I am too. You can only say that leftist and fascists make strange bedfellows for so long when they keep waking up together.
The strangest bedfellows ever were Hitler and Stalin, until they were suddenly not anymore after operation Barbarossa…Shows how the AfD and BSW should trust each other.
Modern russia is a far right ethnostate that promotes christian nationalism. They aren’t the same communist russia of ww2.
France is moving right too.
In 2002 the far right national rally party got 18% of the vote for president. In 2017 it was 34%. In 2022 it was 42%.
I wasn’t talking about leftists and fascists as bedfellows, because that would be an obvious point - in fact, I said they agree on a lot - but I was talking about (and lamenting) that the person who blew up Die Linke to land a party with 5-6% approval is suddenly in an incredibly powerful position, as reward for what she did.
You’re welcome, and in the same context, let me add that today de Masi apparently said that if the Parliament fails to elect an ‘independent’ (non-AfD/CDU) Ministerpraesident in the first two rounds, they will abstain from the third round of voting. Since abstaining members are not counted in the denominator of % achieved in that vote, he is effectively guaranteeing the ascension of an AfD member if all the other parties don’t come to a common agreement on someone. Now who could that someone be?
But FWIW there appears to be no love between National Rally and AfD.
Not to mention the KPD and NSDAP…
In pre-fascist Germany, before 1933? They had nothing in common and fought each other on the streets, tooth and nail.
By 1931 they had decided that tossing the liberals under the bus hoping that the Nazis would wreck the country enough that people would be miserable and desperate enough to turn to communism was their best bet and adopted the slogan “after Hitler, us”. Seemingly the same thing that the BSW is going for.
I would not call BSW a left wing party. It is a vanity project for a deeply troubled narcissist, and as Maserschmidt has rightly pointed out, the whole story is grotesque. Why some people vote for this group is beyond my understanding. Historians will have a hard time explaining that.
Everything I’ve read about them says that they are far/radical left on economic and foreign policy and conservative socially. I haven’t seen a single source that doesn’t consider them a leftist party overall. You got a cite for them being widely accepted as anything but a leftist party?
Just one example:
That did not come across as I wanted to. Yes, they call themselves in their manifesto a left wing party. And no, their voters and members are not left (and still vote for them, curiously). See here, for instance, an analysis from two years ago. It’s in German, but the graphs are easy to understand, I believe.
But what I really wanted to say is that BSW is not a political party. It is a vanity project for Sahra Wagenknecht. She is not well in her head.
Anti-immigrant, self described as “anti woke” including transgender rights, anti-green policy. They call themselves leftist because they do believe in unions and nationalized industries, but it’s lazy of media to consider them leftist.
They sound like typical horseshoe dwelling tankies to me.
By this logic Joseph Stalin wasn’t a leftist because he was socially conservative.
Which why we have some many things like political compass - Left vs Right is too simplistic to even broadly place in boxes.
They’re left-wing on economic issues, right wing on social issues and nationalist/isolationist on foreign policy.
I think class reductionism is the most straightforward explanation of how a leftist would support them. Some combination of that and the fact that the SPD and the greens were in a unity government (incidentally with the free-market oriented, socially liberal FDP) and some left wingers may blame them for betraying their stated left-wing principles while the left (which BSW) is a splinter from had the benefit of being on the sidelines.
So, how preventable was this AfD rise to power, and recent election win? Or do the other parties all basically have their hands tied and already did their best but just couldn’t stop AfD in Saxony, it was an inevitable thing?
Do you have an opinion on it?
So they’re socialists, but also nationalists? What an original idea! What will the Germans think of next?
I do think (unlike the nazis) they have genuinely left-wing economic views.