Summary

Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, is poised for its strongest national election result yet in Germany.

Initially focused on eurozone bailouts, AfD shifted its focus to migration, gaining significant support and entering parliament in 2017.

The party, now advocating for large-scale deportations and opposing support for Ukraine, has become a significant political force, particularly in eastern Germany, and is under observation for suspected right-wing extremism.

    • @Guidy
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      124 days ago

      Greed and oligarchs.

    • FaceDeer
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      596 days ago

      Because a lot of people feel like the world is getting shittier, and so they’re voting for the parties that tell them “the world is shitty and we have the solution. It’s simple and straightforward and someone other than you will bear the brunt of it.”

      If the left wants the far-right to stop gaining then it has to defuse this argument. They should be working to make people feel like the world is less shitty, convincing people that they have solutions for the world’s shittyness, and ensuring that those solutions are simple and straightforward and put the brunt of the effort on someone else.

      This is the downside of democracy, you have to do what the people want. Sometimes that’s kind of annoying and difficult.

        • @Anton243
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          14 days ago

          Where the hell are these steamers and ytbers leftists that are ‘defusing’ the problems and breaking them down easy to understand, while giving a solution? Only thing I see, is people telling you the Dems are trash and not on your side. And the current system wouldn’t work and needed to be changed, everything sucks. Really where are these positive left channels? I mean, your post in itself tells me everything is controlled by the ultra powerful, wealthy. So what could I poor worker do anything to change that, hell even voting doesn’t work, cause all of them are controlled by lobbies… Can you really not see what you are saying?

    • @Yawweee877h444
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      94 days ago

      There’s more stupid people than there are smart people. Stupid people always have more kids. They raise their kids to be stupid.

      We’re doomed.

      • @ynthrepic
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        74 days ago

        If it’s always been that way, how did things ever get better?

        • @[email protected]
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          94 days ago

          We used to shun stupidity. Social media and the internet has emboldened stupid people to support other stupid people spouting stupidity. Used to be if no one would listen to you in person, you’d just have to keep your dumb thoughts to yourself.

          • @ynthrepic
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            94 days ago

            I mean yeah the internet has proliferated stupid. But I think everyone was always stupid, but just nowhere near power.

            We need a meritocratic system that is also based on modern science and social psychology, and it needs to be diverse, equitable, and inclusive too…

            • @[email protected]
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              54 days ago

              Agree with your points, stupid people still existed, but would be shunned from important roles once others realized they were stupid. Social media and the systematic underfunding of education and science also is a factor of dumbing down the general population and overall lack of critical thinking. It’s one of the reasons so many mistrust scientist or experts and think watching youtube or tiktok videos counts as “research”.

              Can you imagine, governments made up of highly educated people that are actually experts in the fields their role is responsible for? We might actually progress as a society.

              • @[email protected]
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                34 days ago

                That or we’d overspec into stem education and neglect humanities until we get a whole generation of genius niche engineers who will sit down and gladly explain the most eugenicist viewpoint you’ve ever head from a living human in your entire life the moment you ask them a single question related to social issues…

                Oh wait.

                • @ynthrepic
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                  4 days ago

                  There is a little bit of an assumption of the mad scientist here. Most scientists and engineers are very compassionate and caring people, even if many are excentric. We care about a thriving humanities department.

                  The psychopath cohort you’re thinking of is the executive branch, or the people who made it to sales manager.

                • @[email protected]
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                  4 days ago

                  That’s not exactly what I mean… they should be experts in their respective field or at least something related to their role in the government. Not just everyone’s a tech engineer.

        • @[email protected]
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          34 days ago

          As new technologies arrive they destabilize societies. This can be good (the pill giving women freedom from unwanted pregnancy), bad (distilled alcohol leading to widespread alcoholism), or mixed (the Internet).

          There are always people in the upper echelons of society who yearn to be in charge. They seize any chance to take over. Sometimes this requires support from the masses. One way to do this is selling a dream of a better future for all. They may even believe it!

          If the power balance shifts there may be a time of genuine progress, but eventually the people with power figure out how to exploit the new system, and everything new is old again.

    • Optional
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      256 days ago

      Because propaganda works.

      And the only antidote is to understand media, the main driving force of so many things in the world. The media ownership will not be doing that. Governments, under control of the media ownership, will not be doing that.

      Therefore: shittier.

    • @[email protected]
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      34 days ago

      History repeats itself, especially because people don’t remember or don’t know what happened in the past.

    • billwashere
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      85 days ago

      I know right. The only issue is instead of a world at war with countries fighting each other, it’s going to be like 20 separate civil wars.

    • @riodoro1
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      96 days ago

      It’s pretty complicated to explain but humans in general are pretty shit at this whole civilization thing. Above all we’re selfish, greedy, and envious. The only systems we’ve ever built were based on exploitation and suffering of the populace so that the „elite” can fuck around in wealth and luxury. When these stop working because the „elite” is more and more idiotic we just go to war because instead of identifying and beheading the problem we let them convince us it’s somehow the other unfortunate to blame.

      It’s pretty grim but that’s what we are, rabid fucking animals who can sometimes say something intelligent.

    • @SlopppyEngineer
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      56 days ago

      And to add what the others said, things are getting more expensive. Raw material prices keep going up, price of energy is rising but wages aren’t. Growth of the western countries went way down but the elite still insist on their usual cut even if they means taking a cut from the general population to make up the difference.

      Then comes climate change making insurances more expensive or impossible, what makes things more difficult for housing. After that the climate also messes with food production. Not to mention how modern industrial animal husbandry is a pandemic generator what’s going to make it worse.