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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?
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.
What part of their competent physicians are foreign born? And also lets not pretend that all foreigners are created equal. AfD don't want Eastern Europeans or East Asians or Latin Americans gone that bad.
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So to you, the immigration issue is just a distraction, an excuse, a scapegoat, and not actually a problem?
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Plenty of scope to still have high skilled immigrants (especially as a EU nation) without letting in massive family reunification et al. People acting like this kind of rhetoric is a binary on/off where a vanishingly small chunk of useful immigrants with immediate productive application in jobs with actual functions (Largely medicine these days) make up a small percentage, especially when you start carving out administrative health positions and other absurdities that get pulled in to bulk out the numbers.
I live in a country where obtaining a passport as a foreign adult is essentially impossible unless you do an act of significant national service (AFAIK like 200 get granted a year and there's approximately 3-5 million foreigners currently residing in Malaysia) plus there's essentially no social safety net, and there's still a gigantic population of foreign workers who are drawn in by wage arbitrage. Governments vastly overrate how many carrots are required to draw overseas talent into the country or how nice you have to be to them. I've got a friend in Dubai who's scion of a very wealthy Indian family who've been in the gulf since 1930 or so and he doesn't have a Emirati passport nor any expectation of it. Western governments massively undervalue access to their own economic systems as a draw factor.
Sure, but this is not what the median AfD voter wants.
Basically, if I were an Asian post-doc, I would stay the hell away from Magdeburg University (and most of East Germany, really). Sure, this could be overcome if incentives were high enough, but "the locals do not want you here, their state government (and sponsor of your employer) do not want you here" are big negative points for the tradeoff.
The median AfD voter feels that they cannot trust the state on Immigration whatsoever so they'd rather the tap be turned off completely than 'Think about the Doctors and the Elon Musks who must be sitting amidst the Burkhas. My spreadsheet says they must be there'. There is no shortage of Asian post-docs in the world, there is a shortage of University spots. Said Post-docs are willing to go to places far more repressive, without the opportunities afforded by Germany and with far less clear pathways towards future settlement or citizenship.
The vast majority of educated, affluent Asians I know are far more disquieted by visiting London and witnessing street crime and a lack of Anglos than they are about the white working classes of Europe.
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If a party is getting close to 50% of the vote, I'm not sure you can call it 'far' anything. Surely the political centre should be defined by what the public actually vote for?
Technically this is of course possible. For instance Hamas won 44% in 2006 elections in Gaza, the coalition around Hezbollah won 40% in 2022 Lebanon elections.
Of course this only shows the fragility of the our democracy™ sometimes also known as liberal democracy. It is always appeal to majority but with the caveats of human rights. Majority builds legitimacy - e.g. here they will say 55% are not AfD. While human rights are there as a grounding for moral argument for unpopular policies. So trans and naturalization of immigrants are human rights, and thus part of our democracy™. If unelected EU bureaucrats rule by fiat, it is under the veneer of human rights or sometimes The Science™ etc. - even if they literally subvert democratic norms, try to ban opposition parties etc. It is democratic from where they stand in their worldview.
In the end I think this liberal consensus is nonsense from their own standpoint, especially if they lose both legs. If they lose majority, they lose legitimacy. However the rights discourse is also based on the very same pilar. Slogan housing is human right or even asylum is human right depends on enough people shouting and more importantly enforcing it. There is no objective grounding, it is not as if such a right was found on an asteroid floating around Jupiter or whatnot. As soon as people start mocking it and refuse to uphold it, it stops being a right. In fact the same erosion happened to article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human rights (right to privacy of correspondence) and now every state and their underling browses through your correspondence for fun. So why not article 14 about asylum - just give the same caveat that asylum is technically there, but it only covers airplane ticket to Rwanda or French Guayana or whatnot.
In a reverse, ban on mocking The Prophet is nowhere near universal human right, but it practically became one by virtue of threat of violence if broken despite it never being marked as such. In a very same secular logic, human right is just a strongly worded law or custom with accompanied attempts to convince or shame and blame or even threaten people into accepting it.
A lot of platitudes about the ideals of democracy completely gloss over the "two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner" part. If your electorate is sufficiently homogeneous (all sheep, or even all wolves) this isn't an issue, but in practice a heterogeneous democracy really depends on a shared sense of liberal civic values: voters need to accept that nobody gets blasphemy laws, or they'll keep voting for them. Sure, you can set higher thresholds for changing your constitutions, but that only leans on a balance of voters and isn't really stable when increasing fractions of your voters don't like it. Demographics there do matter, especially relative to cosmopolitanism.
And worse, there isn't even broad agreement on what "a shared sense of liberal civic values" should be.
There always were blasphemy laws in place, in fact we probably live in an era of highest moral panic of hate speech, where saying magic words such as f-word or n-word in recent case can get you to jail. Not to even talk about bans on social media platforms, getting fired from work etc. It is arguably stronger than being told you are commie during Cold War or actually blaspheming against God before then.
Yes. I recently argued that Culture War is in fact a religious war. There is no sense of liberal civic values, because there is huge disagreement about values, which is domain of axiology and theology. And so we live through
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Yes, and the NSDAP was not an extremist party either by about 33 for the same reason.
I think the distinction is reasonable. The CDU is moderately right, but there have always been parties to the right of them. They famously tolerated former Nazis, but drew the line at tolerating people actively waving the swastika flag. The few percent of people who were always dreaming of making Germany great again had their own fringe parties like the NPD, REP, DVU.
Today there are no far right parties apart from the AfD participating in German federal elections. This is very likely because the AfD is open for Neonazis, and unlike the NPD, they have electoral success.
So sure, not everyone in the AfD is a fascist, but everyone in the AfD is someone who is fine with being in the same party as fascists.
Not everyone in respectable left-of-center politics is a communist, but they all are fine with being in the same party/coalition/movement with communists. Is there any principled reason center-right parties have a special duty to ostracize their LARP wing, while the center-left does not?
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The fascists are no longer the worst that can happen.
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In the federal state of Sachsen-Anhalt, which has a population of slightly over 2 million people. Germany as a whole has over 80 million, and at the federal level the AfD's popular support is substantially lower; closer to 25%.
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It's just a slur.
The far-right is bad, the establishment wants to (deniably) call them bad, so they call them far-right. They wish describing them as being on the fringe was accurate.
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Ah, thank for adding context. Sounds like there's a real chance for AfD to win the governance of Sachsen-Anhalt, then. Still, that's (a) just one state and (b) still a slim majority that relies on a very different party to help it keep it's coalition. So would expect them not to accomplish much. Maybe this will actually cause their support to break, if they finally win power and people realize... it's still just a regular political party, they're not going to snap their fingers and magically solve everything. They probably can't even significantly affect immigration.
OK, this would be hilarious. And it opens the door for the funniest election ever. Germany wants a president who is has experience building a giant border wall along politically contraversial territory. Someone with huge name recognition, a fresh approach to politics, and no sense of shame. He's got experience, but he'll be a free agent after 2028. He even has (distant) German ancestry, making him potentially eligible for citizenship if they can dig something up. Drumpf for Deutschland, 2028!
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What makes the AfD far-right? They're pro-democracy, they oppose immigration sure- do they want to change the German constitution? Do they support irredentism or want to revoke civil rights from their opponents?
I don't think the AfD is likely to be good at governing, but that is a separate criticism from far-right, which I haven't seen any evidence for.
In most Western cultures, this is far-right, regardless of any other beliefs.
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I’ve for a few years realize I hate labels like far-right or moderate. Those terms are extremely dependent on time and place. Many mainstream Democratic positions were considered crazy when I was growing up. Like basically on the crazy spectrum (Tran stuff) that would be straight to jail and had like 2% support. There are two ways for a party to not be far right. Change positions or move the Overton window. When you getting 42% of the vote then even for time and place your close to the center. One more surge in popularity and AFD is basically centrists.
And probably currently centrists for native Germans.
I was reading some discussion about the recent Tuscon (?) shooter on Reddit. There were no shortage of people calling him far-right after the news about his background broke. Which isn't wrong (radical Islamists do fit a great number of "far-right" definition points!), but it was clearly being used just as a way to further attack the US right wing/MAGA.
Yeah. Classically used for the 'Far-Right Terrorism is the greatest threat' headlines which bulk themselves out with Neonazi prison crimes and 'Radical islamists are against Womens' rights making them far-right' logic.
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Once you realize these labels are for the exclusive benefit of Boomers it all makes a lot more sense.
They're not for anyone else- they barely even vote anyway.
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Right, the AfD appears to be an anti-woke liberal party which opposes immigration. The definition of far right is being opposed to liberalism from a rightward direction(literally).
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Yes, it's called "remigration".
If that's what it takes, then to hell with civil rights.
Setting up the false dichotomy of "Allow Germany to become a muslim country or else you're against civilization" is what gave rise to the AfD in the first place. Of course, it was also the winning strategy that let leftists fatally wound Germany and leave it to bleed out, and the AfD is not going to be able to fix that. But for what little it's worth, I have nothing but bile left for it. Someone says that backing the only movement that still wants a Germany for Germans is doing something wrong? Is doing almost everything wrong? I don't care. They're doing one thing right, even if it's too little and too late. Let everything else burn.
What was asked was whether they have policies that restrict civil rights (this justifying the tag of far right) and they do. It was OP who set that as the criteria for far right and so the Afd is far right, given how far out of the Overton Window disenfranchising millions of people who have been citizens for decades or even generations now is.
You could say that the lax border policy is far left and never called such. But that doesn't mean this isn't far right.
How many people voted for open borders? Is everyone else then far left?
Already discussed down the chain.
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So when the left violates civil rights (eg restricts speech via hate speech laws, limits free association) does that make them far right?
I think deporting millions of citizens is more extreme than passing legislation citizens can repeal (in countries that may not have the same tradition of strong free speech protections as America) is different from repealing the right to vote for millions.
In any case, this has already been answered: no, extreme left-wing actions would be far left, if the media was inclined to use that label. The media declining to do so doesn't make them not far left, nor does it change that certain ethnonationalist policies are also far right.
Well, can you change the legislation if talking about the problem is in fact a crime? Seems like an uphill battle.
But more to the point, I think you are not speaking the same language of the right. They see the granted citizenship as an entitlement; not a right. The position on the right is that these immigrants have no real right to be here and that it was government grace and diktat that permitted it. So now we are rescinding that right.
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Well, yeah, of course it's far right. I never disputed that!
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How is that taking civil rights away? Are borders themselves civil rights violations? Are taxes?
I didn't say mass deportation of e.g. recent asylum seekers and migrants. Remigration is the deportation and denaturalization of citizens who are not of the main ethnic groups in the country.
If that isn't a violation of someone's civil rights nothing is. There's good reasons for citizens to consider this far right.
Honestly, the two get conflated recently. In public discourse, remigration is often just meant to say "make the foreigners go away".
May be in part people hearing what they want to hear, e.g. "they're gonna make the Boriswave go away". But might also be a deliberate thing. It can help to not appear radical, even if you believe that the average person wants the outcome of radical policies.
This works both ways. How am I supposed to know that you didn't mean mass mean mass deportation of e.g. recent asylum seekers and migrants?
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To the degree that the victims of "remigration" are naturalized citizens, there can be little debate that depriving them of citizenship and deporting them to their countries of origin would be a violation of their rights.
Nobody has a right to be in Germany other than actual Germans. If the privilege of being allowed to stay was previously erroneously referred to as such, well, that's unfortunate, but still, out they go.
These people aren't German just because they have a bit of paper saying so that they won from an overly lenient establishment under lax standards.
The current polity which enforces its laws over what is generally recognized to be Germany does not have your concept of "actual Germans". You can argue that naturalized citizens are not really citizens, just as you could argue that the federal republic of Germany does not really exist and you are instead the rightful Kaiser of Germany, but thankfully you would lack the power to enforce either idea (for now, at least).
Furthermore, I would argue that there is value in economic actors such as individuals, companies and states being able to make credible long-term commitments. If I sell you my house, I can't reneg on the sale three years later simply because I changed my mind. If an administration takes up debt, then there is an expectation that future administrations will continue to pay interest for it.
An exception might be if you argued that the entity making the commitment was not of sound mind when they made it. A five-year-old heir signing away their ancestral home for a box full of candy might be able to reneg on the sale later. If Angela Merkel had risen to power through a coup and granted the whole world citizenship in a fit of madness, that would be one thing. But in actuality, the governments which naturalized foreign residents arguably represented the will of the people. The option to not naturalize anyone was on the ballot, it was called NPD and consistently stayed below 5%. Until the AfD came along, having a naturalization path for non-Whites was a broad political consensus.
Not that the AfD would want to get rid of naturalizations either (just constrain it a lot more) and they certainly would not want to remove the citizenship of previously naturalized people (unless where the law already provides such a mechanism) -- at least that is what they say in writing, probably for the purpose of staying a legal party in Germany.
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So you say. So I say. But the law and the majority of the people in Germany say otherwise.
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Perhaps so. But then we have a case of the wrong people having been given those rights, and now they need to be wronged to make things right again.
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I think it’s in the category of a civil right.
The confusion may be thinking in the of an American Declaration of Independence idea of a right coming from God and is guaranteed.
We’ve pretty much have fought over colliding “rights” for centuries in the court.
Personally I like the fact I have a nearly universal right in my current position to throw a dart and a map and I could pretty much go there in a month or two. Not every other human has the right.
Life is not fair. Rights aren’t universal things everyone gets but we still use that terminology of calling them rights.
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