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German Politics (was Germany: Elections 2017)

littleseb said:
dunno.
yes, it grants the AfD media exposure, makes them victims as well as moral winners etc etc, but they thrive on all of this anyway.
and if one lot deserves to get their heads battered in it's surely them. they need opposing, violently if necessary.
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They need opposing intelligently, I'd say - and I don't see much intelligence at work here. And of course we don't know precisely who was responsible for this one yet. . .
 
Idris2002 said:
An AFD leader was attacked in the street recently by three unknown people who battered him with clubs.

He sustained a severe head injury and is described in some reports as "fighting for his life".

Attackers knock Bremen AfD leader Frank Magnitz unconscious in street | DW | 08.01.2019

The phrase "counter-productive" is what comes immediately to mind.
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As usual, the AfD lied again in their press statement about the incident. In the meantime, police has gotten hold of video footage which shows no clubs or 'piece of wood' at all. He wasn't kicked to the head while lying on the ground as well, as they said, and he didn't nearly die but sustained just a long, bloody cut and a black eye. All in all nothing, that couldn't happen to left-wing or migrant people or even journalists every day. But if the victim is a fascist, it's of course big news.:rolleyes:

Those 'liberal' politicians, journalists, etc. pushing to the front to be first to declare their solidarity and condemn this evil, anti-democatic act totally suck. Really embarrassing, how easy they are tricked into the AfD's gameplay, even people you'd normally deem quite intelligent.

Had loved, if there'd been a broad movement to turn their own language against them and media commentary would instead have been like "we don't see any evidence for a political background here and you can't derive anything from this isolated event, the perpetrators were probably just concerned citizens, who had bad experiences with fascists in the past or feared for the future of their children"…
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Church tax isn't some token 1 or 2 %, though, is it? It's 8 or 9%. Blimey.
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Church tax in Germany is 8 or 9% as high as your income tax. So you don't pay any church tax on your tax exemption limit and after that, it accelerates with your income, but it's always more like 1 or 2% rather than 8% of your gross income. Also, it's not really compulsory, just if your parents thought it was a great idea to baptist you when you were a child. Then you unfortunately have to declare the termination of your church membership at the local town hall and pay a fee that's ridiculously high for a single printed sheet of paper with a stamp.
 
Idris2002 said:
They need opposing intelligently, I'd say - and I don't see much intelligence at work here. And of course we don't know precisely who was responsible for this one yet. . .
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true, spitting at, pulling hair, and ripping Germany T-Shirts off Pegida wankers after one of their Monday rallies in Munich didn't make me feel intelligent, but yes, it felt good to make them feel uncomfortable about walking home alone at night.
 
littleseb said:
true, spitting at, pulling hair, and ripping Germany T-Shirts off Pegida wankers after one of their Monday rallies in Munich didn't make me feel intelligent, but yes, it felt good to make them feel uncomfortable about walking home alone at night.
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Thank you for your service.

And thanks also to otzenpunk for pointing out that all may not be as it seems. Got any links, otzi baby?
 
otzenpunk said:
As usual, the AfD lied again in their press statement about the incident. In the meantime, police has gotten hold of video footage which shows no clubs or 'piece of wood' at all. He wasn't kicked to the head while lying on the ground as well, as they said, and he didn't nearly die but sustained just a long, bloody cut and a black eye. All in all nothing, that couldn't happen to left-wing or migrant people or even journalists every day. But if the victim is a fascist, it's of course big news.:rolleyes:
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Very big news. Have you a link, please? Just so I can backup arguments against right-wing Americans who use this as yet more ammunition to decry, ugh, "the fascist leftists"?
 
otzenpunk said:
Church tax in Germany is 8 or 9% as high as your income tax. So you don't pay any church tax on your tax exemption limit and after that, it accelerates with your income, but it's always more like 1 or 2% rather than 8% of your gross income. Also, it's not really compulsory, just if your parents thought it was a great idea to baptist you when you were a child. Then you unfortunately have to declare the termination of your church membership at the local town hall and pay a fee that's ridiculously high for a single printed sheet of paper with a stamp.
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Ah. That makes more sense.
 
Idris2002 said:
Got any links, otzi baby?
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krtek a houby said:
Very big news. Have you a link, please? Just so I can backup arguments against right-wing Americans who use this as yet more ammunition to decry, ugh, "the fascist leftists"?
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Yes, sure. In German, of course.

Anschlag auf Bremer AfD-Politiker: „Kamera 7 zeigt den Tathergang“
Nach Angriff auf Frank Magnitz: Polizei widerspricht AfD-Version

Polizei Bremen Bremen. Aber sicher! - Pressemeldungen_ab_28122018
 
krtek a houby said:
My German is shit but cheers anyway!
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from the BR article (very quick rough translation):

[...]AfD Bremen said on facebook that [...] several people with covered faces were preying on him. 'With a log of wood they beat him unconscious and kicked his head when he was already on the ground.
[...]
VIDEO PAINTS A DIFFERENT PICTURE
....cctv footage from the crime seen has been looked at. [...] one of the unknown men hit the 66 year old from behind which made him fall. This caused a heavily bleeding wound to his head. [...] a spokes person for the police said:' we could not identify the use of a beater or baton from the cctv footage.'
Prior to this even the police had said that an offensive weapon was used.
[...]
the motive behind is still unclear. The police assumes a political motive.
[...]
Magnitz himself says he doesn't remember much of the attack. He hadn't seen the attackers nor heard what they had said. He had lost consciousness when they hit him over the head.
[...]
'Without being overly dramatic, this attack could be seen as attempted murder', he said.
However, this case is being investigated as GBH [...]
 
Angriff auf Politiker: Staatsanwalt widerspricht AfD

After evaluation of video recordings, which show the attack on the AFD politician Magnitz, the prosecutor's office has contradicted the representation by the AfD. […]

Magnitz had been jumped upon on Monday evening in Bremen by one of three men from behind, said the spokesman for the Bremen prosecutor, Frank Passade, referring to the video footage showing the raid in full. Thereupon, Magnitz fell and apparently hit the ground unimpededly with his head. "We assume all the injuries are due to the fall," said Passade.

The AfD Bremen, however, had written a few hours after the attack in a press release, the perpetrators had hit Magnitz unconscious with a squared timber and then kicked his head when he lay on the ground.[…]

The perpetrators had run away immediately after the attack, said Passade. Based on the videos, there are no indications that Magnitz had been kicked. Earlier, the investigators had communicated that after viewing the recordings in the act no impact object has been used. The police investigate on suspicion of 'dangerous assault and battery'. […]

Magnitz himself did not rule out the possibility of a robbery in an interview with Bild. "It's not very likely, but it may have been a robbery," he said. The attack had been severely condemned nationwide. The leaders of the Bundestag faction, Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland, described the act as a "cowardly assassination attempt" and blamed politicians and media.
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"A German lawyer is threatened with death in another letter. The investigation into an initial letter had led to the uncovering of a group of police officers from Frankfurt's 1st police station. #Aufschrei? Seda Basay-Yildiz has my full solidarity."

One of the papers, yesterday, was talking about this case under the headline of "NSU 2.0?" Bloody hell, I hope not.
 
Financial Times content/4fae0a48-2f9a-11e9-ba00-0251022932c8 (paywalled) Outline - Read & annotate without distractions
Nord Stream 2 marks a failure for EU energy policy
The editorial board. February 13, 2019
The EU has agreed to tighten its rules on natural gas pipelines — in a way that may force a restructuring of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to bring Russian gas under the Baltic Sea direct to Germany. Regrettably, however, it is unlikely to scupper the $9.5bn project. Washington has raised repeated concerns about the scheme; the European Parliament two months ago passed a motion condemning it as a “political project that poses a threat to European energy security”. A robust and coherent European energy policy would have found a way to block it.

The regulatory revamp brings pipelines starting outside the EU under the same rules as those inside the bloc. At least 10 per cent of capacity must be made available to third parties, under non-discriminatory tariffs. Pipelines cannot be directly owned by suppliers. That means Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, may have to rejig ownership of Nord Stream 2. Since it has five European partners in constructing the pipeline — Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall, Engie of France, Anglo-Dutch Shell, and Austria’s OMV — that may not be too challenging.
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Worth a read.
 
The SPD continues to twist slowly in the wind:



How much longer can they go on like this? They're not likely to find a German Corbyn and regenerate themselves that way, that's for sure. Their last chance of that ended when Oskar Lafontaine was kicked out at the behest of the employers' organizations, back in the 1990s. . .
 
Idris2002 said:
The SPD continues to twist slowly in the wind:
How much longer can they go on like this? They're not likely to find a German Corbyn and regenerate themselves that way, that's for sure. Their last chance of that ended when Oskar Lafontaine was kicked out at the behest of the employers' organizations, back in the 1990s. . .
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Reform themselves as a German LD/En Marche? They are pretty much there already.
 
Idris2002 said:
Why not just merge with the FDP, hell merge with the CDU, in that case?
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Historical tradition(?) And the push from some in the CDU to move right to combat AfD. I'm not sure there is enough left to split but you can't see much other than a drift away of members/supporters to other parties - CDU, Grn, DL - can you?.

The outcome of once again supporting Merkel was absolutely predictable, and deserved.
 
redsquirrel said:
Historical tradition(?) And the push from some in the CDU to move right to combat AfD. I'm not sure there is enough left to split but you can't see much other than a drift away of members/supporters to other parties - CDU, Grn, DL - can you?.
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That's a negatory, good buddy, ten-four.

redsquirrel said:
The outcome of once again supporting Merkel was absolutely predictable, and deserved.
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"The future - not everyone is built for it".
 
Lots of things going on in German politics at the moment. I'm trying to give sort of an update (and not to bore you).

It basically started with a professional YouTuber with about 1.5M followers publishing a video a week before the European elections, which went viral and got about 10M views until election day.[1] That's essentially ten times the sales numbers of famous German tabloid BILD. In this hour-long video he not only accuses CDU politicians (and to a lesser extent the SPD ones as well) to be incompetent, corrupt, have no clue about what they're doing and consequently ignoring the interests of younger generations. He went through a couple of policy fields like housing, wealth distribution, support of the American drone wars, the European copyright directive, cannabis criminalization and especially global warming, while supporting every claim extensively with footnotes and sources. In the end, he explicitly called his viewers not to vote for the CDU and SPD, who he made responsible for all this shit, and as a sidenote not for the AfD either, and to talk to their parents and grandparents about these topics, too, because "old people demographically constitute the majority of voters". This video obviously caught the CDU flat-footed, and they were not able to give an effective response in time, despite the usual bunch of classic media supporting them by dissing the YouTuber ad hominem. Rezo, as he is called, then topped this days before the election by publishing another video, where more than 90 different German YouTube stars supported his claims on climate change politics and also his stance, that CDU, SPD and AfD shouldn't be voted for.[2]

I'm not sure, to which extend this videos influenced the outcome of the election. In my opinion, the majority of young people have already been fed up with these parties, as shown by the uproar against the European copyright directive and the FridaysForFuture movement. But it certainly helped to mobilize this people to actually go voting. In the end, turnout surged by round about 13 percent points up to more than 60%, which hadn't been the case for European elections in Germany since 1994. The CDU went down from 36% in 2014 to 28% now, the SPD nearly halved its voting share from 27% to 15%, while the Green party doubled from 10% to 20%. The AfD also went up from 7% to 11%, but felt short of the common expectations of 13–15%. On a sidenote, the satire party Die PARTEI was able to get close to 3% and doubled their seats in the European Parliament from 1 to 2, as many people voted for smaller parties. The Pirate Party of Germany defended their 1 seat as well.

Apparently the Greens have ultimately replaced the socialdemocrats as the centre-left runner-ups against the christiandemocrats now. Polls after the election support this trend, with the Greens rising even further at the expense of the SPD, with several polls showing the Greens even better than the CDU now,[3] and there's no sign that the SPD will ever be able to turn this around again.

Another thing to learn from this election is, if you're discussing real problems in public, like climate change, housing, etc., instead of pseudo problems like migration and refugees, right-wing populists don't overperform any longer. (Surprise!)

Also, new media formats challenge the old gatekeepers like TV and print press, and the old parties struggle with this loss of control. The picture the CDU showed in response to the Rezo videos was quite embarrassing, basically summing up like "WTF? He can't do that. Isn't there any law which prevents him from doing it?", now slowly replaced by "We have to have such a YouTube guy ourselves. Why don't we have that?" m)

What's also shown are several deep divides in the German society. First it's the divide between old and young.[4] The median of German voters is about an age of 55, meaning that it has been totally reasonable for the big, old political parties to focus more on pensions and preserving jobs of older people for example in the coal industry rather than on a sustainable future for people, who plan to stay on this planet for another couple of decades. But the tide is turning. At the European elections, the Greens already went top in every age class under 60! Just the 70+ voters saved the CDU's first place, with way more than 40% support in this group. They are also the age group, which votes for SPD more than any other. These are clearly dinosaur parties.

The other divide is between east and west. While the Greens went first place in several western states, they're still lagging behind in the east, where the AfD is the strongest party in several states, even before the CDU, often with more than 25%. In the west, in contrary, the AfD has clearly jumped the shark, falling below 10% in pretty much every state. (It's important to realize, that all the former Eastern German states without Berlin have in summary a population round about the same height as Northrhine-Westphalia alone.)

There's also a divide between urban and rural society, also with the Greens championing every major city, while the CDU retains ground in rural areas, at least where they don't lose to the AfD.

So what's probably going on in the near future? In the CDU there's clearly a power vacuum forming after Merkel announced her retirement, and there's a strong trend, that right-wingers in her party urge to fill this. There're also several state elections in the East taking place later this year, and it will probably prove very difficult to form governments there without the AfD, giving the CDU's right wingers arguments to try it with them, despite until now they still formally rule that out. On the other hand this is probably going to cost them votes in the centre, and in the end maybe end their monopoly on the chancellorship some day.

For the SPD, I really can't see any possible positive scenario for the future. They're just an overaged, weak party in decline. Their personnel seems to lack any quality. They still suffer from the massive welfare cuts they did under the Schröder government, and rightfully so, but refuse to admit they did anything wrong back then.

The Left party is also stagnating. Many of them are old as well, and they are internally divided into lots of fractions, some of them pretty untenable, like supporting Hamas, Putin, Assad and the like. And although providing the prime minister in the state of Thuringia, (probably not to be reelected later this year, unfortunately,) they haven't got any realistic chance to get their hands on governmental powers on federal level and in most of the states, so many voters probably consider a vote for them wasted, because it would be a certain opposition vote.

Clear winners are the Greens, and one of their two leaders, Robert Habeck, is widely considered to have good chances to become the next chancellor.

Also, I expect the satire project PARTEI to gain additional ground and probably manage to beat the 5% entry level at the next Berlin elections, although it's still a while until these take place in 2021. Maybe in the end they will turn into a proper, young, left-wing alternative, if they don't fuck it up before. The European DiEM25 project by Yanis Varoufakis, who wanted to be this alternative and even presented Varoufakis here in Germany as main candidate, clearly failed to even beat the 0.6% threshold for a single seat in the European Parliament, perhaps because they seriously lacked funding. At least, they weren't really visible in public at all.

[1]
[2]
[3] Wahlumfragen zur Bundestagswahl
[4] https://wahl.tagesschau.de/wahlen/2019-05-26-EP-DE/charts/umfrage-alter/chart_379131.jpg , Europawahl 2019
 
otzenpunk said:
Apparently the Greens have ultimately replaced the socialdemocrats as the centre-left runner-ups against the christiandemocrats now. Polls after the election support this trend, with the Greens rising even further at the expense of the SPD, with several polls showing the Greens even better than the CDU now,[3] and there's no sign that the SPD will ever be able to turn this around again.
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Thanks for that post otzenpunk, lots of useful information. I agree with above but aren't the Greens also getting a not insignificant amount of their support from socially liberal CDU voters? I'm sure I'm saw some data on this effect but will have to hunt around for it.
 
redsquirrel said:
I agree with above but aren't the Greens also getting a not insignificant amount of their support from socially liberal CDU voters?
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Yes, of course. One could argue, that quite a couple of them were certainly not CDU voters for their whole lives, but were attracted by Angela Merkel's politics. But I'm pretty sure, a lot of them have also been long time CDU voters, who happen to take the C seriously and dislike the CDU's current anti-refugee stance and/or ignorance of "God's creation" regarding environmental protection and climate politics.

But in summary, the SPD still loses more, although their remaining base is much smaller than the CDU's by now.
 
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