Worries about the economy and migration pushed up share for far-right AfD in Hesse and Bavaria, while coalition parties did worse
German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious centre-left coalition has received a sharp rebuke from voters in the key states of Bavaria and Hesse, with economic woes and immigration fears boosting the opposition conservatives and the far right.
At the elections on Sunday the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party burst out of its post-industrial eastern strongholds to score its best ever result in a western state. Polls showed it on course to be the second largest party in Hesse, home to the financial capital Frankfurt.
All three parties in Scholz’s federal coalition – his Social Democrats, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) – did worse than five years ago in the states, which together account for about a quarter of the German population.
At this rate, Germany or France could very well be the first to fall to a new wave of Fascism. Either AfD are going to land themselves in a strong coalition government because of how badly the CDU fumbled under Merkel’s reign or Le Pen is going to win the next French presidential election because of how deeply unpopular Macron is.
Either outcome would be disastrous for the European Union or even NATO in general. If you thought Britain leaving was bad enough, imagine the EU losing another of its biggest economies. Now imagine that these governments would be pursuing policies in direct opposition to NATO’s ideologies.
This is why capitalists are playing a dangerous game with the economy. 1917 Russia and 1930’s Germany are living proof that people turn to more radical political beliefs in times of hardship.
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Oh I’m not celebrating this at all either. It’s an outright humanitarian disaster waiting to happen.
People care, but they are exhausted and drowning in rising interest rates, spiking inflation, falling wages, debt…
Wage slaves have just scraps of time to organise and resist,because resisting this bullshit capital corrupt system is work, and most people are already overworked.
Those cheering ones aren’t even the ones funding their own peace, they could end up electing the most war like or even socialist leaders of all time, but if Trump wins, Ukraine likely falls and Europe lose any sense of security they have. Maybe thats part of why they vote the way they do, nothing they do will change their security outcome, they just have to wait for America to see what will happen.
What kind of coalition you are talking about ? Right now every other political party has denied them a possible coalition and will continue to do so. Also the CDU you are talking about is sadly performing very strong in the latest elections, so it’s gonna be probably them again who will reign in germany
Yea that is a bad situation. Belgium did the same thing and there needed to be a coalition of 7! parties to sideline the right. That many parties never see eye to eye and agree on nothing, it basically puts Belgium without a government because nothing gets done. There is a constant fear if 1 party leaves, the majority is gone and the government will fall.
Childish politicians obviously use this as leverage.
You mean the first after Austria, Poland and Hungary?
There’s lots of Germans here on lemmy so I have a question. What exactly is pushing the far right movement other than “immigration fears”? Also how far right is far right? American far right are fucking turbo racists, but as i hear most say EU right would be considered liberal in the US.
As a German, I have absolutely no fucking idea why the AfD is gaining traction right now of all times. Its platform is anti-immigration and also anti-progressivism, which the new government has been doing a bit of, but not much. Maybe it is because there’s been a lot of hostility between the coalition’s parties, but that doesn’t really explain it either.
It’s simple solutions to simple problems. “There is no climate change, we will let you use fossil fuels” for example. Modern politics aren’t easy and the right wing is using that. These rubbish politicians are now accelerating and are actually the most dangerous group in Germany since the NSDAP back in the thirties.
Worse is that there is a media lobby supporting them. It’s as bad as fox news.
So people are unhappy with some recent situations, mostly because they don’t understand them - which is a problem generated by propaganda and false media.
If anything, they are against it. Doing propaganda is easy and they brought nothing to the democracy. They are open and outed Nazis.
Thing is… most that vote them, are the ones suffering if they ever make it to government as a leading party.
Yeah, what we need to do is look from the angle of most people not from above. A lot of people suffer very real deficits of money. They don’t earn more, especially in the East and between Corona, the war in Ukraine and the general world economy everything is more expensive.
What they see is: we have less money, a lot of money gets to other things they don’t care about.
Far right populists promises to curb that money to these things they don’t care much about and indicate that the money of the suffering Germans will improve thusly.
Concrete problems, concrete solution propositions. And that’s just enough for a lot of people who are seeing the bottom of their wallets.
Yeah, just like far-right ultraconservatives and fascists elsewhere, the idea is to always go “Nope, you’re all wrong and also all want to hurt us, in reality it’s all simple, we’ll fix it, just vote for us”.
Their issues are also stuff that is easy to make someone afraid of:
- Rising cost of living
- Money expenditure by the state
- Raised age of retirement
- Immigrants and others in general
Sure, the AfD couldn’t fix a shoelace if they got into power, but they wouldn’t need to. And to get there, they can promise the moon full of simplest solutions and blame everyone else around them for everything. The issue that modern generations are so anti-politics overall that they no longer care and no longer even bother to look into it. And the older generations have seen too much negative consequences too quickly (that them or their parents fucked up) to not be vulnerable to populist rhetorics.
Social media is the closest we’ve come to mind control and many of the people with means to manipulate it are dogshit.
They are far right enough that courts and prosecutors have decided repeatedly that one of their main leaders can be publicly called a fascist and a nazi because it is based on facts and a permissible „value judgement“. This is rather exceptional, as things like that are usually taken very seriously here as an insult and can cost you hundreds or thousands of Euros.
Here is what one prosecutor had to say (translated):
Against the background that the person concerned, according to general opinion, belongs to the extreme right-wing fringe of his party, has expressed himself in recent years, as evidenced by a large number of press publications, in a clearly nationalistic-folkish manner with racist overtones and emphasising a natural claim to leadership of the Germans, and in doing so has repeatedly used formulations that belonged to the standard vocabulary of the representatives of National Socialism before May 1945…
There are moderates in the AfD, but they are increasingly silenced or leaving. And in that case „moderate“ means not demanding that migrants be shot at the border, not defending holocaust deniers, not attending concerts where the hitler salute is shown, not conniving with Reichsbürger (our own mad version of „sovereign citizens“), not calling for the death of government officials, politicians or doctors …
The turn to the right in Germany have a lot to do with the state of the media in Germany.
Far-right groups have sucessfully established isolated media channels on various platforms, among them Telegram and YouTube, but also on Facebook and Twitter, with very little coherence to other media and the actual state of things. Its output is achieved by informally and ideologically recruiting laypersons as influencers who constantly create content which acts as a sort of pyramid scheme of attention, thus self-replicating.
The content also appears on the feeds of already right-wing journalists of very popular and sensationalist newspapers of the Axel-Springer-Verlag (very sketchy and influential publisher) with half a century of experience manipulating the German political landscape.
For additional context it is also necessary to consider that yesterday (Sunday, 2023-10-08) there were elections in two German states, one of which (Bayern) has a history of being more right-wing and religious than the other West-German states.
I would say a lot of people in Germany are feeling left out/alone with their problems.
It’s been like this for at least 10, if not 20 or more years.
Most stuff is lobby and economy driven and we’re getting nowhere.
In came the afd offering easy solutions and appealing to the public (never mind their program stating completely otherwise) so I guess it gave people the feeling of someone doing something and caring for them.
And if not, pissing off the rest of the politicians.
At least the latter is working.
I do not support or condone this behaviour but it is not that hard to read.
And instead of approaching the real current issues (inflation, money issues, buerocracy, environment) directly most parties even try to move further right, to get the afd voters back, which is the worst they could do.
I think your last paragraph is a big part of the problem. Instead of acknowledging that we blundered away the last decades, time critically needed in the transformation of Germany towards a carbon neutral, digital future, the democratic parties are trying to chase the AfD immigration rhetoric. It’s fucking infuriating.
Looking at the election results I think the Greens did remarkably well, in the face of an almost constant hate campaign from conservative media. For me that reads like that there is a good amount of people in Germany ready to tackle the future constructively. The FDP on the other hand lost bad and their take away is not that they fucked up by blocking all initiatives in government but by not being tough enough on immigration. Seriously wtf
It’s pretty much just immigration. There’s some other topics but in all the polls done they absolutely dwarf compared to people not wanting “immigrants” (this includes refugees, including those from Ukraine for example, since those people are deep into Russian propaganda).
That being said, the headline and statement made here by the Guardian is absolute rubbish.
No it’s not that simple. It’s immigration, energy prices, inflation, fear of war, denial of ecological catastrophes, a good portion of racism and a lot of lies and propaganda about our current government (which also makes some mistakes) that are fueling those nazi fucks right now…
It actually is. Energy prices, inflation etc. are all just fractions of the immigration replies in polls. “Fear of war” is hilarious since the AfD wants to just let Russia take the whole of Ukraine and stop all weapon deliveries. And things like “ecological catastrophes” aren’t even a thing with AfD voters as they’re all climate change deniers and want to increase coal power usage. lol
The things you list are at best part of the anti establishment propaganda, but those are just tools to discredit other parties, especially the Greens.
Hey Europe. You weren’t supposed to laugh at us Americans and then start mimicking our horseshit.
It always wonders me how they clone the things the American right says and then rant about how America is thee root of all evil.
As a German I’m so fucking disappointed by the sheer amount of dipshits in my country…
Someone who doesn’t share your views, aren’t necessarily dipshits. Your attitude is just as bad as those dipshits.
voting for nazi scum is a dipshit move, can’t change my mind.
Nazi and right-wing are not synonyms. Your right government are not building concentration camps to gas jews, they are not going for the uber aryan race, they are not going to reintroduce slavery and torture, they are not going to line up people before a wall to get shot, they are not going to start a war to expand their territory.
The word nazi and racist have lost a lot of weight because of incorrectly overly used.
I can tell you’re not happy with it, if they are really that bad, the next election will be different. Just hang on.
Bro, if you don’t know about the politics of a certain country, it’s better to shut up about it. Björn Höcke, who’s considered to be the middle of the AfD wrote in his book “Nie zweimal in den gleichen Fluss” that “we will loose certain parts of our population”. To achieve this he’s willing to use “well temperarated force”. There are hundreds of quotes like this. Many of the regional AfD fractions are being observed by our protection of the constitution or even assured right wing extremists which means they are literal Nazis. The AfD say that the only difference between them and the NPD, they tried to ban, for them being nazis, but failed because it’s to small, is that they are more popular. It’s not about conservative. It’s about this whole fucking party being full of Nazis.
members of our nazi party are denying the holocaust, are racist, are lying and are also supporting neonazis and their cause. They don’t give a fuck about our environment, want to exit nato and the european union, openly support putin and his war and denying covid and its dangers, so please stop excusing those dipshits!
They have to be stopped right now, not in a few years when they start their nazi shit all over again and have driven our land to a new crisis because their agenda is bullshit and grounde on lies and the fear of people.
If you vote for those idiots you are an idiot yourself in the best case and in the worst case you are supporting everything those Nazis stand for. They don’t need to build concentration camps to be nazis they simply are, what a stupid argument to make…holy shit please just let it be and move on.
Yes that is bad. But you shouldn’t get so wound up over an opinion of some nobody internet dude like me. You’ll be fine, germany will be fine.
you were making false statements about those nazi dipshits and and tried to play them down. If you have no idea about our right winged politic parties, try not to start discussion how harmless they are.
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Yeah, in the times where we would most need to all work together, 25%-50% of people in many western nations would rather intentionally abolish intellectual progress, science and common sense, just so they can spend their lives sitting there going “Na na na na na can’t hear you” with their fingers in their ears.
Pass the buck to the next generation.
Granted, it is this very fear - that we’re the generation that gets to see all the shit hit the fan - that causes the fascist parties like the AfD, the Republicans or the Tories to be able to woo their voters. But it’s so sad that it works, especially because a lot of AfD voters do have kids. And do have someone sitting at the table they want to actively fuck the world up for.
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We just need to keep and increase the number of dialogues we’re having with our neighbors on life and our government. Apathy is powerful and hopelessness doubly so but we can build a better future working towards solutions with our neighbors.
Capitalist’s are pushing the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. We have tools that can reverse that disparity and with it remove the intoxicating push to the far right.
I blame the FDP holding up any relief spending that could have blunted this
And the CxU for literally saying everything the AfD does. AfD blames Migrants for anything? Merz does that too. He’s literally helping them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious centre-left coalition has received a sharp rebuke from voters in the key states of Bavaria and Hesse, with economic woes and immigration fears boosting the opposition conservatives and the far right.
At the elections on Sunday the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party burst out of its post-industrial eastern strongholds to score its best ever result in a western state.
Analysts said this would further stoke tensions in a coalition that has struggled to find common ground, with Scholz accused of failing to show the leadership needed to impose order and tackle crises from war in Ukraine to the green transition.
Jens Spahn, a senior legislator for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), said rarely had a government been given such a comprehensive slapdown.
The SPD’s 15.1% – down 4.7% on its 2018 results – was a personal blow to interior minister Nancy Faeser, whose campaign to head the state was dogged by criticism of her handling of a surge in irregular immigration.
The nationalist, anti-migrant AfD is currently polling in second place nationwide up from fifth in the 2021 election, in a shift that could make it harder for Germany to form stable majorities given that other parties refuse to work with it.
The original article contains 506 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
