The Forsa poll, which put the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on 26%, two points higher than the conservatives
Reminder that polls that are years away from the election only fuel populism.
Idk about years away at this point
We just had an election…
I know, an early one because the previous government had collapsed. Which may or may not happen again this time around.
Dont tempt the alien season 2025 earth producers!
How totally surprising. This fucker brings nothing to the table other than his grotesquely oversized ego. Failure is guaranteed.
Yes and everyone knew it and he got ellected nontheless… what a shitshow
The poll asked which politician people find more or less symparhic, not whiom they’d vote if there were an election right noe,. Prettty much nobody likes Merz, still people were vorting for him.
Wtf Germany?
More than half of the voters are senile and will vote for the same conservative party again and again. Which can only do two things: lie and enrich themselves and their coporate buddies if in government or block and obstruct if not.
The rest has 3 options: ignore politics in silence as the country is obviously lost, leave the obviously country or vote for insane extremists as any change is perceived to be better than more decades of slow and steady decay to make the 1% richer.
And thanks to a constant onslaught of social media brain-rot and propaganda a lot of the less educated pick the latter one.
To give you a proper perspective: the same party leading the government for the vast majority in the last decades is in power again. They campaigned on the same lies as they do every 4 years, they broke every single of their promises within weeks after being elected again. They spend most of their time spouting nonsensical culture war bullshit to divert from all their corruption scandals (often dating back several terms) again. And at the same time they barely lost 2% in polls. Because their voters are just brain-dead.
Also -as all conservatives nowadays are embracing Trumpism- they are the far-rights biggest helpers happily pushing populism, culture war and xenophobia as a way to divert from their constant money grabs… while also constantly moving further to the right to get the extremist voters back (they don’t…) while alienating every other democratic party.
Their whole modus operandi is basically you either do what we say or we will block everything. And unless there is a sudden increase in old age mortality they will go on like this forever until the country is so broken that the next fascist government and the rubble thereafter will be an improvement indeed.
Germany is a boomer country and will stay shit for decades
I don’t think that will ever change. Germany will stay a country of old people.
Here we go again…
26%. Jesus. What’s going on to cause that?
He is a literal corporate industry plant that until recently was on the board of BlackRock Germany…
Everything he does is either corrupt, fascist or otherwise amoral.Ah I more meant the AfD popularity. They’re shocking numbers.
Conservative politicians like Merz get into power -> the overall situation for the average citizen gets worse -> far right parties parties gain popularity
It’s so predictable it’s just sad. As much as I’d like to see the current government fail I know that it would help the AfD even more. The possibility to vote for left-wing parties that might actually begin to solve some economic and social issues just doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s radar, and even if it happened the fixes would probably take years to have tangible effects.
In the 2021 federal election the AfD lost 2.2% compared to the 2017 election. That was under Merkel. Given Covid the economy was not doing amazing either. The big difference was that climate change was a huge issue, with is something the AfD does not serve well.
The simple truth is the next election is likely in three years. The left-wing parties are reorganising and some big things might very well happen in the meantime. An end of the war in Ukraine might happen. That might well remove Russian money for the AfD. Also US sentiment tends to flow towards Germany. So a big left wing victory might very well help the left here. You also have the very simple fact that in the last election the left party came back from near death and the Greens managed their second best result ever, while part of a deeply unpopular government.
Germany is not lost and it is foolish to pretend it is. The next elections are certain to be democratic and banning the AfD remains an option.
Conservative politicians like Merz get into power -> the overall situation for the average citizen gets worse -> far right parties parties gain popularity
That’s a bit too simplified, tbh.
From the 76 years of Federal Republic of Germany until now, only 24 have not been under a conservative chancellor and the overall situation for the average citizen has definitely improved in those 76 years. I’d argue the problem isn’t conservative politicians per se, it is that politicians such as Merz apparently cannot offer what is needed at this moment.
It improved in spite of them, not because of them. Worker organizing and direct action is the stick that forces governments to occasionally go against their capitalist overlords; remove that and the current state of the West is what you get.
So much this!
It improved in spite of them, not because of them. Worker organizing and direct action is the stick that forces governments to occasionally go against their capitalist overlords
While that certainly is a factor contributing to levelling the power between different entities within the country and hence ensuring overal benefit from the economic development, it seems a bit farfetched and romantisised to attribute the improvement entirely to organised workers.
Plus, more importantly, if it really were true what the commenter wrote, that conservative politicians lead to far right parties, why did it take almost 50 years of conservative rule for it to happen? We see a rise in far right parties all over the world and irrespective of them having a conservative government. Take fairly liberal countries with a strong welfare state such as Denmark or Sweden. What about the Netherlands? They are also part of the current shift towards rightwing populism, so an explanation like “must be conservatives” seems a bit too simplified to me.
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I agree that the overall situation has improved, but there’s policies like the entire pension system that are fundamentally broken and requires more and more money each year, but enacting significant changes is something a conservative party just won’t do. And there’s stuff that could be done, like the Scandinavian model where part of the pension fond is invested in the stock market, or just reintroducing a wealth tax, among other things. But you need a progressive party to do anything except keep the status quo and watch everything go to shit. (Well I guess the AfD would also enact significant changes but let’s not get into that)
but there’s policies like the entire pension system that are fundamentally broken and requires more and more money each year, but enacting significant changes is something a conservative party just won’t do.
Exactly. That’s why I wrote that to me, the problem seems to be that conservative politicians/parties don’t offer the solutions we currently need. I don’t expect Merz and his party to solve the pension system problem - not because they don’t see it or they don’t understand it but because they simply don’t want to piss off their old aged voter basis. They willingly ignore a problem that gets bigger with every year and this is not even the only topic they ruin for us with this approach.
But still: to say that conservative politicians will categorically worsen the situation of the average citizen and lead to far right parties simply doesn’t hold up to the empirical history of Germany.
That was a long time in the making and should come as absolutely no surprise. They do have the support of the media. (mostly intentional, and some unintentional through the stupidity of modern “journalism” like false balance) Also the established political parties have nothing better to do than legitimising them by parroting their rhetoric and allowing them to set the agenda. At least the CDU is increasingly openly preparing to cooperate with them, too.
It’s like a rerun of the old classic “Weimar Republic”.
Ah ups, yeah that is pretty rough. If you look at this graph from wikipedia tho, it doesnt seem to be a very consistent trend. Who knows what will happen from now on, but as long as either Union or AfD are at the top, this country is doomed in the long term.
Source: dkriesel.com
So nothing too exceptional, really.
The same story that was going on in America: People have problems, both the right and left offer solutions and for a variety reasons (I suspect many common to both cases) more people are more convinced by solutions from the right. So what’s going on is, in short, capitalism.
Erosion of any last respectable politics in the conservative parties. Very weak mid left party. A country full of rich, anxious and tv watching boomers.
