This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Germany:
German media are overwhelmingly one-sided on the Israel-Gaza issue: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/150352?context=8#context
Berlin has seen a series of riots by pro-Palestinian leftists and muslims. Reactions are predictable - indignation about violence, worry about antisemitism, the left ignoring and the right emphasizing the role immigrants play here.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, our head of government (no, Merkel is gone, for real), has done exactly what anyone would predict - toured the middle east in general and Israel especially, gave speeches there as well as at home, and generally took a hard line against Hamas, against antisemitism, in favor of Israel, and against Putin. And, fulfilling expectations, he announced nothing material.
Sahra Wagenknecht, hitherto leading member of the leftist Die Linke party, in the past a self-described stalinist, now an outdated socialist who failed to get with the woke times, aims to found her own party. The woman has a reputation as someone with actual ideals and principles of her own, which allowed her to stand out and earn a modicum of admiration on left and right alike. Her founding her own party is thus likely to draw at least some supporters away from Die Linke as well as from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. The current leadership of Die Linke, a party in steep decline, is outraged, calling this an ego trip. The AfD, flying high in polls, seems largely unbothered. The founding is supposed to take place on next monday.
In other news, the head of the German Union Association, Yasmin Fahimi, called the AfD - a party with strong support among unionized workers - the enemy of the workers, for its racism.
And I just heard on the Radio that two Bavarian companies will soon launch satellite-bearing rockets from a ship in the North Sea.
What do you think is the likelihood of an AfD victory in the 2024 elections? In the polls I've seen they're still only hitting around 20%, are there clear other parties that would coalition with them? If there are enough common supporters between Die Linke and AfD that a Wagenknecht's new party could draw voters from both, is there some kind of weird horseshoe theory possible alliance between the parties or are there differences just too huge?
0%. Even assuming that nothing could possibly go amiss in the electoral procedure itself, I'm nigh-certain that the members of parliament would rather invite foreign occupation, a Bundeswehr coup or four years of non-stop leftist rioting in the Bundestag than actually permit an AfD-led government to take office. It's unthinkable.
No. To many, and especially to almost everyone in media and politics outside of the AfD itself, the AfD is the second coming of the NSDAP. It's like a more grim and dead-serious variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome, in that respect. All other parties, except for on the communal level, are their sworn enemies and they can't condone their existence, much less cooperate with them or even form a coalition, without backpedaling over everything they've spent the last decade saying. And alienating most of their own voters. And most of the voters they'd ever hope to attract. Any success the AfD has in cooperating with anyone whatsoever happens away from the cameras, away from federal and state-level politics - anywhere further up or closer to the limelight and they're seen as a bunch of literally evil retards, and failing to condemn them is about on a level with going to bed with Hitler himself.
The biggest common denominator is being old-school working class with an interesting in class warfare. Other than that they can both draw from segments of the population that failed to get on board with the new paradigms, i.e., people who haven't yet buried the nation-state, from anti-establishment types who care more about sticking it to the man than about left and right, from a small pool of voters who genuinely believe that it's the moderates who are wrong and it takes extremism of whatever kind to save the country. Sorta horseshoe-ish, yeah. But in the end this idiosyncratic common pool remains fairly small and is difficult to address, so the main overlap is blue-collar workers.
So, an alliance? With Wagenknecht being a true believer in only-she-knows-what, anything is possible. But I doubt it. It would surprise me. She's too firmly rooted in the left, and if she has any political sense whatsoever she knows not to test her followers' allegiance by cozying up to what is, to many of them, their mortal political enemy. What's more, the German working class is rapidly becoming very un-german, and I doubt you can get many blue-collar immigrants to support allies of the far-right.
Furthermore, in my assessment, she won't get far. She has her fans, and I suppose novelty may be on her side for a short while, but her pool of potential supporters is drying up. Even in her unusual ways, she's old-school, a being from another time. Maybe the time for yet another new party taking over the German far-left is at hand, but I don't think it'll be hers. She gets outsized media attention because she's photogenic, politically tolerable and an unusual specimen, but her actual political punching power has never been that great and I don't see that changing just because she founds a new party.
Obviously I might have to eat my hat on those predictions; but that's a future that I just can't see coming right now.
My understanding is that Wagenknecht is charismatic, has ideals and is also impossible to work with.
Otherwise even a party as dysfunctional as Die Linke would have gone all in on her.
I assume that her new party will flounder for the same reasons. If she was great at setting up alliances, keeping a tight ship and knowing when to make deals with whom … she would already be running Die Linke today.
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