Here is the best article I could find on this.
The Greens' surge in popularity comes after the party on Monday named co-chair Annalena Baerbock, 40, as its first candidate for chancellor. The nomination of Ms Baerbock, a centrist who advocates a greener economy and a tougher foreign policy stance on Russia and China, has been widely praised.
Hopefully the Christian Democrat Union won't be on top any more.
Greens being tree-Tories
Glad to see its like this everywhere
German Greens are also mostly radlibs, but turn conservative as soon as they take over in one of the Southern states.
Certainly not at all related to the fact that the state were they first became the strongest party in an election has the world HQs of both Mercedes and Porsche.
They're well-meaning radlibs in Denmark as well. They deserve credit for bringing climate politics into the mainstream but they have imploded due to fractional struggle and will lose their seats at the next election.
It always amuses me how all the super climate friendly parties are in counties which produce 0.0000000069% of the world's CO2 lol
In German, we say "Union mit Solardach", and I think that's beautiful.
The Portuguese Greens are usually "allied" with the Communist Party (as in they run as one party, which funnily enough given the country we're talking about in this thread, is called CDU) in elections, so that's good.
The greens are basically a puppet of the US, expect the current cold war to become colder. (And maybe later hot)
I don't like Merkel, but at least she wants Germany and the EU to be independent from the US, especially when it comes to foreign policy and imperialism. With the greens the dog will basically come back to its owner.
I understand why people on this site want EU-China relations to improve, but who cares about Russian-EU relations?
I think it is possible to be anti-imperialist and still oppose, say, the pipeline Russia and Germany are working on.
Could be that they actually are tougher on Russia while doing little more than sabre rattling and light sanctions on China.
a centrist who advocates a greener economy and a tougher foreign policy stance on Russia and China, has been widely praised.
Sounds like shit tbh
I'll accept everyone calling me an incrementalist :LIB: and if the Greens win you won't find me celebrating, but jesus fucking christ it'd still be such a step up from the current state of affairs if only for the fact that they'd do green capitalism.
It's been 16 FUCKING years of nothing being changed. Literally my entire conscious life the government has been blocking any changes into any direction. I'm not going to go celebrate if the greens win, but if they do they might bring about an understanding that the government can actually fucking change things because in general, people here have forgot that this is an option. I don't even know how to articulate this to people of other nations that we've had a government of 16 years which ran (and won) on the basis of "Let's pretend it's 1991" and nothing fucking else.
I'm not advocating to vote for the greens. But fucking hell, it's germanys bernie moment for all it's worth. It ain't good, but it's better.
Yeah of course, the stance on Russia and China is fucking bad. You won't find any better stance with any party except Die Linke which has no realistic chance of being anything but a minor coalition partner or the AfD (the nazi party) which isn't against russia, but for the wrong reasons.
it’s germanys bernie moment for all it’s worth
It definitely isn't.
You won’t find any better stance with any party except Die Linke which has no realistic chance of being anything but a minor coalition partner
Doesn't matter. If you wouldn't even vote for Die Linke over the greens you are turbolib.
Doesn’t matter. If you wouldn’t even vote for Die Linke over the greens you are turbolib.
Good god man, I'm not voting for the green capitalists but against the backdrop of 16 years of inaction you can still be slightly optimistic that they'd at least do literally anything
Alright I misinterpreted that comment. But eh alright perhaps it might be marginally better. I mean I definitely prefer just about anyone to Merkel, being Greek and all...
But eh alright perhaps it might be marginally better
Yeah, which is where all my optimism comes from.
being Greek and all…
Sorry n' all, I swear I didn't vote for these ghouls.
Incidentally nationalists here don't like Die Linke but they like the greens because they think they'll grind their teeth at Turkey or whatever. Meanwhile Die Linke is the only major German party that (to my knowledge) has advocated for paying proper reparations to Greece for WWII. It's very funny because more than 10% of all people in Greece died, 80% of all industry, 90% of ports, roads, railways and bridges and 28% of infrastructure was destroyed, AND the central bank was forced to give a zero interest loan to the Nazis which came at about half a billion marks, and after all that Greece received a bit more than 100 million marks in the 60s and that was supposed to be decent reparations.
Incidentally nationalists here don’t like Die Linke but they like the greens
fucking cringe, couldn't be me
Meanwhile Die Linke is the only major German party that (to my knowledge) has advocated for paying proper reparations to Greece for WWII.
This isn't an attack against you BUT BOY HOWDY WONDER WHY THE FUCK THAT IS JESUS FUCKING CHRIST :knifecat:
I wanted to say, I don't even think it's reasonable to ask for whatever insane figure some board here came up with a few years ago (I think it was more than 200 billion) but like, come the fuck on. Even symbolically it's just pathetic to not even return the total amount that was stolen when the country is the biggest economy in the entire Europe and clearly able to do so. Like, even leaving aside the incredible loss of life and infrastructural devastation, that's just clown shit. I usually roll my eyes when people here go on and on about x stupid thing that is supposed to be a super strong argument for other countries to just write off our debt or whatever but when I researched the reparations thing I was like wtf how is this real?
From what I understand even "The Left" party in Germany is just liberal suc dems, despite having roots in the DDR.
How did we get here?
It's a coalition, kind of like if the DSA was an actual party. They did expel the DKP (the West German version of the SED) in 2008, which is a shame, but Communist and other revolutionary elements, some of which descend from the SED, are strong factions.
Yeah that was because Christel Wegner made whack statements about the Stasi, no way they could not distance themselves from that.
It's more of a big tent where Trots, MLs, SocDems left of the SPD are all in one party.
god i hope they kick the goddamn CDU
christian democracy and its consequences have been a disaster for euro politics
So has social democracy lmao. How do people keep voting for SPD trash?
succdem > chrisdems tbh
i mean the real reason is the actual left spent the last century getting murdered in Western Euro & the past 3 decades getting fucked in the East, lmao
SPD 1994: Abolishment of asylum as a basic right from the basic law.
Abolishment of the welfare state and introduction of neoliberal poverty generation and exploitation
First aggressive war of Germany since WW2.
I could go on, but don't feel like it.
Social Democrats are Neoliberals and they aren't better than CDU, they are just differently worse.
agahhahahhaa that's hilarious
im not that up on recent german politics i was giving SPD some credit for establishing that welfare state :agony-soviet:
Which they gutted with the Harz IV reforms last time they had a chancellor.
I was closely associated to a mandated person of the SPD during 1998 to 2005, you ought to listen to the people who are affected and know stuff. Surely we could talk about the history of the countries that now form Germany from 1848 over 1871 over 1914 over 1945 over 1972 over 1990 over 1994 over 1998 over 2001 over 2005 to today if you like, but one sentence is enough: The SPD of 2000 is not the Social Democratic movement of Marx or Lasalle.
Another point: If you say the SPD established the welfare state where would you pin Bismarck and the social reforms and rent introduction that he did to?
all i said was succdems are better than christian democrats, all this shit can be perfectly accurate about the SPD it'll just make the CDU look even worse
Bismarck would never have done this if he wouldn't have been scared shitless of the worker's movement Germany had at that time. The SPD in the Wilhelminian era already included collaborationist libs, but they also had a revolutionary wing before WW1, they represented the biggest worker's movement on the continent, and the capitalists had seen the uprisings of British workers over the last decades, so it's kinda obvious Bismarck had no choice but to appease the workers to some degree. He literally did that to save capitalism.
Bismarck would never have done this if he wouldn’t have been scared shitless of the worker’s movement Germany had at that time
Yes, but it is a big mistake to mistake the SPD as the only party and the only relevant actor of the workers movement. It also marginalizes the conflict within the party and cloaks the factual reach of it.
It is also wrong to act as if it was the SPD that created the welfare state when the factual powerful and acting bodies were the old and through and through feudalist-capitalist establishment. Surely without organized workers and material conditions heightening the contradictions it wouldn't have happened (and naturally the first laws that the German states created weren't really a welfare state - e.g you couldn't stay alive on rents alone mostly), but that doesn't mean that the SPD was creating it.
There is also a fun element in the history of the German welfare states and that predates any Bismarkian influence. I talk about insurances and rents. For example the mine worker had solidarity funds and such for centuries, those were incorporated into the state for some reasons, but the worker solidarity predates capitalist cooptation of worker's solidarity movements.
SPD is down to 15% - from 38% at the tail end of the Schröder years. Note the -54 seats in the pic. They're declining steadily as their electoral base (boomers who have always voted SPD) keeps dying off.
The CDU/CSU is taking an even harder hit in polls rn, but that's hardly surprising as picking their candidate was a complete shitshow, there's so many corruption scandals around them that even conservatives have a hard time ignoring them and the guy they went with as Merkel's successor, Armin Laschet, is a complete laughingstock constantly botching covid policies in his state.
It's the special kind of fucked up you get when you are a) a very conservative country such as germany and b) also still have some tradition of workers rights baked into the national DNA:
Which lands you at a sizeable amount of people who vote for the SPD because their dad voted for the SPD, come as it may. It's genuinely a conservative position, it's just they're being conservative about coal miners and other types of good ol' manual labour that hasn't existed in this country in any sizeable population for about 30 years.
People talking about how this might be good for Germany. I'm sitting here wondering how this will affect NATO, how this will affect imperialism. To me the green shit sounds completely irrelevant and the foreign policy is suspiciously convenient for the US in the new cold war.
CDU was already pretty big on NATO though, so I don't think it changes that much. They do strike me as slightly more hawkish but idk.
I love foreign elections. I get to try and piece together how other countries politics work. If there are any Germans here, does Die Linke have a chance of coalition government?
There is a slim chance of greens + spd + linke, yes. More likely it'll be greens + cdu/csu, though
even then fdp is more likely to be the third wheel.
linke policies are just so fundamentally incompatible with neoliberalism that a coalition just wouldn't work. not to mention that the private sector would go apeshit.
Their economic policies are fairly mild succdemism wherever they are in charge. In many Eastern states, they even get along ok-ish with conservatives on a local level. There are exceptions, as they are a big tent left unity party that includes everything from based tankies and ex-DDR cadres to antifa squatters to trots to radlibs to a very large number of succdems and DemSocs to their token NazBol queen Sahra Wagenknecht.
The real dealbreaker for entering a federal government coalition is something else than how left or moderate they are economically: In spite of all their flaws, they are rather uncompromisingly against imperialism. I can't see Germany leaving the NATO (if that happened, the CIA would probably arm nazis here with missile launchers), but the Linke could very well make it a condition to not start any new wars under their participation, and that alone is reason enough to make them political pariahs on the federal level.
Their economic policies are fairly mild succdemism wherever they are in charge
They've never been in charge. If you are talking at a local level then there ain't that much you can do if the government is completely opposed to you beyond mild succdemism.
They're part of several state governments. Where they don't have bad policies at all, i like what they tried with the rent cap in Berlin, for example. That has been shut down by the courts recently, as they ruled that would have to be a federal law, not a state law. So i could see them bring forth some good policies if they were in charge federally, and they're miles better than the Greens, not to mention that grotesque zombie that's the SPD. I'm just saying that in the majority, they are very far from being a revolutionary worker's party.
That has been shut down by the courts recently, as they ruled that would have to be a federal law, not a state law.
See, that's the thing.
I’m just saying that in the majority, they are very far from being a revolutionary worker’s party.
Yeah but I don't expect much more from Germany right now. Who knows, if they ever became big perhaps a more radical faction would also become influential.
Yeah but I don’t expect much more from Germany right now.
Me neither. I do see incredible amounts of cope from our local chuds rn, though, which is absolutely delicious. These people firmly believe that the Greens will make cars, meat and penises illegal once they're in charge, and it's really fun to see them panic about that. Also, there's at least a chance to get rid of the CDU, and it's a certainty that we'll finally be free of Merkel, which is a relieve. Oh, and the SPD will get kicked in the balls yet again, they can expect the lowest voter turnout in their entire party history.
we’ll finally be free of Merkel, which is a relieve
Oh we're pretty glad to be finally free from Merkel too here in Greece lol
Oh, and the SPD will get kicked in the balls yet again, they can expect the lowest voter turnout in their entire party history.
The SPD is such a joke of a party it's just sad.
Without talking to Southern Europeans online, i wouldn't even know how hard Greece has been hit by German-imposed austerity. It's frightening how completely that got suppressed here.
Oh it was nuts. My family's income after tax dropped by about half, and we were some of the "lucky" ones because other people just ended up unemployed and lost everything to debt. Not just that, every public service (healthcare, education etc) just started collapsing and/or got privatised. A lot of it was sold to German companies, and that's still going on (for instance, 14 small airports were sold to Fraport under pretty suspect terms as a memorandum condition about 4 years ago). German companies own a lot of stuff here now. The other part that gets me is that the IMF literally admitted "uh maybe all that austerity wasn't a great idea" and then they kept doing it anyways.
What's even crazier is the subject of reparations. Like, Greece was among the countries most devastated by the Nazis. More than 10% of the population died, 80% of all industry was destroyed as well as 90% of roads, railways, bridges, ports etc, and the central bank was forced under occupation to loan hundreds of millions of marks to Germany with 0 interest. All the country ever received from Germany is 115 million marks in 1960. It's a total joke. Germany claims now they have no responsibility to pay anything since the 90s since the subject of reparations was settled with the two plus four agreement, except Greece didn't even participate in this agreement. "Yeah I know I burned down your house and only gave you back 10 bucks, but I signed an agreement with some other bloke and they said it's fine if I don't give you reparations. Anyways, let's now talk about all that money you owe". I'm really not one of these nationalists here who believe everyone ows us everything but this kind of shit is just too ridiculous.
A lot of it was sold to German companies, and that’s still going on (for instance, 14 small airports were sold to Fraport under pretty suspect terms as a memorandum condition about 4 years ago). German companies own a lot of stuff here now.
These ghouls. These fucking ghouls. That's exactly how West German companies looted the former DDR after the reunification, and they did it again.
I guess they have prior experience with that sort of stuff lol
Deutsche Telekom also owns most of the largest (by far) telecom company here which also used to be public (although shares started getting sold off already before the crisis).
More likely it’ll be greens + cdu/csu, though
That will be fucking hilariously grim.
AFAIK the SPD suffers from terminal horseshoe syndrome and treats Die Linke as if they were poisonous extremists and refuse basing a coalition on their support.
Well, I see they've really grown from their positions in 1919...and 1923...and 1928...and 1959...
They also refused to be in a coalition with them on the federal level. The SPD preferred being the smaller party in a coalition with the conservatives over getting to be chancelor in a left coalition. Twice.
Partially this is because the SPD is the most cucked party in existence. Even moreso than the Dems or Labour. Partially, this is also because the Linke challenges US foreign policy, which is still a taboo in German politics, in spite of the US regualrly setting its pants on fire, being the most aggressive regime in the world, and also in total disregard of public opinion in this country, which is very clearly anti-war. 70% of the people here were against invading Afghanistan. 70%. The SPD and Greens went there regardless.
So, what are they gonna do about anything? Rubber stamp a US war?
Slightly off topic but the albania elections were the other day and the socialist party won, but I can't tell if they are actually good or not? someone help lol.
What coalition is likely to come out of this? CDU-SPD-FDP? CDU-Grüne-FDP? Grüne-SPD-Linke? What direction is the political consensus moving, will anything change for German workers?
Flicking down the page here, the first thing I saw was SPUD. SPUD should rule Germany.
I have no idea what SPUD would stand for, I just mix up words and letters in my head until I actually focus on the page.
You mean the Greens who pushed for burning more coal instead of keeping a clean, safe, and efficient energy source just because of a scary word?
