This isn't directly related to AfD, but the reporting that Jan Marsalek, one of the top executives at Wirecard (essentially the Enron of German--a payments processor, like Stripe or Square, championed by the German government as a way to build up a native globally-important software company, which turned out to have committed a tremendous amount of accounting fraud and collapsed) was likely a Russian agent was totally fascinating.

I was just in Germany and have nothing to report. The last couple of days I've been staying with an old friend, whom I was pleased to find running for kanton legislature in the Green party.

An old friend in Switzerland, I neglected to say.

Apparently the Guardian wrote about German politics earlier this week and somehow neglected to mention a demonstration against the far right in Berlin that drew 150,000 (according to local radio). That's multiples, and maybe an order of magnitude, bigger than the farmer protests.

Wirecard and Maassen are both disheartening.

When I wrote the title I was feeling inspired by the right-mindededness on display from regular Germans, but by the time I'd finished assembling links I had been overwhelmed by the vapidity of their rulers.

1: It does seem worryingly consistent that shitty prominent people often end up being, at a minimum, unduly friendly towards the Russian state.

That AfD conference was on the nose. A secret meeting to decide how to solve the problem of a seen-as-undesirable minority group, led by a far-right Austrian? ...in Potsdam? You don't say. I'm also inspired by the reaction of regular German people towards it.

the 11-year-old anti-establishment party has about 20% support nationwide, behind only the main opposition conservatives, polls suggest. It places first in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg in eastern Germany

Voters who have fond nostalgic memories of their immigrant-free authoritarian state also vote for a party which promises to create an immigrant-free authoritarian state, you say? Gosh.

I can't say anything coherent about German politics, but the omelet guy at the Munich Airport Hilton does an excellent job.

(No, I didn't watch the news last night. Instead, the biathlon! French women came in 1,2,3,4 at the Worlds in Moravia!)