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- cross-posted to:
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Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is celebrating a “historic success”, with a big victory for the far-right party in the eastern state of Thuringia.
The result gives the far right its first win in a state parliament election since World War Two, although it has little hope of forming a government in Thuringia because other parties are unlikely to work with it.
The AfD’s top candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who is a highly controversial figure in Germany, hailed a “historic victory” and spoke of his great pride. He failed to win a direct mandate for the state parliament, but secured a seat because he was top of his party list.
Pragmatism time:
When so many people start voting for these psychos, maybe your more moderate parties need to pull their heads out of their asses and start asking why people are breaking this direction in droves. And I mean like a root-cause analysis “why”. If you just treat the symptoms, you’ll generally just make it worse.
Labour and LibDems in the UK, and Democrats here in the US found that out the hard way. France is struggling with FN. Poland is only recently pulling back from that idiocy. Hungary is… Hungary.
There’s definitely foreign (by which I mean Russian) influence going on, but you can’t just call that out and throw up your hands. It’s a multi-front struggle. So yeah, maybe actually let your intelligence services fight against that effectively. But also, make cogent, helpful policies to your citizenry that are actually meaningful to the middle class. Communicate to voters. Loudly and consistently reject extremism and prejudice. And don’t stop. We can never stop. Because the fascists won’t either.
One big thing worthy of note is the psychological aspect of all this. We can’t simply boil everything down to living conditions and policies when culture is also an important element.
East Germany lived under a police state for decades. This does not promote trust or pro-social behaviors in a populace, it promotes the keep-your-head-down-and-obey mentality that authoritarians benefit from. This mentality can then be handed down parent to child in families.
This cultural difference could potentially be a big component.
When people become accustomed to and expect hardship, abuse and distrust, it’s not so easy to win their support with positive action. They won’t trust it, they’ll just be waiting for the other shoe to drop. They believe in an authoritarian world, ruled by hierarchy and power, and nothing else really makes sense to them.
I’d be curious to see research going into a variety of cultural and public health differences between the two former halves of Germany, to see if my idea pans out.
It is most certainly a big component. All you need to do to see it is look at the dichotomy between voting results of the former DDR regions compared to former West German regions nowadays. There’s a meaningful split.
This is the only comment here that recognizes the real problem instead of resorting to childish name calling
I just wish more people wouldn’t so easily lean into the conflict that these influence operations are so obviously trying to exacerbate :/ we really need more public resources and education on media literacy and social media bias.