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Wagenknecht, hitherto leading member of the leftist Die Linke party, in the past a self-described stalinist, now an outdated socialist who failed to get with the woke times, aims to found her own party.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.
A few years ago a bunch of antifa punks wrote "No votes for the AfD" in giant glaring letters on public infrastructure in plain view from my window. So far the authorities have not removed this slogan, and since then I have been voting for the AfD and I intend to continue to do so until it is removed.
Now, if that weren't the case, and I had to choose between those two?
Probably still the AfD, if only to nudge the Overton window away from the left. I guess I'm alright with the AfD for as long as it takes to make the other parties crack down on immigration. Sadly nothing that happened in Germany has so far been able to achieve this - everyone except the AfD is pro-immigration in some way, or at least was, until very recently. It's only with the recent waves of anti-zionism and anti-semitism that the non-left parties have begun to propose anti-immigration measures. Too little, too late, for the wrong reasons, and I don't believe that they'll go through with it or keep it up once the current outrage has passed. The bigger the AfD gets, the more pressure it puts on the other parties to oppose immigration in general, and that's worth putting up with their lack of platform, decorum, intellect and qualification.
Supporting Wagenknecht, on the other hand, at best temporarily weakens Die Linke, while not actually doing anything to pressure the other parties into shifting their positions. Alright, that's assuming it goes as I predict and her new party goes under shortly. Assuming that it's here to stay and that it magically replaces the left altogether...I guess that's a slight win, since her positions are less absurd? But I really, really don't expect that to happen.
If immigration weren't an issue and nobody had turned my home office view into political propaganda, then I'd support other parties entirely, but I guess I am a two-issue voter for the time being.
Well, if the mainstream press is to be believed, then the AfD will also ruin the country economically, which should reduce pull factors and encourage immigrants and the rootless to emigrate again. Together with whatever immigration restrictions may ever be implemented, this may serve to make the country unattractive enough for the low-fertility native Germans to keep it as theirs for a while longer.
This is nonsense, of course. In my blackpilled view Germany is doomed either way. It's too late for benign ethnonationalism, nobody's got the spine for meritocratic civic nationalism, and whatever else is coming will have little to do with the Germany of yesteryear. But I'm sentimental and spiteful and I'd rather see the ship sink in the name of the people who built it than have its fate decided by a bunch of pirates, mutineers and stowaways.
And I get to hold such pointless views because in the end, I'm just one voter among very many and nobody's listening to me anyways.
Or did you want some kind of detached, impersonal perspective? If so, please specify parameters.
No. The government in general is not respected enough to actually have that kind of impact. Some very fundamental things about politics in Germany would have to change; it requires a very different political landscape (i.e., less fragmented and with institutions less captured by the left), a different kind of politician (not the kind of spineless grifters and bumbling ideologues we presently have), and a different public attitude towards politics (i.e., seeing the government as more than a money redistribution device).
I suspect it would take either a foreign invasion of Poland or even Germany, or a gentle Bundeswehr coup followed by a velvet-gloved non-democracy, or someone very charismatic with cross-partisan appeal reaching Germans and others who dwell in Germany on an emotional level. Right now the natives are too anti-national and the migrants are too detached from Germany as a nation, and the politicans either have contrary commitments or different interests.
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