But the benefit to that is, at best, that people then don’t vote in extremist parties. “It’s good when people do this because then they stop doing it” isn’t a coherent argument.
I feel sick to my stomach. And also, I’m scared as fuck for my country. I don’t want to go down the same path as the USA or Hungary. How can people be so blind and stupid? Part of me wishes for the wall to be rebuilt to shield us from the fascists, but I fear that the “West” is not far behind. I wish nothing but destruction and hardship for every single person who voted for these all-but-in-name Nazis, and I cannot imagine how it must feel for a thinking and feeling person to live in a Bundesland (state) where almost half the electorate somehow slept through all of their history classes.
This is the party that wants to return all of the doctors and caregivers with a foreign passport to their home country (and replace them with proper Aryan medical students). Fuck 'em, let them see what they voted themselves into, and let the next five years serve as a warning to anyone left with half a working brain cell.
I am angry. I am scared. I am devastated. How have so many people forgotten?
It’s still hanging by a thread if the AfD maybe get to govern by forming a coalition or being tolerated by the BSW. At the moment, prognoses for the party hover around 5%, some have them over and some a hair under. It’s crucial how that turns out.
ETA: anyway, it’s heartbreaking that almost 50% of a German state vote for anti-democratic parties.
I think there’s maybe an argument for this in situations like the UK Reform party winning local council elections- a position with responsibility but very little power. It can give them a platform to demonstrate that they really couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery and have promised to stop programmes that don’t exist, while causing just enough damage to inconvenience people.
That sort it thing is not going to discourage the hard-core fans, but I’ll believe that a situation like that can give a dose of reality to those who were considering voting for them or those who weren’t planning on voting at all.
This isn’t a situation where it’s a minor local vote though. This isn’t a situation where the local community centre winds up closing and the bins aren’t reliably collected until someone more sensible gets elected. It’s some real power and a plausible step to more.
(ETA: This is about 25-30% of all the doctors in this state, so good luck with that…)
My sympathies for those in Germany dealing with this. I can’t understand people who support far-right policies at all. Can’t these people ask themselves: When in history have far-right governments ever been good for the people?
For which people? Of course they’re not good for those people, but those people deserve to suffer.
It’s grotesque to me that Sahra Wagenknecht of all people is suddenly (potentially) going to be in a position of great leverage, but it feels like she and the AfD agree on so much that it’s inevitable.
(also, annoyingly, the only livestream I get on my TV is English-translated, and has spent the last 20 minutes on Siegmund’s interminable speech)
It’s truly grotesque, but in the end, seemingly extremists want to extremist, at all costs, including selling your soul and your principles.
As I understand it : Some very limited power to potentially really fuck things up in that state pretty efficiently. No real power beyond that. Some security risks that must be managed yes.
Very sad to see frustration result in support for this and maybe they now have just enough rope to choke themselves.
I did find some live German analysts, and first: I see that the BSW is at 4.8%, and second, the announcer just said that Fabio de Masi (apparently the head of the BSW, I’d never heard of him) “hat so eine Koalition mit der AfD ganz abgelehnt.”
But…I guess the first question is whether the BSW will even have enough individual wins to gain that 4.8%. ETA…even as I was typing it jumped to 5%.
(I just noticed I posted pictures of Sachsen above, not Sachsen-Anhalt…how embarrassing)
Which is apparently “completely rejected such a coalition with the AfD”.
Sorry, yes.
So this Flavio de Masi guy has completely rejected such a coalition with the AfD. And the AfD has categorically excluded the possibility to govern in a coalition, because then they could not get their manifesto, execute it and eat it. Lokal Spitzenkandidat Siegmung excludes a minority government. Alles klar?
Not quite. Alice Weidel, co-president of the AfD, says that the voter have given them a clear mandate to govern. I cannot even say that this is complete bullshit, not by her standards anyway. As for the BSW, there are many more ways to let the AfD govern than such a coalition. If Sahra Wagenknecht’s party really slips into the local parliament and she ends up tolerating a minority AfD government it would be grotesque indeed.
Anti-democratic? Call it what it is: fascist.
So if they are short of the absolute majority to go it alone and it remains that even BSW won’t enter a coalition with them, what then happens?
ETA missed above but not clearly understanding the mechanics of tolerating a minority?
It would be very compicated, and not knowing yet whether the BSW has made it into the parliament or not makes speculation hard. But for them to tolerate a minority would mean that the AfD has more seats than all the others excluding BSW, which is currently possible, and then BSW abstains during the election for president of the local government. A relative majority would be enough in the third voting round, if my memory serves me right.
Just one possibility, it can be even more complicated than that. There always is the possibility of defections, preferably for the AfD from the CDU. Also possible, and maybe lucrative for the defectors.
The only thing I can exclude is an absolute majority without the participation of the AfD, because it would mean the right wing CDU and the very left wing Die Linke working in a coalition (as well as crazy BSW with no principles, plus SPD and Greens). Not only have they both excluded that option, it makes no sense, not even to stop the AfD.
Yeah, you’re right, and I already called them fascists in this thread. Both AfD and BSW.
Of course you did, but I have to vent. I think we all have to.
About that minority government: of course it would be an exceedingly weak government. But that has great advantages for the AfD. They couldn’t do anything, but that would not be their fault. So they would be spared showing their incompetence for all to see, as some have argued without evidence would teach voters what to really expect from them. Failing without consequences, just what the right likes.
And still they would form a government with ministers that would be entitled to participate in the federal ministerial conferences, where the Länder, that is, the regional governments, try to coordinate their policies. There the minister for education could argue in favour of making Russian the default language to teach at school (their manifesto), the minister for the interior could ask what the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (something like the FBI, mutatis mutandis) knows about the AfD, their fascist tendencies, and how they know it. And many more such things.
They could also block the financing of local wind and solar parks. That is particularly easy when you cannot pass a budget. They couldn’t finance them if they wanted to, but what they really want to finance is coal. Sounds familiar?
Venting? I am not in form today. I’ll better take a break.
ETA: If we at least had someone like Jonathan Pie for Germany, who really knows how to insult (3’40" video). Not that it changes the results, but at least you can laugh. That’s venting!! But no, Germany is not the place for humor. It’s a cliché, but it is the truth right now.
One thing that really gets me down: it looks like AfD picked up votes of about 150,000 to 160,000 non-voters. This election had much higher participation than the last one five years ago - looks like a pretty scathing indictment of democracy. I was always of the opinion that higher turnout is better for reigning in extremist parties, but it looks like about 30% of AfD voters did not vote in the last election. I don’t really know what to do with this information. Fuck.
Since it is mostly me I will clarify that I am not arguing that so much as wondering it.
As you point out though being able to grow in popularity and have no consequence for failure because they remain on the outside, not their fault, even with the most votes … seems the worst outcome? The one most likely to spur further popularity elsewhere.
I am asking from ignorance here but I wonder if on the national level the firewall backfires? Someone can actually dislike them and would not vote for them if it could actually lead to them having power, but love having a vote for them as a none of the above protest.