XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.republicans XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
With everything happening in the world, I've been neglecting to post on a
lot of what's been happening in Germany.
Right now, there are a number of moving parts coming together that are
rather ominous for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party's future.
One thing that isn't gloomy at all is their continued growth in
popularity. Alice Weidel's 'hard-right' group, as it's often derided, has
done nothing in the face of Chancellor and Christian Democrat head
Friedrich Merz's continued bumblings but gain followers. This has come at
the expense of the traditional coalition partners of the past few decades.
AfD closes in on conservatives as far right gains in new poll
Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has narrowed the gap
with the conservative CDU/CSU bloc, according to a new YouGov poll.
The AfD gained two points since last month to hit 25% support, while the
CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, slipped one point to 27%.
If an election were held this Sunday, the poll showed the centre-left
Social Democrats (SPD) stuck at 14%. The environmentalist Greens dipped to
11%, down one point, while the socialist Left Party rose two points to
10%.
This has created a certain amount of angst and resentment among a group
who are used to being players in German government coalitions regardless
of their actual Bundestag numbers, while only occasionally swapping out
the party of the chancellor. The Greens have enjoyed outsized influence
over German policy because their participation is required to form a government, as no one ever has an outright majority. In current times,
when one factors in the perceived, almost dogmatic insistence on
maintaining the so-called cordon sanitaire to deny AfD their rightful participation in a functioning government, deals made with parties of
minor representation give them clout that their numbers do not reflect.
It's easy to get used to being a prince.
In the Social Democrats' (SPD) case, by the time their leader, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in concert with the Green Party's lunatic fringe,
was done leading the country down the primrose path of a forced and
onerous Green transition, deindustrialization had begun to sweep the
country along with a massive immigration wave. SPD's stock has now fallen
so far that it barely blips above 10% alongside the Greens.
But they are still agitating as if they were running the show, and one of
their biggest moves has been aimed at cutting the legs out from under the ascendant AfD. Not through winning elections, but by having them banned as
a legal party.
Their attempts in the Bundestag failed earlier this year to have it done through legislative means, so they are attacking on a new front. The
German parliament is who gets to elect judges to the German Constitutional Court when vacancies come up, and this year there are three openings to be filled.
The SPD is moving Heaven and Earth to put two firmly anti-AfD people on
the bench, which is very difficult in a fractured legislature for a vote requiring a two-thirds approval.
...Anyway, one of the things the Bundestag has to do, is periodically
elect new justices to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. These justices wear pseudohistorical red robes designed to recall the Prussian judiciary and they decide on matters of constitutional importance.
The time has come to appoint three new justices to this court, and for the present government this is an incredibly delicate matter. This is because
these elections require a two-thirds supermajority of the Bundestag, and two-thirds of the Bundestag are very hard to achieve with all of the firewalling going on. On the one hand, the CDU and CSU have a firewall
against Die Linke, or the crazy Left Party; on the other hand and as
stated above they have a firewall against the AfD. Because the AfD and Die Linke together command a bit more than one-third of the Bundestag seats,
there is strictly speaking no way for the Union parties to elect anybody
to the Federal Constitutional Court without violating some firewall or
other.
As blogger eugyppius says, the smartest thing to do would have been to
nominate the most boring, middle-of-the-road jurist possible that most
everyone could agree on, which is what the CDU side did. SPD, though,
wants blood.
...The SPD, by contrast, did not feel any need to stay boring. They
nominated two hyphenated crazy women named Ann-Katrin Kaufhold and Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf.
The one is not only anti-AfD, she is an abortion advocate up to the moment
of birth, where Merz's CDU has always been firmly pro-life.
In the brouhaha over the wild candidates, the chancellor was asked the
gotcha question:
...On Wednesday in the Bundestag, Beatrix von Storch of the AfD had an opportunity to put a question to Chancellor Merz, and she pressed the
issue of Brosius-Gersdorf’s candidacy:
I ask you: can you in good conscience vote for Ms Brosius-Gersdorf, who
does not believe that human dignity applies to people who have not yet
been born? Ms Brosius-Gersdorf has said that a nine-month-old foetus has
no human dignity two minutes before birth. Can you in good conscience vote
for this woman, knowing that she will probably soon vote to abolish
Section 218 [i.e., our abortion criminalising statute]?
And flubbed it.
...With a look of triumph and after some prefatory AfD bashing, he said:
“My simple answer to your question here is: Yes.” He looked to the CDU benches, feeling that he had properly owned that obnoxious AfD woman.
Instead there was nothing but stunned silence, then a smattering of pro
forma claps. Merz had implicitly endorsed von Storch’s characterisation of Brosius-Gersdorf as a rabidly pro-abortion candidate and thrown his
support behind her.
(For the record, abortion is still ILLEGAL in Germany.)
The entire vote blew up in the face of German Catholic bishops going on a public rampage, CDU members telling the press they could not support such
a woman, and the SPD and Greens howling about misogyny.
They're going to try again because that's how determined the Left is, and
they have an enormous amount of political heft to lose if they cannot pull
this off.
...This matters because Brosius-Gersdorf and Kaufhold have both argued in favour of ban proceedings against Alternative für Deutschland. What is
more, both candidates would be appointed to the second senate of the Constitutional Court, which is the division responsible for banning
political parties. And as if that were not enough, the SPD nominated both candidates in the wake of their party congress, where SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil said that banning the AfD was his party’s “historical duty.” Many have therefore concluded that the SPD are trying to stack the court
in advance of an application to prohibit Germany's second-strongest
political party, banish all of its elected politicians and seize all of
its assets.
Things are sliding so far out of whack in the country that it soon could
be irretrievable.
...Keep in mind that this is not about the AfD, but about imperatives
within the left itself. No amount of moderation, polite messaging or triangulation on the part of the AfD can get the left to stop or pursue
other goals. Unless some exogenous force introduces a new unifying
obsession for the left parties and their activists, they will never stop gnawing on this particular chew toy.
Practically, this probably means that the AfD has an expiration date. If
they can’t get into government at the federal level and if nothing else changes, they will find themselves facing ban proceedings before a court stacked with leftists who hate them in the next 10 or 15 years. The
federal elections in 2029 seem like the last opportunity to normalise the
AfD before this final escalation.
Elements of the government are already attempting to purge AfD members
from employment.
That's going to court. Unsurprisingly, the police commissioner is an SPD
member and former elected representative.
Germany's Federal Police Commissioner Uli Grötsch has voiced opposition to police officers being members of the far-right Alternative for Germany
(AfD) party, calling it "incompatible" with serving in law enforcement.
"AfD membership and working as a police officer are incompatible," Grötsch told the Rheinische Post newspaper in remarks published late on Monday.
The former Social Democrat (SPD) lawmaker added that officers who
demonstrate clear commitment to the AfD should be dismissed. "For me, commitment means openly supporting the party, running for local or city
council or even for the Bundestag," he said.
Has 'white rage' vibes all over it, doesn't it? Think how close we came to
that ourselves.
In an attempted regional purge, the SPD has been forced to back down.
AfD members in Rhineland-Palatinate will not be excluded from public
service roles after all, following a political and legal backlash that
forced the state’s SPD-led government to retreat.
Interior Minister Michael Ebling had attempted to bar AfD members from
jobs such as teaching and policing, citing “loyalty to the constitution.” The move was widely seen as a political ploy, especially after the AfD was added to the state’s list of “extremist” groups—despite being Germany’s
largest opposition party.
But the AfD is still on the 'extremist group list. The government's backtracking could also be painted as a political ploy. They haven't consolidated enough power...yet.
There is also the matter of the inexorable extinguishment of Germans
themselves by the very people attempting to deny almost a third of the
country a political voice.
The immigration numbers are staggering, and the toll is too much.
Thilo Sarrazin, the former Bundesbank board member whose 2010 book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (“Germany Is Abolishing Itself”) sparked controversy, has returned to the spotlight with a revised edition of his bestseller — arguing that his original predictions about mass migration
and demographic transformation in Germany have been dramatically surpassed
by reality.
In an interview with Czech news outlet Echo24, Sarrazin reflected on his earlier work, noting that while he was broadly right in his projections,
the scale and pace of immigration — particularly since the 2015 crisis — have outstripped his original calculations.
He noted that his demographic model had assumed annual net immigration of between 50,000 and 100,000 people, based on official forecasts at the
time. In the decade since, however, Germany has averaged 500,000 new
arrivals per year, a majority of whom come from outside the European Union
and from predominantly Muslim-majority countries.
“Back then, I predicted that within a few decades, Germans would become a minority in their own homeland,” Sarrazin said. “But it will come much sooner.”
The AfD's biggest battle has been against the ardent pro-immigration
forces, and caving on his promises to tighten the border was Merz's first
Old Magoo after being elected.
...Only the AfD emphasized stopping the immigration flow in the first
place, rather than trying to reverse it after it had occurred. The day
after the Solingen attack, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration, admission, and naturalization. She followed up
with a call for the immediate expulsion of illegal migrants and criminals; in-kind rather than cash benefits for migrants; and an end to the naturalization of welfare-dependent migrants.
...The magazine notes that sexual assaults and harassment are done "predominantly by men with a migrant background."
"And once again, a piece of public space is being lost for women. Just as
they can no longer take the tram in the evenings and have long since
stopped partying freely in public or in bars for fear of having date rape
drugs in their glasses," writes the magazine.
Just like Socialists. Doing their damndest to keep the good times rolling
for everyone.
Beege ADDS: I updated the headline, changing 'Socialist' to specify the
Social Democrats, even though I know there's barely a hair's breadth
between the two.
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2025/07/16/german-socialist-party- scrambling-to-get-afd-banned-n3804845
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