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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   713 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?

Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.

I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.

Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?

I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.

But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?

The problem with the Nazis wasn't that they wanted to restrict immigration and expel foreign influence. It wasn't even (really) that they hated Jews. The problem with the Nazis was that they had an expansionist foreign policy.

What is the AfD position on German Irredentism? I expect that it's not in the official platform documents that they want to annex Austria and take back Königsberg, but what do the rank-and-file voters think of these questions?

To me the key point here is that AfD support correlates with youth. The younger the German, the more likely he is to support AfD. This is linear and substantial.

Ok, seems you beat me to the post. Still, here is mine. German election in the state (Land) Sachsen-Anhalt. The far-right AfD got 43.8% of the vote, which is about 5% more than a far right party ever got in a fair and free election before there.

Together with the BSW (a splinter group of the Left who split off when the rest of the party became disenchanted with Russia in 2022) they have an absolute majority.

So far, the parties to the left of the AfD have had a policy not to cooperate with them, a concept called Brandmauer (fire wall, in the building safety sense). On the one hand, it is reasonable: if a party is incompatible with your values, you should not cooperate with it. On the other hand, being stuck in the opposition is a great way for a party to become more popular as other parties get blamed for policy failures. This is even clearer with the present situation in the German East, where the other parliamentary parties (Left, Green, social democrats, conservatives) would have to form one block (and get tolerated by BSW) to form a majority. Five years of a democratic spectrum coalition is unlikely to leave any of the parties with clear victories for their bases, so next time the AfD would simply score 60%.

At this point, I am hoping that BSW will just tolerate an AfD government instead -- it is Putin's will, after all. Sure, it will suck for the people who voted for traditional parties, but it will also not be the end of the world. If Hungary could survive Orban, Germany could probably survive an AfD government if push came to shove. Unlike in Weimar, we have built a few decades of democratic tradition. Still, if the price for avoiding this at the federal level is Sachsen-Anhalt (or most of the rest of the East, for that matter), then I for one am willing to pay that price.

Let them try to fix their demographic problems by blaming the immigrants. Let's see how their two (or so) universities will fare under their stewardship. Let's see how the AfD will influence the availability of medical services, after all, not only are a significant fraction of physicians in Germany foreign-born (and may feel slightly unwelcome), but a decent fraction of the German-born doctors would likely want to avoid their kids going to schools where the AfD sets the curriculum.

I get that people in the East feel left behind. It is not like Merz has their best interests at heart, he's working for Blackrock instead. But protest votes are not the answer. Germans of all people should know that there is always room for worse equilibria.

Satirist Martin Sonneborn has called for a reestablishment of the wall for decades (and this time it would actually be an antifaschistischer Schutzwall), and more and more I feel that reunification was a mistake. It would have been better to let them join what would become Schengen but keep them separate. An AfD running the government of East Germany would not be so different from Orban in Hungary, PiS in Poland, Haider in Austria and so on, all very tolerable from West Germany.

I mean, fundamentally, a vote for AfD is a vote to not genocide yourself if you are German. You have infinite 3rd world migrants, social dysfunction and degrowth policies on one hand... and human flourishing on the other. And the problem with being a suicide cult, is there will always be fewer and fewer members as time goes on, where as if you believe in growth and human flourishing, you will have more and more members over time. Assuming the suicide cult doesn't steal and brainwash your children into degrowth, and/or hand the country over to the 3rd world in a spiteful effort to deny the co-ethnics that refused to join their suicide cult a future.

In most Western countries, it's a race between the native population moving rightward over time vs an increasingly large immigrant population that always votes left.

Some countries, like Canada, have already passed the event horizon and will be run by strong anti-white coalitions in the future.

Other countries, like the US, UK, and Germany still have a fighting chance to avoid that fate but it will be a near-run thing. Among voting Germans, there is still a large supermajority of people without a migration background. But among births, already nearly half have a migration background. Unless the AFD wins, stops immigration, and implements remigration it is over for Germany. It will be a population replacement similar to the prehistoric steppe invasions, but over a much smaller time period.

Everyone realizes the game now. The idea that immigrants would assimilate and be just like the native population is an obvious falsity. So in the internecine struggle between left and right, the left-wing parties fight to import as many as possible and right wing to stop it.

What are the actual odds on a BSW/AFD coalition? I presume somewhat higher than the 'everyone except the AFD' coalition needed to keep them out of government, but compared to new elections?

Despite the German claim of being a multi-party parliamentary democracy, in effect there are two parties, "AfD" and "not AfD". Not-AfD won. Unless AfD gets a clear majority, they get no power.

Accurate, but if the CDU really wanted to kill the AFD it would be quite easy.

  1. Form coalition with AFD imposing heavy conditions
  2. Give the AFD like 10% of what it wants. Restrict immigration slightly. Deport worst of the worst. Restore order to cities.
  3. Yay! We solved the problem.
  4. Wait for 10-20 years.
  5. Demographics of Germany change drastically as old white people die and are replaced with young third worlders

AFD back below 20%. Re-embargo them. Ban them. And now they won't be strong enough to fight back.

Modulo unforseen AI circumstances, only drastic action now can save Germany. The surest route to doom is slow and steady.

Yeah this is basically what the Sweden Democrats just did in coalition with the Swedish center-right, and not only did their support collapse, so did the center-right’s and now the left who implemented mass immigration in the first place will come back to power.

Yeah, it's why socialist messaging is so powerful. "We can give you the impossible utopia, and it's only greedy capitalists that stand in the way. Still not working after 10,20,30 years? It's just the greedy capitalists wreckers. The solution is more power for me". It's evergreen.

Actually fixing problems that normal people care about doesn't work. They've done it in Sweden and people got bored and moved on. People won't vote for the right unless there are hand grenades on the streets. And the next time it happens, it probably won't matter if they vote right or not since they'll have been replaced.

Cheap travel and third world migration is to Europe what smallpox was to the Native Americans. They just have zero resistance.

A Reuters article indicates otherwise.

The AfD surged into first place in Sunday's state election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt but fell just short of an absolute majority, with 39 of 83 seats in the regional legislature.

While mainstream parties, including Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU conservatives, have long refused to work with the AfD, in a policy known as the "firewall", the far-left BSW reaffirmed its readiness to play kingmaker after it cleared the 5% threshold to enter Saxony-Anhalt's state parliament [with five seats, which is enough to form a majority with AfD].

"We've made no secret from the beginning that we'll talk with all parties. The AfD is part of that," Thomas Schulze, the BSW party's lead candidate in the Saxony-Anhalt state election, told Reuters on Monday.

Schulze said the mainstream parties' refusal to work with the AfD was "undemocratic". Germany's domestic intelligence agency has branded the AfD as "extremist".

As well as their hostility to Germany's political establishment and their social conservatism, the two parties share a number of priorities, including a hostility to mass migration—which the BSW says harms local workers' rights—suspicion of the mainstream media and a desire to end financial and military support for Ukraine and restore ties with Russia.

There are suggestions that BSW is considering breaking the firewall and forming a majority coalition with AfD.

In this case it’s close enough that it would be difficult, especially if it was repeated nationally.

The CDU/CSU coalition ruled out working with the far left [successor to the ruling party of East Germany], which in effect means a situation in a German election where the AfD get more than about 35-40% of seats, given parliamentary thresholds, just results in repeat elections until either they fall below that line or get a majority, or until the center right work with them.

And in both Austria and Sweden the center and hard right have been in coalition together, so it’s likely to happen in Germany eventually.

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