AfD is the most popular party in Germany for the first time, with a record 26%
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It's mostly East Germany. Communism's fuckups in that area are still causing suffering today.
Unfortunately, that's not the only reason. We have 16 Bundesländer (states). 5 of them are in the East. But they have hardly more inhabitants than Bavaria. So a lot of us in the "Real Germany" (the western states) are voting those AHs too.
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I think the problem can be summed up as poll driven politics.
It's a feedback loop, they do focus on a topic some opinion poll has shown to be somewhat popular, the resulting exposure increases popularity, which reflects in the polls, which leads to increased political focus on the topic...
In America at least, this is as a direct result of corporate media and money in politics both controlling the narrative. None of this was naturally occurring.
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its a few factors in play, one is the normalization of far-right policies by the other big parties (SPD, Greens, Union) and their inability to fix the damage caused by the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of anti-migrant beliefs in the german working class, and a few others
i think this video explains well the rise of the AfD in germany, at this point its only a matter of time until one or more parties decide to make a coalition with the AfD
nd their inability to fix the damage caused by the financial crisis of 2008
That's absolutely not it. Germany went through the crisis of 2008 like a breeze. In 2015 during the refugee crisis, Merkel decided to open our borders to all of the refugees. Before that, the AfD had below 10% of the voters on their side. But a huge chunk of the population did not agree to Merkel's refugee policies. That's when the AfD took off. And now we can't get rif of them
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In America at least, this is as a direct result of corporate media and money in politics both controlling the narrative. None of this was naturally occurring.
Not that different in Germany. The biggest difference in the media landscape, difference, the pretty large public broadcasters aren't really a difference, because their governing bodies and leadership positions are stuffed with (ex) politicians and their relatives.
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Not that different in Germany. The biggest difference in the media landscape, difference, the pretty large public broadcasters aren't really a difference, because their governing bodies and leadership positions are stuffed with (ex) politicians and their relatives.
Same thing here, but with basically every industry and not just news media. We call it the "revolving door" effect.
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Same thing here, but with basically every industry and not just news media. We call it the "revolving door" effect.
The revolving door effect is separate from large political parties' influence on public broadcasters, but it exists, too. It, and many other forms of legalised corruption, has led to an erosion of trust in politicians and political institutions in which the Nazis of the AfD thrieve.
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As a crimson lining, I hope the United State's decay will teach Germany to destroy the AfD and all other right wingers. They are a poison to civilization.
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I've been watching AfD grow for years. They aren't the ruling party now, but will be soon enough. Maybe German democracy is strong enough to resist Fascism, maybe not. Only time will tell for sure.
Strongest Power doesnt mean ruling power here.
And they will not get into power unless the Union partys want to betrail all their voters even more than they have always been doing. Which will trigger a full on uprising.And even if they are in power the states can block almost everything they do. Germanys constitutional court also has lots of say and can stop things and isnt appointed by the partys unlike in the US
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So their policy documents etc are lies? Based on what?
Their policy documents are half-truths that point in a direction, their speeches in front of followers are often more to the point.
And these quote collections are really all over the German-language interwebs, e.g. https://www.watson.ch/international/rechtsextremismus/291420759-rechtsextremismus-in-der-afd-diese-21-zitate-sprechen-fuer-sich
And guess what kind of materials court proceedings against Afd would be based on? Quotes and overheard conversations.
Ok so you do mean illegal immigrants.
I don't. People aren't "illegal", unless you dabble in dehumanizing language.
Can someone apply for asylum in Germany without illegally entering the country?
No, with the
A quick google shows that that is what the AfD are proposing - asylum seekers apply before entering the country.
It's a fairly transparent proposal to remove the rights of asylum seekers for any kind of due process and remove any kind of oversight. Regular German judges, lawyers, civil-rights organizations will all be far away.
Some private operator will get rich off running an internment camp. An airline will get rich off the flights there.
"The refugee doesn't care at which border he dies, the Greek or German." - Günter Lenhardt, AfD
Germany isn’t an island so that shouldn’t be too difficult, and seems reasonable.
Germany is part of the EU, Germany is part of the Schengen agreement that is supposed to guarantee free movement within Europe, and Germany should help the EU as a whole succeed. The latter includes integrating refugees into the society.
large number of people who are not granted asylum just staying illegally, as the current situation in the USA shows.
How do people that just live and go to work hurt the system? (I.e. the vastest majority of undocumented and overstaying immigrants.)
Yeah, and the US is currently doing a bang-up job deporting family father of 3 with no priors while not getting ahold of people who actually are criminal. (Iirc, 90% of the nameless, supposed "worst of the worst" gang members recently from the US had no priors.)
Incidentally, on a much smaller scale, so is Germany: Deporting the easy people, the people who show up to appointments and live at their registered place of residence.
They try to deport illegals who have lived there for 13+ years without even attempting to get asylum, and everyone blows up at them saying they should just leave them alone.
Possibly because these people likely are a net positive to society, have built a life, have friends, have integrated to a degree, just normal humaning.
If someone wants to rent my property I don’t let them stay in it while I process their application.
Cool story.
Ok so you basically want unregulated immigration and think that any attempts to stop it is nazi-adjacent, or just straight up nazi behaviour.
people aren’t “illegal”
Way to argue in bad faith. People can be “illegal immigrants” which is what is being discussed. Illegal immigrants are immigrants that entered the country illegally. They broke the law. No one is saying a person is illegal. Thats the very definition of a bad faith argument, intentionally cherry picking words out of context and acting like they mean something that they don’t so you can attack them and/or the poster.
Making a process for asylum seekers to get approval to enter the country before entering the country isn’t “removing rights of asylum seekers for due process” in any way. It’s giving them due process to enter the country rather than letting them in and then having to go through endless processes to remove them if they’re not granted asylum. It makes sense. It’s the smart thing to do. It fixes many issues with the current system. What rights do you think it takes away?
deporting father of 3 with no priors
You mean the MS-13 gang member who has lived in the country illegally for 13 years without any attempt to become a legal citizen, who had twice been ordered to be deported back to his home country, where he now is? That “Maryland father”?
Like I said, your position is that all immigration should be legal. Thats a position alright, but it’s a very unpopular one that only the furthest of the far left advocate for. It’s no wonder why you claim that a party who want to control immigration are Nazis and should be banned from becoming too popular.
Cool story
So you didn’t get the point that was being made, or you have no way to refute it?
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Also, the heads of most of the polling institutes are openly right leaning.
RTL and their head is more than just "right leaning"
Remember the call? "We have to do everything in our power to destroy the greens and spd. Help the FDP and our other ally"
Springer is such a huge problem. No one would be remorsed if the entire springer empire got sucked up by a black hole -
Honest question, what was wrong with the denazification that was carried out? Did they have any historical example to compare to?
The so called Schreibtisch Nazis werent punished eventhough they were just as part of the holocaust, helping it moving and working, as the once not in an office.
East germany, did it even worse imo. The soviets recruited not just scientists and some spies. They recruited Gestapo and SS members, helped them shred their past and unpunished recruited them for the SaSi.
Also not teaching it "our people did this and we have to make sure it doesnt happen again" but "we were the victims and didnt have anything to do with the nazis"And then add a butchered integration. Butchering and slaughtering the rest of wealth from east germany in the 90s. Fertal ground for those types of idiological spreaders that came from the west. And now we see their flower bloom...
And ugly smelling brown rotting rotfruit -
Put looting the east via Treuhand on that list...
Treuhand was a disgrace
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I'm an American. I really hope the German masses can learn this lesson before it"s too late.
But you guys need to counter the hateful messaging against immigrants with an equally effective message against the people with power/money, otherwise, fascism is likely to win in the long run against neoliberalism [...]
This is exactly it. However, I am not too optimistic about centrist politicians/media/society coming to that conclusion. We are complacent and scared and would rather keep our heads in the sand and blame minorities instead of addressing the underlying structural issues.
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But how much longer does AfD's popularity line keep going up before the government does start working? Do we even expect the current government to be meaningfully different from the previous in that regard?
4 years comes quicker than you think.
I am expecting the incoming government to do a much worse job than the outgoing one, regarding actually addressing the underlying structural problems that lead us here.
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Germans literally have so many choices of political parties that they can actually elect, why do they have to go for the worst one AfD?
I want to give oen example of how people on the fence can up on the wrong side, radicalized if you will. For the record I’m as far left as I can get. I support a lof of humanitarian causes and respect the decisions of others, particularly in sexuality or individual personal definitions. Be what you want, do what you want, be good, be fair. It’s easier than being rotten.
I’m only a resident of Germany, so every two years I need to renew my residency card, the Awshfksoyngelelemdn, or whatever that alphabet soup is called. I began the process 3 months before I was set to expire (Nov 2024). Surely, that would be enough time to get shit done at a rathaus that refuses to do any of this online. Oof, so wrong. JULY was the first appointment they would give me. My residency expired in April. No problem, they said. I can still live here since I made the appointment, just don’t leave Germany. I must leave Germany as that’s my job and why they moved me here from the US years back.
I begged to understand why the wait times are so long and the answer I got, from the rathaus, was that refugees from Syria and Palestine have been given the opportunity to migrate to my town and their processing is a priority. The only way I can get around that, to get an earlier appointment, would be to stand in the line when they open at 7:30am-12:00pm, M-F. I went there at 7am and the line wrapped around the block. I asked the person in the front of the line what time they got there. 4am.
I came back another day, at 4am, and got shit done, but that’s a huge brick in the wall for people already pissed they have to share with the lesser fortunate. I sucked it up. I get what they’re doing. But when Germans see just how poorly this is all being managed, they start listening to the assholes that promise to fix that… at all costs.
It’s a fkn drag. I had much higher hopes for Germany when I moved here, but now I’m left wondering what my next move is going to be. I refuse to be ruled by racist idiots. It’s a big reason behind why I happily left the US. Only hope will be that everyone sees the US administration tripping over their own dicks and come to their senses, but I’ve really lost faith after the 2024 election cycle.
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I want to give oen example of how people on the fence can up on the wrong side, radicalized if you will. For the record I’m as far left as I can get. I support a lof of humanitarian causes and respect the decisions of others, particularly in sexuality or individual personal definitions. Be what you want, do what you want, be good, be fair. It’s easier than being rotten.
I’m only a resident of Germany, so every two years I need to renew my residency card, the Awshfksoyngelelemdn, or whatever that alphabet soup is called. I began the process 3 months before I was set to expire (Nov 2024). Surely, that would be enough time to get shit done at a rathaus that refuses to do any of this online. Oof, so wrong. JULY was the first appointment they would give me. My residency expired in April. No problem, they said. I can still live here since I made the appointment, just don’t leave Germany. I must leave Germany as that’s my job and why they moved me here from the US years back.
I begged to understand why the wait times are so long and the answer I got, from the rathaus, was that refugees from Syria and Palestine have been given the opportunity to migrate to my town and their processing is a priority. The only way I can get around that, to get an earlier appointment, would be to stand in the line when they open at 7:30am-12:00pm, M-F. I went there at 7am and the line wrapped around the block. I asked the person in the front of the line what time they got there. 4am.
I came back another day, at 4am, and got shit done, but that’s a huge brick in the wall for people already pissed they have to share with the lesser fortunate. I sucked it up. I get what they’re doing. But when Germans see just how poorly this is all being managed, they start listening to the assholes that promise to fix that… at all costs.
It’s a fkn drag. I had much higher hopes for Germany when I moved here, but now I’m left wondering what my next move is going to be. I refuse to be ruled by racist idiots. It’s a big reason behind why I happily left the US. Only hope will be that everyone sees the US administration tripping over their own dicks and come to their senses, but I’ve really lost faith after the 2024 election cycle.
It's really tiring how all-or-nothing political parties like to be. Your choices are:
· Help everyone, thus straining our resources thin and barely helping anyone
· Fucking kill anyone who so much looks at usI personally think "help yourself first so you can help others better". How are you expected to take care of humanitarian issues when your own country is unraveled? You're having your own humanitarian issue!
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nd their inability to fix the damage caused by the financial crisis of 2008
That's absolutely not it. Germany went through the crisis of 2008 like a breeze. In 2015 during the refugee crisis, Merkel decided to open our borders to all of the refugees. Before that, the AfD had below 10% of the voters on their side. But a huge chunk of the population did not agree to Merkel's refugee policies. That's when the AfD took off. And now we can't get rif of them
So AfD took off because Germans are largely racist, great look
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*In an opinion poll
I mean lets not confuse an opinion poll with the truth. These things regularly get things a couple points off. In fact that’s the norm.
They were quite accurate the last few elections though... Maybe 1% off, but that's it.
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Shit, in the US a $1000 deductible is what you get with pretty good insurance. My employer has a few plans and only one has a deductible below $1000.
Not to say that's good. Just pointing out that the US has succumbed to capitalism.
Shit, in the US a $1000 deductible is what you get with pretty good insurance
US is not my standard when it comes to healthcare.
Everyone in germany pays 14% of his income as health insurance, you do not have a choice (except for a few people), there is a MASSIVE amount of money in the system. It's just wasted left and right, so introducing a deductible is just the dumbest thing ever.
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Ok so you basically want unregulated immigration and think that any attempts to stop it is nazi-adjacent, or just straight up nazi behaviour.
people aren’t “illegal”
Way to argue in bad faith. People can be “illegal immigrants” which is what is being discussed. Illegal immigrants are immigrants that entered the country illegally. They broke the law. No one is saying a person is illegal. Thats the very definition of a bad faith argument, intentionally cherry picking words out of context and acting like they mean something that they don’t so you can attack them and/or the poster.
Making a process for asylum seekers to get approval to enter the country before entering the country isn’t “removing rights of asylum seekers for due process” in any way. It’s giving them due process to enter the country rather than letting them in and then having to go through endless processes to remove them if they’re not granted asylum. It makes sense. It’s the smart thing to do. It fixes many issues with the current system. What rights do you think it takes away?
deporting father of 3 with no priors
You mean the MS-13 gang member who has lived in the country illegally for 13 years without any attempt to become a legal citizen, who had twice been ordered to be deported back to his home country, where he now is? That “Maryland father”?
Like I said, your position is that all immigration should be legal. Thats a position alright, but it’s a very unpopular one that only the furthest of the far left advocate for. It’s no wonder why you claim that a party who want to control immigration are Nazis and should be banned from becoming too popular.
Cool story
So you didn’t get the point that was being made, or you have no way to refute it?
Ok so you basically want unregulated immigration and think that any attempts to stop it is nazi-adjacent, or just straight up nazi behaviour.
Nice strawman! Where did you buy it? I usually get mine at Aldi's, but I've recently wondered whether I should switch up.
On a more serious note: Of course, immigration should be controlled. It should not be cut off though.
Way to argue in bad faith. People can be “illegal immigrants” which is what is being discussed.
Absolutely in good faith. There's a reason why this specific phrase was coined: It's a derogatory term to criminalize people who are usually fleeing their home countries. And often enough, it's even shortened to "illegals", making the intended dehumanization even more blatant.
Making a process for asylum seekers to get approval to enter the country before entering the country isn’t “removing rights of asylum seekers for due process” in any way.
Now that's a bad-faith argument! Again, that process usually centers around "welcome centers" or whatever the euphemism du jour is, in other words: offshored internment camps. I suspect there may be reasons why Italy's Albanian camp project and the UK's Rwandan camp project were each struck down by courts multiple times. Notably, cost projection for both of these were rather interesting too.
You mean the MS-13 gang member who has lived in the country illegally for 13 years without any attempt to become a legal citizen, who had twice been ordered to be deported back to his home country, where he now is?
Don't know the specific case; is that the case with the photoshopped knuckle tattoo though?
In any case, I was referring the sort of average profile of a person that ends up in getting deported. Statistically, the chances of the deported being violent criminals is getting much lower, the higher the number of deportations. And that's pretty logical: most people are not actually criminal, and if you're just deporting to juice the stats, you'll obviously deport those people you can arrest easily. Deportations are shit tool if your goal is justice, and they are extremely easy to abuse.
Like I said, your position is that all immigration should be legal.
Lol. "Like I said, your position is", even to you that wording should be cue.
Cool story
So you didn’t get the point that was being made, or you have no way to refute it?
Your experience as a landlord seemed irrelevant to the topic.
It’s no wonder why you claim that a party who want to control immigration are Nazis and should be banned from becoming too popular.
Shall we recap this discussion between the two of us?
- You called people who are in favor of disbanding the Afd party "nazis" and "fascists".
- I named a number of policy positions held by this party and its representatives that are in fact putting them fairly close to historic Nazism.
- I asked whether these sorts of positions were positions that could reasonably be called democratic.
- You claimed that your comment was being distorted by my listing of their policy. (Also that you were being called a nazi. Actually, where?)
- When we were done with that, you picked one of the policy and tried to disect it.
- We've been conversing about the finer legal details of pointlessly hurting and, in effect, often killing, people since.
- Now you feel you've reduced ad absurdo enough and built yourself a few strawmen.
- You claim that I am a nazi (capital N?).
I'd still love to know, what you think of the positions that I wrote up above. Just take them at face value Are those positions of a normal democratic party that should remain allowed?
I am copying what I wrote above again:
the people who want everyone with the wrong kind of mustache to be deported, who want citizenships revoked, who want to "remove the outmoded political party system", who are already obstructing the judicial system in Thuringia, who want to defund public media because it's "too woke", who want to gut universities because they are "too woke", who want to fuck up the environment because - guess what - also "woke", and who want to overthrow the constitutional order
