German Federal Elections, September 2017

They’re pretty anti-immigrant and engage in blatantly xenophobic rhetoric. For example having posters of a woman in a bikini and the slogan “No burkas here! We prefer bikinis!”

I will say I chuckled a little at the fact they did far better in East Germany than anywhere else. Authoritarians always seem to have a certain affinity for each other regardless of whether they’re on the Left or the Right.

I’m reminded of Oliver Stone in his recent documentary series giving repeated tongue baths to Vladamir Putin.

The Nazi’s are back and they are pissed!. :frowning:

On the bright side, this does mean that maybe a few years after WW3, humans will reach Mars.

Yeah you beat me to it. They’re not anti-Jew (on the surface), but they’re “anti-other,” and that’s dangerous regardless of who the other happens to be. In this case, it happens to be Islam. Pay attention to what comes out of this movement. Nationalism. Calls for tighter borders. Stiffer penalties for relatively minor or moderate offenses. Authoritarian may take different forms, but the precursors and symptoms are quite similar in many cases.

This is surely Merkel’s last term as Chancellor so I’m hoping she will use her time to repeatedly point out the idiocy and radical bullshit of the AfD’s policies. That political party needs to be mocked repeatedly and driven to irrelevance.

Problem is, she’s not known for clear stances and confrontational politics, so I think it will be the task of other members of her future government (and again, I’m very curious about the coalition negotiations and the future workings of a Jamaica coalition) and the remaining opposition to call out the AfD’s bullshit; maybe it’s a chance for the SPD to recover from the fall-out of the coalition with the CDU (Groko) and to sharpen their currently very diffuse profile.

You might want to consider the case of Hillary vs Trump before you adopt that as a strategy. From what I’ve read, a large part of the AfD’s popularity is that people don’t feel like there’s significant difference between the moderate parties. This seems especially true in Germany, where Merkel’s Christian Democrats are likely to be involved in any coalition government that forms from moderate votes. People who don’t trust the establishment now don’t really have an option but to go to one of the extremes if they want to see change. Having the establishment try to crack down on the populist party could severely backfire, it certainly gives them more press and more ‘thought time’ from people.

So what is the point of the concept of national borders and nations for that matter if they aren’t enforced or maintained?

Borders show which country owns what in terms of land. There’s no reason why such a thing means that someone from the other side of the border can’t come and do whatever on this side of the border. There is a large set of semi-sovereign entities in North America that allow free passage among their borders and allow anyone from any of those other entities practically the same rights as those from their own. Are the borders between these entities meaningless?

Had he claimed he didn’t want the borders “enforced or maintained” you’d have a point, but he didn’t so you don’t.

Your post also does nothing to address the rather obvious issue that AfD is rather clearly anti-immigrant.

Admittedly, Germany isn’t the only country where the white working class is throwing a tantrum because they’re upset about how society is changing on them.

Apparently they started off more as an anti-euro party than anything, then folks like Frauke Petry (curious if others can inform me who the other major players were) in making the party veer harder right, socially.

Wow - the AfD going from 0 to 94 seats. Shittiness.

Its not really 0 to 94. The Germans have the Electoral threshold - Wikipedia . What this means is that once a party gets at least 5% of the vote they are entitled to be represented in parliament. In 2013 they received 4.7% of the vote; not enough to win any seats. Also, their gain came almost entirely from Merkels party.

So these sources are wrong, then?

Vanity Fair:

The Guardian:

National Post:

If these articles don’t mention anything about election threshold, do we attribute that to sloppy journalism, then?

Yes. 4.7% of the vote equaled 0 seats in the Bundestag.

On the German network DW, the commentators blamed Merkel for going too far to the left in her grand coalition. A more traditional CDU would have again marginalized the AfD.

It’s good to be worried about the racist parties in any country, but still, these clowns got far less of the vote than Trump did, and still no better than Le Pen’s party did in France. It may work out better for any country with that problem in the long run to have them exposed and examined and mocked.

The first election where the Nazis did well, they won 17% of the vote.
And they only improved from there. The Germans best start practicing their goosestep.

To a certain extent I agree but it didn’t really work with Farange, isn’t working with Donald Trump, and I think most Muslim immigrants in France would question how effective the mocking of racist political parties has been.

Dismissing people’s concerns and their voting for a party that addresses those concerns as ‘throwing a tantrum’ is exactly the attitude that pushes people to vote for extreme parties instead of mainstream parties. If the mainstream parties hold you in contempt for not agreeing with what their glorious leaders tell you you should want, why not vote for the people who might hate other people but don’t hate you?

Careful.

I was just warned on another site that "calling someone a Nazi is really beyond the pale in Europe. Far more so than in America or anywhere else. Something people not from Europe should never do. And that’s especially true when using the word when discussing Germans.

Proportion-wise the greatest defections to the AfD were from the Linke. 430k Linke voters switched to AfD compared to 1.07 million CDU/CSU. (Not surprisingly: their stronghold is in eastern Germany which is also the stronghold of the postcommunists and neocommunists).

I’m not sure why you would churckle, surely this couldn’t have come as a suprpise to you. Eastern Europeans tend to be both more economically left-wing and more culturally conservative (at least on issues of ethnicity and immigration) than western Europeans, and that holds within Germany as well: residents of the former GDR are more left wing on economics and more conservatives on immigration/ethnicity than westerners. Which is one indication that concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ here aren’t all that useful, there’s no intrinsic reason that someone who prefers a large state role in the economy & high taxes also needs to support a tolerant approach towards ethnic minoritys.