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So the green bright future is in 10 years and it will take a lot of hard work to get there? If that's the path to success, AfD will be at 50% within 2 years.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
I'm Dutch. Just look across the border at what will happen. We're having lots of fun with our dearly beloved Geert Wilders trying to get a government together and having to suddenly deal with the notion that 100% percent of his party program is a combination of impractical, impossible, or in conflict with the constitution, international treaties, and what his own voters actually want. Which of course is a hot topic of debate and kind of hard to pin down to more than "I don't like X". Where X is foreigners, people that look a bit funny, the weather, or whatever else they saw on TV. Vaguely disgruntled and angry is the dominating sentiment. He may or may not get a government together. But if he does, it will likely be short lived and implode under its own madness. This is not actually the first time this is happening in my country. The last time was a wild ride of ludicrously incompetent people doing silly things until the whole thing ended. This round looks like it's going to be a repeat of that. Very similar to the Trump presidency, actually. The AFD may very well end up in power at some point but it will probably be their undoing. Kind of a necessary evil and it will definitely shake a few things up if it happens. But a bit of short lived shock therapy like that might actually not be that bad for Germany. Either way, I don't see them getting anywhere near 50%.
- mamonster 3y ago
  I would agree with you but there is a key difference in Germany: CDU/SPD boomers will never defuse the AfD by letting them into power because they don't think like that. They will use all the tools at their disposal (Bundesverfassungschutz, punishing secessionists like Maassen, etc) to prevent AfD from ever getting into government, which will only make them more powerful. You might have a different idea of AfD's strategy, but IMO they are playing a very explosive game: They are basically trying to force some "unelected" organ to ban them, and on the basis of that get a boost and then get into power on a mandate of "everything should be democractic", which would allow them to dismantle any institutions that don't work with elections and use referendums to go around any Rechtsstaat considerations CDU/SPD could easily let them into government, stonewall them using the civil service for like 4 years and kill the party, but they are too dumb for that.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    > CDU/SPD could easily let them into government But that is precisely what happened in 1933 - the conservatives thought they could control Hitler and his party, but of course it didn't turn out that way. Small wonder they won't be doing the same for AfD anytime soon.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Again, I can point at my own country and point out that CDA (similar to the CDU) and the PVDA (similar to the SPD) are shadows of their former selves. Both parties pretty much got wiped out in recent elections. PVDA combined with the green party for the last round of elections and managed to recover a little bit. But the CDA which once had the same status as the CDU in Germany of being the defacto governing party was all but wiped out this election round. 5 seats in a 150 seat parliament. They've become a fringe party. NSC founded by a former member managed to grab 20 seats. That's a party that did not exist until a few months before the elections. And they were polling in the lead at 35 seats at some point. A completely new party. Their main competitor is another new party that peaked a few months before the elections but didn't manage in the end. The polls kept changing right up until the elections and the outcome caught a lot of people by surprise as, evidently, some 10-15 seats ended up shifting in the last days/hours. VVD (which supplied the prime minister for the last ten years), was expected to win, but ended up losing badly to a populist that had previously been written off and made a miraculous recovery and won over two other parties that both been polling in the lead as well. This is just to provide a little insight into how things can change and how there are no certainties in politics. The VVD never lead a government until the CDA imploded after their last government in 2010. Now the CDA is wiped out and the VVD is at risk of being wiped out as well. Voters have flocked to new parties that didn't even exist until a few years ago. The same dynamics are at play in Germany and elsewhere. Lots of Germans are not really committed to voting on any of the traditional parties. And the ones that still are, aren't feeling that great about it. Everybody assumes that everything will just revert to people voting for the same parties because nothing ever changes in Germany. But when change comes, these things stop being true. If CDU/CSU ends up forming a government with the AFD, they could end up paying a heavy price. That's exactly what happened in the Netherlands in the last 20 years. It completely wiped out the CDA. This was unthinkable until about 20 years ago.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

I'm Dutch. Just look across the border at what will happen. We're having lots of fun with our dearly beloved Geert Wilders trying to get a government together and having to suddenly deal with the notion that 100% percent of his party program is a combination of impractical, impossible, or in conflict with the constitution, international treaties, and what his own voters actually want. Which of course is a hot topic of debate and kind of hard to pin down to more than "I don't like X". Where X is foreigners, people that look a bit funny, the weather, or whatever else they saw on TV. Vaguely disgruntled and angry is the dominating sentiment. He may or may not get a government together. But if he does, it will likely be short lived and implode under its own madness. This is not actually the first time this is happening in my country. The last time was a wild ride of ludicrously incompetent people doing silly things until the whole thing ended. This round looks like it's going to be a repeat of that. Very similar to the Trump presidency, actually. The AFD may very well end up in power at some point but it will probably be their undoing. Kind of a necessary evil and it will definitely shake a few things up if it happens. But a bit of short lived shock therapy like that might actually not be that bad for Germany. Either way, I don't see them getting anywhere near 50%.

mamonster 3y ago
I would agree with you but there is a key difference in Germany: CDU/SPD boomers will never defuse the AfD by letting them into power because they don't think like that. They will use all the tools at their disposal (Bundesverfassungschutz, punishing secessionists like Maassen, etc) to prevent AfD from ever getting into government, which will only make them more powerful. You might have a different idea of AfD's strategy, but IMO they are playing a very explosive game: They are basically trying to force some "unelected" organ to ban them, and on the basis of that get a boost and then get into power on a mandate of "everything should be democractic", which would allow them to dismantle any institutions that don't work with elections and use referendums to go around any Rechtsstaat considerations CDU/SPD could easily let them into government, stonewall them using the civil service for like 4 years and kill the party, but they are too dumb for that.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  > CDU/SPD could easily let them into government But that is precisely what happened in 1933 - the conservatives thought they could control Hitler and his party, but of course it didn't turn out that way. Small wonder they won't be doing the same for AfD anytime soon.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Again, I can point at my own country and point out that CDA (similar to the CDU) and the PVDA (similar to the SPD) are shadows of their former selves. Both parties pretty much got wiped out in recent elections. PVDA combined with the green party for the last round of elections and managed to recover a little bit. But the CDA which once had the same status as the CDU in Germany of being the defacto governing party was all but wiped out this election round. 5 seats in a 150 seat parliament. They've become a fringe party. NSC founded by a former member managed to grab 20 seats. That's a party that did not exist until a few months before the elections. And they were polling in the lead at 35 seats at some point. A completely new party. Their main competitor is another new party that peaked a few months before the elections but didn't manage in the end. The polls kept changing right up until the elections and the outcome caught a lot of people by surprise as, evidently, some 10-15 seats ended up shifting in the last days/hours. VVD (which supplied the prime minister for the last ten years), was expected to win, but ended up losing badly to a populist that had previously been written off and made a miraculous recovery and won over two other parties that both been polling in the lead as well. This is just to provide a little insight into how things can change and how there are no certainties in politics. The VVD never lead a government until the CDA imploded after their last government in 2010. Now the CDA is wiped out and the VVD is at risk of being wiped out as well. Voters have flocked to new parties that didn't even exist until a few years ago. The same dynamics are at play in Germany and elsewhere. Lots of Germans are not really committed to voting on any of the traditional parties. And the ones that still are, aren't feeling that great about it. Everybody assumes that everything will just revert to people voting for the same parties because nothing ever changes in Germany. But when change comes, these things stop being true. If CDU/CSU ends up forming a government with the AFD, they could end up paying a heavy price. That's exactly what happened in the Netherlands in the last 20 years. It completely wiped out the CDA. This was unthinkable until about 20 years ago.