of damage, I am sure.
Their structures will be destroyed and the money confiscated. Also all people involved there are burned, and can't create just a new party. It will buy us some years to figure out, how we should deal with this
Maybe, but at least short to mid term you'd have newly and further radicalized far right actors who are now further disenfranchised and see their conspiracy theories confirmed.
Either way, it'll take the whole village to deal with this issue.
by now people who witnessed ww2 are an almost nonexistent minority and the modern people to replace them are unimaginative low iq blobs. it's not like there's a lack of information about that time in history. βΊοΈπ fuck afd
Already end of August
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66645801