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.
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.
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.
See, that's the thing.
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.
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.
Oh we're pretty glad to be finally free from Merkel too here in Greece lol
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.
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).