🇩🇪 German state & local elections

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https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1140307515541983232

better than predicted for AFD.

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very curious to see the next polls. I bet on an afd surge.

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very curious to see the next polls. I bet on an afd surge.

A strange assumption. Care to elaborate?

cfr your post just above.

I add that this "farce" has given a little "respectability" to AFD. It's a little like VB in Flanders: NVA negociations (3 times !) with VB has given a boost to VB in polls. Also, hysteria at the federal level should favored this (federal against the land, elites against people,...).

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very curious to see the next polls. I bet on an afd surge.

A strange assumption. Care to elaborate?

cfr your post just above.

I add that this "farce" has given a little "respectability" to AFD. It's a little like VB in Flanders: NVA negociations (3 times !) with VB has given a boost to VB in polls. Also, hysteria at the federal level should favored this (federal against the land, elites against people,...).

The thing is that there weren't really negotiations with the AfD... not officially anyway. Almost everybody involved denies the existence of negotiations, while some in the AfD basically gloated "haha, we've successfully played you!".

So, I fail to see how this lends respectability to the AfD. They nominated a candidate of their own, but not because they wanted to vote for him or because they wanted to got him elected, but as a ploy to lure the FDP into a candidacy of their own. After this was achieved they threw their own candidate under the bus and secretely voted for the FDP guy without any prior announcement. As a result, there was a 24-hour FDP minority government which relied on their five members of parliament until he the newly elected minister-president resigned and called for a snap election.

Granted, this scheme was masterfully executed but does it really lend respectiability to the AfD? Would Frank Underwood from House of Cards actually gain in popularity if all the manipulations he had ever done came to light? If anything, it looks like the AfD played games with the constitution and the state's institutions. It leaves a bit of an ugly taste...

I only wrote that that the AfD would gain (but perhaps less so than the Left) because I think CDU and FDP look even stupider. And the latter look stupider because there has been lots of open infighting among their ranks, while the AfD has been pretty unified. So, these partes will lose some votes over it which have to go somewhere now.

it seems to me that at first, the support of afd had been "accepted" by the liberals. cfr the handshake between the afd leader and the fdp leader.

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The FDP should just go all the way on nuclear energy. Twist the SPD and the Greens' arm and don't just keep the current power plants open, but actually open some of the closed ones within one year. It'll cost a lot of money but so did the Energiewende, and I don't buy that it's technically impossible. We're in a continental crisis in which all existing taboos should be rethought. It's the right thing to do and it'll show right-wing voters they still have some balls.

I would like to see this too, but it feels like German society is quite viscerally anti-nuclear and this is an extremely broad and deep sentiment. And knowing the stubbornness of Germans, I am pessimistic on this changing.

I also wonder if we can really say that this is also something that won't backfire on the FDP, because keeping open the nuclear power plant in Niedersachsen was an issue in the state election and yet the Greens surged and FDP lost. The federal Greens also seem like they will never, ever accept reopening new power plants and yet people keep voting for them. And I haven't seen any polling showing major changes in how Germans view nuclear energy.

wrong

https://www.energymonitor.ai/policy/weekly-data-shift-in-germanys-perception-of-nuclear-energy

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BSW surge in Thuringia

https://twitter.com/Wahlen_DE/status/1747578462125138421

Anti Atlantist parties at 48

and anti-immigration