🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[Zinneke]

How is Schulz not woke?

Have you ever seen him on TV?

Nope

He has an image of being boring and technocratic. If you've been following the Spitenkandidaten process, imagine a reverse Ska Keller.

[Zinneke]

How is Schulz not woke?

Have you ever seen him on TV?

Nope

He has an image of being boring and technocratic.

Plus he is a reformed alcoholic - and you can easily tell by just looking at and listening to him.
Plus he has a very distinct speech impediment (the same as Nahles, btw) that simply makes him seem imbecile.

Schulz comes accross as an imbecile when he speaks on the same scale as Nahles?! He always seemed quite rough spoken but I can't detect it. Is it the NRW mannerisms? If that's the case Saxons and people from Baden have more serious speech impediments

[Zinneke]

Martin Sonneborn as potential kingmaker. What a time to be alive.

[Zinneke]

Even 100% support for NS2 among Germans would not change the fact that even if Germany might become gas hub, still main beneficiary of that whole affair is Russia, and supporting NS2 for real means supporting Russian interests - even if not consciously. Same with the TurkStream.

Thats quite a zero-sum view of the World. Most people support things if is good for them - even if it may be good for someone else too. I have a Chinese Smartphone: Not because I support Chinese interests, Huawei or the CCP at all, but because it was the Phone with the Best Value for me - even if they happened to profit from it too. Same goes with National Governments. I dont think that Canada signed that Free Trade Agreement with the US because they supported US interests - rather because they stood to profit too.

You might do not have such intentions but purchasing Chinese mobile phone supports economic interests of PRC. You maybe would have multi-functional, advanced phone but still your individual consumer choice supported economy of China. Your comfort in global scale is much less important than further strengthening of their market position. Similarly, potential profits from selling natural gas surpluses by Germany are in scale less important than potential geopolitical and economic benefits which Russia might acquire. But in this case we are talking not about individuals but states, which one is generally threatening like one third of EU states and any supporting of that state economic interests should be considered in the EU as at least not welcome.  

And buying LNG from America that's 2x more expensive and needs to be brought on a tanker halfway across the world is worse for the environment.

The more Gas we use, the better it is for the environment, and it just happens that Russia has a reliable, cheap source, that can be transported with minimal impact on the environment (compared to other sources).

Something you should take into account if you support any sort of Green party.

He hasn't raised any environmental concerns in his argument. This is about not being dependent on tinpot authoritarian adversaries that systematically try to undermine our democracies. I get that that's a difficult concept for so called patriots 3 feet up Putin's arse on the right of the spectrum and so called communists on the far left happily suckling on China's FDI, but I actually don't want to be co-dependent on these crooks and cheats of the international system, even if it means paying more.

[Zinneke]

If there were a centre of gravity for the AfD would it be Chemnitz or Cottbus?

[Zinneke]

So how come Pankow swung to the Greens while places like Treptow stayed Die Linke? Is Pankow really now more gentrified than south east Berlin?

[Zinneke]

snippidy snip

I agree with all of this but there is one big external event that has become salient since the start of 2023 that you have missed: a massive increase in asylum applications from outside of Europe.

Hidden behind the numbers of the 1.4 million Ukrainians who have come to Germany, is another 244,000 asylum seekers primarily from the Middle East, Central Asia (especially Afghanistan and Iran), and Africa. In just the first three months of 2023, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has received over 80,000 asylum applications, 78% more than the number received in the same period in 2022.

States and municipalities have been loudly sounding the alarm for the past 6 months about how it is getting increasingly difficult to manage. They lack proper housing, so more highly-visible tent and trailer accommodations have been set up for refugees. It's also putting a strain on state and municipal budgets, as not only do they have to care for, feed, and educate refugees, but they also have to dedicate more and more personnel from other departments to helping with refugees. And civil society organizations are also stretched to their limits.

In May, there was an asylum summit between the states and the federal government, where the feds provided an immediate 1 billion EUR in emergency aid, and also agreed to speed up deportations of those whose applications have been rejected, expand the number of detention days from 10 to 28, as well as new investments to modernize IT systems to speed up processing (because Germany is stuck in the 1980s for some reason). They agreed to have another summit in October 2023 after the results of results of the Common European Asylum System reforms at the EU level to determine a permanent funding solution. The fact that the federal government took so long to hold the summit certainly does not help its image.

Some estimates I have seen project some 800,000 total asylum applications in 2023 alone. There is a feeling of perpetual crisis and state and local governments have been very open about how much stress they are under and how desperate the situation is getting.

Now we see the AfD rising in frustration about not only government infighting, the PR catastrophe that was the new Building Energy Law, and now also a renewed asylum crisis. The Federal Ministry of the Interior has also reported that attacks on asylum centers, while not as high as 2015-2016, have increased by a whopping 70% in 2022 compared to 2021.

Polling shows that a supermajority of Germans do not trust any party to handle refugees and asylum seekers, so this holds both promise and danger.

This is apparently what some people care about, although I can't really say how I was ever personally affected by asylum-seekers or refugee crises in a negative manner... nor I do recall knowing people in person who have. I certainly was affected pretty hard by COVID and the subsequent lockdowns. To some extent also by last year's inflation and energy prize hikes, altough I was still in a financial position to mostly shrug it off (although I was always aware that others probably weren't). Maybe it would have been different if I had fallen to victim to one of Tender Branson's Afghan gang-bangers, but the way it played out the worst thing that ever happened to me as a result of refugee crises was receiving death threats (and subsequently reporting them to the authorities) by AfD sh**theads and having an casually racist father who muses about crime in some manner every second time he talks about brown people.

I really don't think there is any excuse for voting AfD, however, you can not be directly affected by immigrants yet still hold the perfectly sane belief that accepting 800,000 asylum seekers, all while oil Sheiks who pay hookers 100k to have a sh*t on them in the Gulf have accepted zero Syrians or Afghans, is simply beyond the modern European state capacity's level of acceptability.

I actually think if Europe wasn't governed by such narrow conservative interest groups and a sense of the squeakiest wheels getting the most attention, we would be able to, as a continent, deal with immigration more effectively, but instead big cities in countries with more tolerant asylum policies like Germany are the ones to have to deal with the equivalent of a new big city's population joining them, and that results in the perception that these places are dysfunctional messes. Covid has also not helped in terms of homelessness and mental health problems, and the first victims are often asylum seekers or undocumented migrants (here in Brussels at least) - there is simply no more capacity and both the migrants themselves and the provincial areas that vote extremes do not want newcomers to settle in their village or small town. Even Ukrainians who are given housing in a nice Walloon village end up wanting to be in either Brussels or Antwerp and think the village is beneath them. It's a wicked cycle and eventually even nominally pro-immigration people end up frustrated - I count myself among them, without ever bringing myself to vote for any far right party.

Sort these issues out at a Europe-wide level, get some elements of society to pull their weight as opposed to Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne-like cities all the time, and fix our territorial policies and population distributions in the process. You may see AfD lose a good 5-10% of protest voters and left with just their bona fide racists.