Just looking at the people around me (mostly colleagues, I’m not friends with this kind of people) it’s no surprise, when just about anything triggers them to vote AfD. Some actual examples:
“We have a vegetarian day at the cafeteria now. Stupid Greens forcing me to not eat meat one day a week. I’m going to vote AfD next election.”
“They built a new bicycle lane on my way to work. Now I’m forced to stick to the speed limit because of all the bicyclists on MY road blocking me. It’s a straight street, I should be able to go 80 even though it’s inner city. I’ve always been going 80 there! Stupid Greens, I’m going to vote AfD next election.”
“Supplier X stopped issuing their bikini model calendar. Everything is forbidden nowadays! Noone ever cared for bikini model calenders, but the Greens want to forbid every little piece of fun. Stupid woke culture. I’m going to vote AfD.”
And let’s not forget that one boss who told me that my life-threatening nut allergy was woke nonsense, because back in his day “everybody just ate what’s on the table and noone died, but nowadays everybody has to feel special by making up things they won’t eat.”
They just want to go back to 1950s culture, when gay people, trans people, allergies, ADHD, autism, veganism, climate change and anything other than straight white dudes and straight white housewives “didn’t exist”, because how dare the world be more complex than a Rosamunde Pilcher movie.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” – Franklin Leonard
They want to return to 1950s, but they will return to 1930s. And not only in Germany. Stupid people have no clue what dictators always do.
Specifically, 1939.
I’m genuinely sorry your boss said that to you, but it sounds so fucking ridiculous I laughed. Jesus. Imagine being so stupid that someone might die.
You know what the worst thing is? He wasn’t the only one by far. Later at a different company another Teamleader told me I have to go out to eat with everybody. When I said the restaurant isn’t save for me (lots of nuts on the menu), he just said I HAVE to come and that’s what the Epipen is there for. I complained to HR and the HR lady asked why I don’t just do a therapy against allergies. Told me about some esoteric bullshit that’s supposed to cure all allergies and advised me to do that so I can better fit in with the company culture.
This has to be the most toxic employer in Germany. I had some shit jobs, especially when I was younger, but this is insane.
I want to come throw hands on all these people for you!
Bavaria?
NRW. Rheinland, um genau zu sein. Hier gibt es auch seeehr viele “Wir haben das schon immer so gemacht”-Leute.
Rheinische Frohnatur halt 😉
Well, to bring some darker thoughts to the topic: Most fascist movements are also very, very inclined on their interpretation of darwinism, so… “weak” people dying off may for them be more a feature than a bug
Also highlights we don’t live in a meritocracy if this clown is in charge of others.
You guys gotta be more like America on the bike lanes one.
Just have crippling, insane traffic, where it takes you three hours to move five (5) city blocks (this has actually happened to me).
Suddenly, a new bike lane gets you across the city in 26 minutes.
It made the bike lanes very popular, haha.
As an American, I don’t think people will support bike lanes even then
The German mindset to capitulate in the face of challenges that cant be solved by doing how things where allways done (since kohl).
By god, nobody wants things like wealth and inheritance taxes to be done like way back when (when they existed).
Ok, unfair the majority of Germans wants them, but this great democracy continuously produces Governments for and by the 1% irrespective of your vote.
Both the US and Germany want to return to their fascist roots it seems
Decades of capitalist decay and anti-communist propaganda will do that.
Don’t forget about Russia. It is already there and leading in its effort to turn some countries into the same political system, making thereby these countries their puppets aka satellites.
Mass immigration into a housing shortage in order to push down wages, artificially invert the Phillips curve, and prop up housing prices will as well. I assume rising support for the afd is mostly the young.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/housing-index
https://recruitonomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/DE3-Net-migration-1024x565.png
The see the US and realize it’s possible to do it all over again.
Why hasn’t the German government shut them down? I thought they had anti-fascist laws on their books.
There are multiple factors at play.
- The government is incompetent and the Nazis are playing them like a fiddle by setting the public agenda aided by incompetent and complicit media. (That the Nazis’ economic agenda, more money for the rich, isn’t all that differnet from that of the established parties helps with this, because this renders them unable of countering the Nazis’ lies about foreigners being to blame for the economic hardships of the masses without harming themselves)
- The government consists of greedy, power hungry bastards who think they can use the Nazis to their advantage. (Some lie to themselves that they can steal votes from them by parroting their rhetoric, some use the spectre of cooperating with the Nazis to pressure other parties into cooperation with them instead)
- The government consists of opportunistic cowards who are afraid of angering the Nazi voters and/or losing the court case for a ban of the Nazi party.
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.
Hopefully yes. But not very likely as the cdU/csU are getting more and more open to cooperate with the afd. I’m afraid we are in the last legaslative term without an afd-ridden coalition.
This is such a U.S. way of reporting things.
74% of people don’t want to be part of AfD.
One out every four people you meet being a literal nazi is tough tho
sadly, it’s basically expected that about 15-30% of the population are far-right xenophobes. the question is how well they can be mobilized.
US: what about one out of every two?
More like 1 in 3, many people didn’t or couldn’t vote
I disagree. The nazis leading the polls is very disturbing.
It’s not. 74% are also not working on convincing disgruntled voters that AfD is just a shitsandwich and not an alternative that would improve anything. 26% for a single party that didn’t exist for long is huge and just shows how sick Germans are of the usual cdu/csu/spd/green/fdp bullshit.
The infuriating thing is that AfD voters would probably be better off with dieLinke.
Ive really been trying but every time theres a worse quagmire of information to wade through. “Like literal Trump fans. Jews own everything. Democracy is cool and all but really… sometimes we need other measures.” Theres just no way to talk back. Or even interact when in comes to politics.
No surprise considering CDU/CSU fucking up shit for the broad population from day one. They even suggested a 1000€ deductible for the health insurance.
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.
That isn’t pretty good insurance.
It’s what most employees will settle for.
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.
pretty good usually mean somewhat expensive too.
Yep, costly for the enrollees and their emoyers.
It’s similar in the UK currently. The UK’s equivalent of AfD is Reform UK who are apparently the leading party in the polls (source):
Reform UK in front on 25%, Labour on 23% and the Conservatives on 20%, with the Lib Dems on 16% and Greens on 10%
The next UK election must be held in about four years. The only elections this year will be by-elections (notorious for elevating micro-parties due to protest votes) and local government elections (where Reform has done poorly, since they don’t really have more than a handful of candidates who aren’t local cranks and Nazis). Where I live, the local-government protest votes has swung seats from Labour to the Greens, and to a lesser extent, the LibDems; the right hasn’t had much success.
It should also be noted that the UK press is very rightwing and is constantly promoting Fromage.
True, it’s a long time until the next UK general election. Maybe Reform’s vote will suffer before then. Alternatively the local elections and by-elections could be a boost for them, I dunno.
Anyway, maybe we should have proportional representation in the UK. Even if Reform had 25% of the vote and therefore 25% of the seats in parliament, that would mean that 75% of parliamentarians wouldn’t be Reform members.
Our current system allows a party with minority support (potentially Reform in the future) to win a majority of parliamentary seats. In 2019, the Conservatives won 44% of the vote, which gave them 56% of seats. Last year, Labour won 34% of the vote, which gave them 63% of seats.
Many reform voters are old men. Many will die between here and 4 years with the state of the NHS
And stil the state refuses to ban them, refuses to arrest and sentence their leaders.
It will be Weimar 2.0 with liberals being either too incompetent or too unwilling to stop fascism.
Fascism is not stopped at the podium or in parliament. It is stopped with bullets and bombs. The longer you wait the more bullets and bombs it will take and the more lives it will cost. We need a new, this time thorough, denazification.
Liberal does not mean leftist outside of the USA. Liberal actually means what is called libertarian in the USA.
I have not called liberals leftist and never would. I’m not on that American brainrot.
in most contexts here ive heard “liberal” used to describe neoliberalism rather then leftism or libertarianism (though I know many conservatives in the US use it as a catch all for the left)
I’m American and I use the term “liberal” specifically to refer to neoliberals. I’m probably in the minority, though, especially given Fox News and GamerGate calling everything they don’t like “liberal”.
bullets and bombs
I think it’s enough to just do: arrests of leaders (and banning them from public speaking but for life) + breaking up the party + outlawing the party + banning people who decide to take up the mantle of/act as a declared proxy for the party and attempt to visibly pick up where they left off.
That last one I learned from my own country’'s current situation: in Romania, a crazy far right candidate came out of nowhere (on the wings of illegal undisclosed campaign donations) to win the first round, and as soon as that happened our mainstream far right party’s candidate started supporting him. Then they canceled the election because of the undisclosed donations (he literally declared 0 campaign spending!) so now, in the redo of the election, this other guy is basically running as his proxy and will likely try to appoint him PM if he wins.
Ideally arrests and executions will be enough. I think letting fascists live out their lives in prison is too dangerous. Too many political enemies have been released historically after government changes. Hitler himself didn’t even have to serve for life and was released early.
Weimar was a small civil war between soldiers who returned from WW1. That’s why both the left and the right had fighters. Where should the fighters who shoot the bullets come from now?
The fascists came to power because the elite feared that the communists could win. Otherwise, despite massive manipulation, the fascists never got an absolute majority.
There are many issues that other parties simply ignore. There would be far less voteres for the AfD if the other parties would listen. The AfD started with the demand that the rules about euro stability shouldn’t be ignored. That’s not a fascist position.
The other parties are not taking up AfDs made up causes because they are made up.
For example:
A sack of potatoes falls.
AfD: Foreigners are causing the sacks to fall! We must gas them! And the jews!
Other parties: This is so stupid it doesn’t even warrant a response.
General public: but the foreigners!!111!1!!!11 and the potatoes!!1! I am outraged!!!111!!!
Unfortunately, the other parties are very well taking up the Nazis’ lies. The Nazis are playing the political establishment like a fiddle.
To stick with your example of the potato sack, the established parties do just jump the Nazi bandwagon and parrot their narrative in a less extreme manner, like “Illegal immigrants kicking over potato sacks is a severe problem, we need to protect our potato sacks by border controls and increased deportations.”
Just as one AfD politician remarked last year, (after the election in Thuringia, if I recall right) the AfD is ruling without actually being in the government.
This reflects American politics as well.
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.
Not that different in Germany. The biggest difference in the media landscape, 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.
I don’t think that you make a good point if you yourself make up your point. Please quote the AfD to avoid all doubt.
Of course. Here is an AfD quote:
Sieg Heil! Gas the jews!
Hope that makes it clearer.
Don’t you see that false quotes undermine your position?
But it isn’t false. They are literal nazis and say literal nazi things.
Several offices for the protection of the constitution of the German Länder (they are a kind of anti-extremist intelligence services, in case you don’t know) have found them to be “assuredly right-wing-extremists”, which is the worst possible classification the law recognises.
Again. Literal, actual, nazis.
Yes. That’s why you should quote what they literally say. It’s not a quote if you write what you think they say.
But starting and organizing a violent opposition seem like so much effort. And I really have to finish some shows I’ve been watching.
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There can be no tolerance against intolerance, it’s a paradox.
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So according to you, 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 Thurinigia, 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 are not the fascists?
Fwiw, German law explicitly allows the government to ask the constitutional court to check whether a party behaves consistently with constitutional order, and if not, outlawing them based on that. The German constitution includes some learnings from WWII: This includes a paragraphs on non-discrimination, on the individual right to asylum, on outlawing parties that threaten to overthrow the constitutional order.
Did you just delete my comment and reply to it so no one can see what I actually said, while completely fabricating the message of what I said? Lol
I had multiple reports on the comment, you know, you called people here “nazis”. I don’t know in what sense you feel mischaracterized though. There is no direct or indirect quote from you in my comment.
The question still stands though: We have a group of people that exhibits a bunch of characteristics of nazis (see above). And you say that the people who don’t like them are the nazis.
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I am not the one you are asking, but personally, in my honest opinion: An “emergency government”, lets say with a 20 year term, removing far right parties, doing the necessary changes to massively reduce our climate impact and prepare for the ineviteable fallout from climate change and doing other reforms wouldn’t be THAT bad of an idea…
Yeah, “emergency powers” have never caused any problems in the past …
What else can you do when > 50% of the population is unwilling to help solving the single most dangerous problem in human history?
Not sure, but installing an unelected goverment and abolishing elections for 20 years is literally fighting fascism with fascism, so let’s not do that.
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I am a bit fatalistic and perhaps a bit on the doomer side, but i am pretty sure we will get fascism one way or the other soon… and if this is ineviteable, i am very much in favour of installing ecofascism instead of other forms.
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Yup, can not deny that
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No, what i am dalking about is: We WILL see a rise of an authoritarian party in germany in the near future, as we see with many countries worldwide at the moment. And i say: IF we are already doomed to have an authoritarian / fascist regime, i prefer it to be on the ecofascist side. And if there will be an opportunity for such an regime, well, i WILL support it.
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I don’t think you know what authoritarianism actually is.
I have relatives in China and Vietnam and lived in both places for extended periods of time… well, let’s just say i have a rough estimate…
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Using bullets and bombs would make the rest not better than the fascists, so lets not use them.
We don’t need to be tolerant to the intolerant.
No it wouldn’t, it would make you smart enough to speak to the fascists in the only language they understand. Words don’t work against fascists because they don’t care what words mean. Better to defend yourself now while you still can.
Once they take power, the only thing that can stop them is bullets and bombs. And Fascists do have a nasty habit of shooting first, if you let them.
War and violence have existed long before fascism. It’s not their invention or monopoly.
True. But I don’t want the world to be that bad. I want to live without war and violence.
AfD is using fascist manipulation using propaganda (always putting immigrants and immigrant attacks in the spotlight) to gain power and discriminate immigrants even more, causing more retaliation which in turn makes people give the AfD even more power.
In a tolerant society we should not be tolerant of such intolerance.
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, as we just saw in America after our long-term experiment with neoliberalism, which really kicked off in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
In the 1990s, the American Democrats felt so defeated after having lost big time to Reagan and Bush Sr., so Bill Clinton decided the Democrats cannot “unilatterally disarm” and must start taking corporate money. This acceptance of corporate money led to their idiology becoming the same as Reagan’s idiology, and then the Republican party being bith opportunists and contrarians, took advantage of that situation by shifting further and further right (see: the ratchet effect), until they openly became fascists.
I’m not too familiar with German politics, but if anything I said applies, then heed my warning.
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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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.
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 us
I 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!
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 😒
So AfD took off because Germans are largely racist, great look
If you ask the AfD-Fanboys, most are probably going to say that they are not racist, that there are just too many refugees in the country and the other parties aren’t doing anything about it. The AfD, meanwhile, is blaming all og the problems on the “left parties” and illegal immigrants. But yes, in my opinion, if you vote for the AfD, you are racist to a degree at least.
It’s mostly East Germany. Communism’s fuckups in that area are still causing suffering today. I suppose West can be blamed for failing to integrate the east properly.
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.
Put looting the east via Treuhand on that list…
Treuhand was a disgrace
*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.
That’s what people have been saying for years and yet the AfD is already the second strongest in the last election…
a couple points off
Yes so they’re first or a close second, that’s hardly better.
They were quite accurate the last few elections though… Maybe 1% off, but that’s it.
Someone explain, are these the Nazis?
they are the neo-Nazis
Fuck
It is the party all the fascists vote on.
Should tell you enough.
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeessss.
Anything from national conservatives to common reactionaries, Völkische and neo-nazis and neo-fascists.
I read 50% of the men in Germany died in ww2 ….but yea cool Nazis what could go wrong.? Fuck around and find out I guess
And 60 million others.
Yep nothing good ever comes from supporting facists
It’s baffling how those self proclaimed patriots can celebrate a bunch of traitors who ruined their country by killing off a significant part of its population and starting an unwinnable war that left the country in ruins.
…and after the War the allies fell over themselves to get former Nazi ministers reelected. The CDP was funded by the US State Department for decades.
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Who is going to fight them this time? The US and the UK are heading down the same path with the US far out in the lead and Russia is already an authoritarian state. France and Canada aren’t enough to stand up against this wave of naziism.
I mean, why vote CDU if they are doing the same shit as AFD but are not as good at it?
We don’t know how good AFD would be at doing, what they claim. But none of the parties who have been in power over the last 20-30 years have done anything significant to improve the average workers economic status (e.g. make housing affordable, guarantee a reasonable pension, lessen the fear of unemployment, etc.). AFD claims, “if we get rid of the immigrants, everything will be better again” and people are believing it.
I’ve seen some negative reporting on afd Landesregierung, where we can see them act in power. Unfortunately I can’t point to any right now.
Germany should have actually denazified instead of the joke they did. Also should have reunited the two germanys instead of what happened which was basically a west German conquest of east Germany contributing greatly to its impoverershment.
Honest question, what was wrong with the denazification that was carried out? Did they have any historical example to compare to?
Think about it like this: What do you do if everyone is at least complicit? While the soviets excluded the old elites from their new regime, the west focused more on reintegrating them. That being said, both sides were willing to turn a blind eye if you where qualified enough and needed for the continued function of society.
So for example the head of the neurological society was a doctor who experimented on brains of executed prisoners and children. And unfortunately this was the rule, not the exception.
The fact that it didn’t happen? That a lot of the very few who got actual sentences (less than those who worked just at Auschwitz)were pardoned before their time was up. That all levels of the post war German government was filled with nazi party members. That it was quickly abandoned even in the limited and performative form it existed it to unite to fight “the communist threat”. I don’t need a historical example of a successful de radicalization in order to say this one didn’t happen and its a myth it did.
Ok I get what you mean. But what was the realistic alternative when (like another poster mentioned) everyone is partly complicit and society has to be rebuilt? Who can the chief surgeon of the hospital be replaced with? Everyone professionally competent in any position of esteem has to have been at least partially complicit or compliant with the previous regime. Historical context is important because I think it is a near impossible task. Pol pot killed everyone, de-Baathification created more of a mess (both efforts to weed things out later, presumably using Germany as a bad example).
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
Jeah wondering the same, like Germany was already doing a lot more compared to other countries with previous facist governments
