Worries about the economy and migration pushed up share for far-right AfD in Hesse and Bavaria, while coalition parties did worse
German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious centre-left coalition has received a sharp rebuke from voters in the key states of Bavaria and Hesse, with economic woes and immigration fears boosting the opposition conservatives and the far right.
At the elections on Sunday the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party burst out of its post-industrial eastern strongholds to score its best ever result in a western state. Polls showed it on course to be the second largest party in Hesse, home to the financial capital Frankfurt.
All three parties in Scholz’s federal coalition – his Social Democrats, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) – did worse than five years ago in the states, which together account for about a quarter of the German population.
As a German, I have absolutely no fucking idea why the AfD is gaining traction right now of all times. Its platform is anti-immigration and also anti-progressivism, which the new government has been doing a bit of, but not much. Maybe it is because there’s been a lot of hostility between the coalition’s parties, but that doesn’t really explain it either.
It’s simple solutions to simple problems. “There is no climate change, we will let you use fossil fuels” for example. Modern politics aren’t easy and the right wing is using that. These rubbish politicians are now accelerating and are actually the most dangerous group in Germany since the NSDAP back in the thirties.
Worse is that there is a media lobby supporting them. It’s as bad as fox news.
So people are unhappy with some recent situations, mostly because they don’t understand them - which is a problem generated by propaganda and false media.
If anything, they are against it. Doing propaganda is easy and they brought nothing to the democracy. They are open and outed Nazis.
Thing is… most that vote them, are the ones suffering if they ever make it to government as a leading party.
Yeah, just like far-right ultraconservatives and fascists elsewhere, the idea is to always go “Nope, you’re all wrong and also all want to hurt us, in reality it’s all simple, we’ll fix it, just vote for us”.
Their issues are also stuff that is easy to make someone afraid of:
Sure, the AfD couldn’t fix a shoelace if they got into power, but they wouldn’t need to. And to get there, they can promise the moon full of simplest solutions and blame everyone else around them for everything. The issue that modern generations are so anti-politics overall that they no longer care and no longer even bother to look into it. And the older generations have seen too much negative consequences too quickly (that them or their parents fucked up) to not be vulnerable to populist rhetorics.
Social media is the closest we’ve come to mind control and many of the people with means to manipulate it are dogshit.