Wow German elections are confusing-- looks like these are elections for the provincial parliaments; AfD popularity there is not new. Here's the map of national parliamentary elections in 2021; Thuringia is the sky blue (AfD) bit near CZ with Dresden and Leipzig. Here's the wiki page for the smaller local election that just happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landtag_of_Thuringia
My Czech cousin is pessimistic about how well Germany is managing refugee immigrants, despite the huge numbers of people who have assimilated successfully after fleeing Syria. I haven't been there in ten years, can't judge whether his pessimism seems right. An ongoing problem is the requirement that embassies of immigrant criminals cooperate before they deport people found guilty of crimes without originating country papers.
Whoops, national map 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_German_federal_election
For the briefest moment, I thought this was a physics thread, but no that's AdS/CFT.
Broadly speaking, it's applied physics.
For not having gone to a sex dungeon party?
He refused to go somewhere because they were evil. But I can't remember where and there's more evil going on lately so I'm not doing well at researching it.
Anyway, I think it's bad that the Nazis won a regional election. But I don't understand how bad.
My pet Oxford-history-essay argument is "It is wrong to think that Communism was vindicated and became more popular as a result of WW2. In fact, Communism was discredited. Fascism was vindicated and became more popular. Virtually no nations freely chose a Communist government after 1945, for any value of 'freely' - virtually every Communist government after 1945 was imposed by external armed force. The number of nations that adopted a Fascist or Fascist-adjacent government after 1945, without imposition by an external force, is well into the double figures. People saw Fascism, they liked it, and they wanted it for themselves. Even in Germany, the majority view in 1951 was that Nazi policies were good but had been poorly implemented."
Part of the reason the AfD won is that nobody outside the state cares very much about Thüringen, but that also means that the effects could be limited because nobody outside the state cares very much about Thüringen. On the other other hand, it's the region where the Actual Nazis had their first breakthrough and formed part of the state government as early as 1930.
As for the BSW, it's a personality cult centered on someone who chose the summer of 1989 as the ideal time to join a ruling Communist party, which tells you what kind of a person Sahra Wagenknecht is. Now that the execrable Roland Koch has been drummed out of public life, I don't think there's anyone I find more contemptible in German politics than Wagenknecht. But more than half of Thüringian voters for The Left, good Stalinists that they are, chose to follow her, and now the faction has 15 seats to The Left's 12 (of 88 total in the state legislature).
In theory AfD and BSD could form a government with a two-seat majority. I don't think they want to make a Red-Brown alliance so explicit, but who knows? Otherwise, it doesn't look like a government can be formed: all of the other parties would have to contribute votes to a majority, and I can't see the Christian Democrats getting into bed with either The Left or BSW, let alone both. The AfD has a big enough minority that it can block the legislature dissolving itself and calling new elections. However, as I understand it, a state premier who loses a no-confidence vote is obliged to call new elections.
So that's kinda what I expect: a few weeks of muddle, a premier is named and elected by the legislators but understood to be the preparation for new elections, new elections some time in late fall or early winter. I haven't read the fine constitutional details, so I could be wrong. (Middle German Radio rather breathlessly reports that the AfD and a dozen or so other legislators could prop up the fall guy in a secret ballot. I think that's unlikely, and also "a dozen or so" is the whole Left contingent, all but three BSW, or half of the CDU, so in the context of this legislature's size, it's a lot of members.)
I haven't thought about Saxony yet.
thank you doug, very informative!
(why does your name link to a book review site written entirely by a Doreen?)
I think the thing to remember about Sahra Wagenknecht is that 1980s communists weren't revolutionary or radical; they were the conservatives, concerned about culture wars, law-and-order crackdowns, flags, trying to find extra consumer goodies for the boomers while also abiding by the terms of your IMF package, stuff like that. In many ways she's ended up where she started.
There was a phase when Die Linke did look like your new favourite band but that was immediately after the GFC; since then it's been driven by the tension between its western and Berlin-based supporters and its provincial eastern cranky old git clientele, with SW constantly trying to force it rightwards (it opposed doing anything much about the Eurocrisis, because inflation) but being blocked by the membership. Hence various tricks like trying to start a new "movement" that would incorporate it but only answer to herself. Eventually the contradictions got heightened to the max and now here we are.
I would really like to hear an inside account of when she invited Jon Lansman and others from Momentum and the Corbyn team over to Berlin to talk about that project, by the way, because I can't think they were enthusiastic about giving the wokes a good telling off about gender and immigrants (a key issue in the SW vs DL split). Very ironically, what she is now offering is quite a lot like the Tories, Trump, or the most irritating people in Labour:
- against public spending except on pensioners, in which case the sky is the limit
- car sauce gimmes and culture war against environmental improvements
- culture war against immigrants and teh transes
- electoral focus on a specific postindustrial boomer regional demographic (red wall, how are ya?)
- palling around with the Russians (more a Tory or Trump habit than e.g Mike Gapes but you see what I'm driving at)
Anyway it seems to have worked up to a point in that the DL vote has been ripped almost exactly in half. There are a variety of questions after this, notably how the new thing relates to the other parties, whether it scales, and how the fact SW isn't a candidate works out. The actual people who have been elected and will negotiate with other parties and might be ministers are of course not her, but apparently she wants to lead the coalition talks from Berlin because of course she does, despite not having been elected to anything in the relevant state. I don't think they'll dare do the full horseshoe coalition, not least because their relationship with the AfD is as competitors for the same constituency, who can't agree, rather than enemies, who can.
The AfD, for its part, is roughly where it was in 2019 having gone backwards in between; I think it's probably regained people it lost to even weirder groups during the pandemic (e.g. the "Lateral Thinkers" Q-movement or the Independent Voters in their national antivax incarnation).
The parties who have been punished are the ones in government - the SPD and Greens never did particularly well in the states in question but they've done worse, and the FDP has bombed out completely and gone under the 5% line where you don't get any seats. I have to say I am appreciating Christian Lindner squealing about this, as nobody has done quite as much to assure the coalition's failure as that guy. The CDU has done ok-ish in that it didn't spill votes all over the floor.
17: In August, European book reviewers go to the beach with the French.
In fact, Communism was discredited. Fascism was vindicated and became more popular.
I can't really describe what fascism means besides lots of racism and dictatorship. Which doesn't strike me as something that was ever out of style, long before the 20th century.
A bit of polling: https://x.com/derJamesJackson/status/1830512876945129841
76k net adds from DL, 46k from nonvoters, 43k from the CDU?!, not so many from the AfD or elsewhere.
17, 20: Or in this case they spend the August weekends clearing a house in Cologne and the work week in Berlin too exhausted to write anything.
Anyway, here's Wonderwall the page of just my reviews:
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/author/dmerrill/
For not having gone to a sex dungeon party?
Non-denial denial. They didn't ask the obvious follow-up about sex grotto parties.
Here's a fuller, interactive Waehlerwanderung:
https://taz.de/Waehlerwanderung-in-Thueringen-und-Sachsen/!6033697/
Roughly, BSW picked up from DL and nonvoters, AfD from nonvoters and the CDU. Also quite a hefty flow from DL to both the CDU and the AfD, which kind of bears out my point about the party being Sanders Utopia in Berlin and Tories elsewhere.
https://www.ft.com/content/c8ffc94c-e930-4ef5-ab47-9dd726d9da2b
In his book Ungleich vereint (United in Disunity), the sociologist Steffen Mau (born in Rostock in 1968) provides a richly textured and sourced summation of the current state of research. He notes that for a host of historical, demographic, economic and social reasons, the mediating organisations that representative democracy requires to thrive -- such as parties, unions or civil associations -- struggled to flourish [in the ex-GDR] after 1990. Instead, he argues, a feeling of imagined inferiority and a culture of street protests with maximalist demands are fused in a toxic "hyperpolitics" that is extremely vulnerable to ruthless "polarisation entrepreneurs". Enter the AfD and the BSW.
Freiheitsschock (Freedom Shock), a new book by the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (born in East Berlin in 1967) diagnoses the propensity of east Germans to vote for authoritarian parties as the result of the long-term damage caused by their past as "inmates of the GDR" who had dreamt of the west as another nanny state -- only richer.
Self-limiting?
"Höcke is the most successful campaigner the AfD ever had and at the same time he's the most polarising figure, the one who publicly presents the most radical positions,"https://www.ft.com/content/875bbe1b-2e46-43b6-ba87-ae288eda9392
[...]
The AfD's stunning result in Thuringia, where it won 32.8 per cent of the vote, more than nine points ahead of the CDU, will silence many of Höcke's critics in the party and cement his position as its éminence grise.
[...]
"The AfD is completely divided between the social-patriotic wing in eastern Germany and the economically liberal arm in West Germany and Berlin,"
[...]
Other far-right European parties such as Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy (FdI), or Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), have sought to "detoxify" their brand, shedding their more radical positions to make themselves more palatable to middle-of-the-road voters. The AfD, by contrast, has gone in the other direction, gradually shifting to the rabble-rousing right.
The AfD is completely divided between the social-patriotic wing in eastern Germany and the economically liberal arm in West Germany and Berlin
This is true but I think the division has been resolved; nobody cares about the stuffy law and econ professor types any more, they've either kowtowed to the openly fascistic ones or else they're shuffling away to either the CDU (Merz being palatable to them) or irrelevance.
I don't know anything about the German political situation, but I'm very concerned about the general rise of right-wing movements. I had sort of naive,y thought that Europe, particularly Western Europe, I.e France and Germany, would be less vulnerable to this kind of stuff because of their relatively strong social welfare services.
I think the thing to remember about Sahra Wagenknecht is that 1980s communists weren't revolutionary or radical; they were the conservatives
Very good point, and also: see Russia, where the majority political position is best summed up by a poster of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin and Putin.
Historically, the majority of communists tend not to be young radical revolutionaries; they tend to be the middle-aged men who murder the young radical revolutionaries.
I had sort of naive,y thought that Europe, particularly Western Europe, I.e France and Germany, would be less vulnerable to this kind of stuff because of their relatively strong social welfare services.
Important to distinguish the social welfare system as status quo vs as political aspiration. If a genie gave the US got a health system corresponding to that envisioned in the official Tory platform, it would be a progressive wet dream, but it doesn't mean the Tories are progressive, it means they work with the starting point they have.
33: Right, but I thought that its existence would prevent the development of broad based resentment.
But people take it for granted after a bit, though. The window shifts.
It's also not what it used to be.
Anyway, all parties in Thuringen are now having coalition talks except the AfD as official Billy No-Mates. It may be important that the CDU has an internal rule that it will never cooperate with Die Linke, on the grounds that it's the legal successor of the East German communists and is institutionally continuous with it and they won't cooperate with communists*. I don't think they have a similar rule for BSW, which after all is not. This may turn out to be important.
*This is a bit hypocritical as the CDU permitted the East German CDU, a communist controlled front organization, to just merge in. This gave the party a huge unfair advantage because they got a ready-made organizing network across the East right out of the gate. Which is why they did it.
36: And the CDU has held the office of premier in Saxony continuously since 1990. (Kurt Biedenkopf took on GDR citizenship before reunification so that he could run there, and he held the office for 12 years.) So a little hypocrisy has paid off handsomely.
It also shows the differences in having been a Potemkin party versus having been forcefully merged into the Communists, as the Social Democrats were. They've struggled to establish a strong identity in the eastern states, and voting levels reflect that. (It's also not unusual for post-communist countries (which Germany likes to forget that it is) in Central Europe. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a significant social democratic party in the region that isn't also in some shape or form a successor of the former communists. Corrections and reminders welcomed!)
I can't really describe what fascism means besides lots of racism and dictatorship. Which doesn't strike me as something that was ever out of style, long before the 20th century.
Would you like some book recommendations?
Some people in the CDU would like to ban cooperating with BSW as well as DL and the AfD: https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/landtagswahlen-widerstand-in-der-cdu-gegen-moegliche-koalition-mit-dem-bsw/100066077.html
It also shows the differences in having been a Potemkin party versus having been forcefully merged into the Communists, as the Social Democrats were.
I don't understand this. Or 36*. Or the conjunction of the two.
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https://www.barrons.com/news/indian-insurgents-in-manipur-launch-deadly-drone-attack-88d91d93
But I'm sure the problem will go away if the centre ignores it for another year and a half.
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GDR CDU was presumably a Potemkin party. But if so, how did absorbing it help the CDU CDU?
Maybe they tried to stop absorbing but couldn't because they have a cotton-based party structure.
It was - it didn't have any independence - but it did have real assets, like buildings, office holders, newspapers, lists of members. This blog post explains how they worked and why the DDR bothered: https://historyned.blog/2016/04/10/more-than-just-an-oxymoron-democracy-in-the-german-democratic-republic/
Ok, so in 1946 the Soviets forced through a merger of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in their occpuation zone. The post-merger party is called the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). People use "Communist part of East Germany" as shorthand for the SED. The SPD stays independent in the other three Allied zones of occupation.
Three years later, four-power occpuation of Germany finally falls completely apart, leading to the foundation of the two German states. In East Germany, the SED kept up the facade of multi-party democracy, although the other parties in the "popular front" (including the CDU) acknowledged the leading role of the SED, and practically never voted against them.
However! In the crucial autumn of 1989, the eastern CDU became a home for church-based opposition (the biggest demonstrations in East Germany grew out of church-based groups in Leipzig), and internal party reformers pushed out the SED-supporting leaders.
At that point, it began to function as a real party, and was a strong advocate for swift reunification. Lothar de Maiziere, the only freely elected head of an East German government, was from the CDU. In August 1990, the CDU absorbed a minor party called Democratic Awakening, bringing along their spokesperson, a chemist named Angela Merkel.
So by the time of reunification in October 1990, the CDU in the east had a year or so of actual independence (more than parties that came to power elsewhere in Central Europe). They had also take a strong and popular stand on the most important issue: reunification as fast as possible. They had credibly stood for freedom and for a unified Germany, which gave them a clear identity, and there was enough of an organization present that they were up and running for the state elections in mid-October 1990. The CDU won four out of five state elections that month.
44: ok. But now I don't understand this
forcefully merged into the Communists, as the Social Democrats were.