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.
To those saying Germany is experiencing the same dynamic that lead to the anti-democratic government takeover in the US: Hold your horses.
- AfD is polling at ~20%. That’s objectively very bad, however, 80% of voters support democratic parties. US fascists won a majority of voters - we‘re far from that.
- AfD is isolated in the parliament - other parties ignored their existence in the parliament for the entirety of this parliament‘s turn. They simply refuse to work with AfD. This means that every vote for AfD becomes meaningless the day after the election.
- For weeks, there have been millions in the streets all over Germany, demonstrating against AfD and fascist movements. That’s happening despite Germany going through a recession for the third year in a row - we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis in decades.
There are way more differences than that, but I’ll stop here. We’re far from what’s happening in the US. The trend is concerning though, and if the economic crisis continues, together with soaring inequality and the creation of an oligarch class of the super-rich, we might be in a bad spot in a decade or so.
There’s also the small issue of “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes”.
They are no longer supected to be right-extremist, they are assured-right-extremist by now.
They even have a convenient Hitler face appearing as a watermark in their leaflets.
Got a link to an example?
Ofc i just demonstrated against them today and grabed one of their hate pamphlets just because I was made aware of this fact:
Front:
Back:
Truth:
Every time someone pointed out problems caused by migrants, legal and illegal, they got downvoted. Now I’m sure that the left and those infected by the woke virus really hate their country. No one in their right mind would ignore damages done to their own country.
Dude fuck off, we don’t want you here. Why don’t you emigrate from this platform?
Now you sound like the far-right militants. Lol.
Every time someone pointed out they hate groups of people, in arbitrary subcategories, they got downvoted.
There, I fixed that for you.
Every time someone pointed out the truth, they got downvoted.
Nah. This version is more precise and concise.
Every time people try to blame immigrants for problems they don’t cause they get downvoted.
Fixed that for you.
That’s the woke virus talking through you. How blind can people be?
" I don’t have any valid claims to make or evidenced arguments to cite, so I’m just gonna say ‘woke virus’ a few times to dismiss everyone else’s position. I’m so edgy and smart."
Wow, now that’s an argument. The woke virus… Are you a conspirationist?
If it happened to us it will happen to you. Guaranteed. Maybe now everyone will get off their high horse and help us figure this shit out so we will be alive to help you figure it out.
Happened to us in 1933 already. Question is if we manage to remember what that lead us into. Will people make the same mistake twice?
The rest of the world watching the US be an extra dysfunctional mess for the last forty years and finally blow its own legs off: “well, okay, but they said it’ll be different for us”
Oh, so far we’ve got one European or Canadian downcoping and telling themselves “but it really will be different for us”.
Fuck around and find out, bud. Hope you don’t enjoy your social programs.
Maple millhouse will be so fucking bad for canada
I think there’s an easy solution. Left wing parties should start tackling the problem of immigration, because yes, it’s a problem and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can stop extreme right wing parties from using that as a lever to come into power.
iTsThE IMMIGRANTS fAuLt!!
My man, if you knew how much of the economy was based on immigrant work you’d tout another tune.
I didn’t say we should stop immigration. But everybody can see that some immigrants don’t come to Europe to work, not at all. And people are angry about that; left wing parties should tackle that problem in a rational way. Otherwise people get fed up and then they resort to vote for extreme right wing parties.
Oh no only 99.7% of immigrants come here to work! Let’s kick them all out!
Shouldn’t we kick out any people if they don’t want to work with that logic? I hope you’re having a job!
Smh
Or wait check this out: they promise to fix housing and solve things people want.
With the recent mass murder by immigrants, no wonder.
What ‘mass murder’? There were some attacks, but no ‘mass murder’.
German prosecutors on Sunday released the name of the 26-year-old Syrian man suspected of a multiple stabbing attack in the western city of Solingen that killed three people and injured eight others.
On 20 December 2024, an SUV was driven into a crowd at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing 6 people and injuring at least 299 others. The driver of the car, allegedly 50-year-old anti-Islam activist Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, was arrested at the scene.
There was just days ago an attempt at mass murder that injured 30. This sort of shit obviously gets people worried and reacting out of that fear and worry
E: A mother and child in the München attack have just died today and an hour ago there was a knife attack in Austria
A 14-year-old boy has died and four people have been wounded in a knife attack in Austria.
The suspect is a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker and has been detained, AFP news agency reported citing a police official.
Fucking hell.
I didn’t remember that many victims at the Christmas one. I grant you that. But to go right to the Nazi party cause of some irrational fears and worries, is not understandable.
There’s been a new sad development. Two of the people in the München car attack died, a mother and a child. And now just hours ago there’s been a knife attack by a Syrian asylum seeker where at least one person has died.
People aren’t entirely rational when they’re afraid. Hell, people are not entirely rational on best of days. And I don’t think they feel like other parties have done enough. A lot of people do, it’s still a minority that are looking for AfD but if these things keep happening and other parties don’t react strongly enough, we know what becomes of that.
I’m still waiting for the Bavarian minister of the interior to resign over those repeated specifically Bavarian failures.
Misery loves company
Why is the whole world getting shittier?
Media conglomerates pushing right wing propaganda
Greed and oligarchs.
Oligarchs are targeting democracies.
History repeats itself, especially because people don’t remember or don’t know what happened in the past.
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.
If it’s always been that way, how did things ever get better?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The left constantly tries to defuse it… the problem is that the ultra-wealthy do everything they can to control governing opposition… they run social media conglomerates that tilt people’s highly tailored “feeds” toward a media diet that consequently most benefits them, they donate to all major parties and contests to ensure they most likely get friendly figures into positions, regardless of their supposed political leaning, and they then lobby them heavily. This is worst in the U.S. but people like Mr. X are working hard to do it everywhere else, too.
This means “the left” has so much harder of a time getting a foot-hold in power… and we’re not even really talking about “the left” - we’re talking mildly off-center social democrats. “The left” is nowhere in power outside of a few popular Twitch and YT streaming personas.
The ultra-wealthy are so narcissistic that they think they can rule better than governments, and in their hubris, they are breaking the world and inviting chaos that no one - including them - should want.
“Mario bros. events,” military coups, market instability, outright corruption, and disregarding of agreed-upon societal norms are a direct result of their refusal to just pay taxes, their attempting to tilt scales in their favor, and tin-pot dictatorships will harm ALL of us (including them as well) tangibly. A dragon sitting on a pile of gold being merc’d out of the blue is not a result of a “loss of moral values” or “respect for life” - it’s a result of dragons making people both inconsolably angry and legislatively powerless, and thereby hopeless for anything other than “revenge.” They don’t care they might be burned in “dragon fire.”
Still… besides all major parties being lobbied heavily and infiltrated by the ultra-rich, the world’s almost universal neo-liberal response to COVID has had a major backlash swing - because people suffered, and demagogues swept in to blame scapegoats when in reality, they and their opposition party counter-parts all pushed policies that resulted in everyone else but those at the top suffering far more than they ever should have.
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?
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.
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.
We’ll see, hopefully world wars are a thing of the past but history tends to rhyme.
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.
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.
This hits extra hard given Tim Allen’s MAGAness.
O good, it’s not just us in the US
Canada also has a bunch of far right assholes who’re currently leading in our polls. Luckily the US clusterfuck is making Canadians think twice about voting for them though and they’re dropping in the polls
Quick edit: it’s hilarious because they have to court both the moderate conservatives who hate Trump and the far right who idolise him and they’re fumbling both
How does that even sound ? How would you defend and attack him at once?
Wait…why would that be good?
You’ve heard the saying “misery lives company?”
Maybe we’ll avert WW3, since every country is just going full Axis. World harmony achieved, I guess?
If the axis won they would’ve ended up fighting amongst themselves. Their ideology requires scapegoats, and they will always find them. The ideology itself is counter to peace. We had 80 years of peace because we pushed it to the fringes, but now that it’s resurging I feel like I’m surrounded by people who grew up in a different world with a different history.
Or simply people who didn’t learn actual history.
Don’t forget what eventually becomes necessary to retain domestic control.
They’re not liberals, they don’t stomach the idea that the populace could choose something else if they prove themselves unable to deliver on their promises. Liberals get around this by embracing change, giving people the option to change the status quo if they wish. Even to the point of discarding liberalism itself.
Authoritarians don’t believe in that option though.
The entire world including lots of Europe has been shifting significantly right despite what leftist US haters often say about the US left being a European right. That hasn’t been true for a decade or more.
Regarding important economic issues such as healthcare, welfare, taxes, consumer protection & industry regulation this is certainly the case.
The part where the European right mainly differs from the US left is on more recent additions to leftist ideology - such as identity politics & intersectionalism.
First, I find it kind of irritating when someone attributes opinions to an undefined “they”. Was this a thing Bernie Sanders said? Was this something started in a press release by the DSA? If you’re talking about Twitter, might as well say ‘I heard from the propaganda machine…’
I’m left as heck, and I’m very aware that countries are moving right all over the world. It seems to be especially driven by migration. And I think folks need an affirmative message besides either ‘we’re ignoring your concerns and letting folks in’ or ‘fine, we’ll lock the gates and kill the migrants. Please like us.’
It seems to be especially driven by migration.
No, that’s just the scapegoat. Neither the number of immigrants, nor the number of illegal immigrants, nor the crime rate among immigrants are especially high right now.
All of these numbers are currently lower (in Germany) than 10, 20 or 30 years ago.I think maybe I was unclear. I believe that much of the shift rightward is because migrants are an ideal boogyman. They’re a natural target for nationalists, and liberals are largely apathetic.
As late stage capitalism, automation, and outsourcing create greater and greater economic precarity, the far right has a perfect opportunity to enter the mainstream by giving voice to two of the biggest unspoken concerns that many politically disengaged voters relate to but often feel pressured not to talk about.
The fascists say, ‘your life is worse! And your neighborhood has changed ethnically! And we have a whole explanation for all your problems that the people in charge are trying to suppress! Lol at how aggressively they try and prevent us from saying these things!’
And the dominant liberal order can’t say ‘It’s not what it looks like! The rich are actually just taking advantage of you, and those migrants are just the earliest victims of climate change and greed!’
The truth is that migrants don’t drive down wages: criminalizing migrants does. And given enough time, you could be a migrant too. That’s the thing I’d like more folks to know.
Hell yeah
