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.
There’s lots of Germans here on lemmy so I have a question. What exactly is pushing the far right movement other than “immigration fears”? Also how far right is far right? American far right are fucking turbo racists, but as i hear most say EU right would be considered liberal in the US.
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, what we need to do is look from the angle of most people not from above. A lot of people suffer very real deficits of money. They don't earn more, especially in the East and between Corona, the war in Ukraine and the general world economy everything is more expensive.
What they see is: we have less money, a lot of money gets to other things they don't care about.
Far right populists promises to curb that money to these things they don't care much about and indicate that the money of the suffering Germans will improve thusly.
Concrete problems, concrete solution propositions. And that's just enough for a lot of people who are seeing the bottom of their wallets.
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.
They are far right enough that courts and prosecutors have decided repeatedly that one of their main leaders can be publicly called a fascist and a nazi because it is based on facts and a permissible „value judgement“. This is rather exceptional, as things like that are usually taken very seriously here as an insult and can cost you hundreds or thousands of Euros.
Here is what one prosecutor had to say (translated):
There are moderates in the AfD, but they are increasingly silenced or leaving. And in that case „moderate“ means not demanding that migrants be shot at the border, not defending holocaust deniers, not attending concerts where the hitler salute is shown, not conniving with Reichsbürger (our own mad version of „sovereign citizens“), not calling for the death of government officials, politicians or doctors …
The turn to the right in Germany have a lot to do with the state of the media in Germany.
Far-right groups have sucessfully established isolated media channels on various platforms, among them Telegram and YouTube, but also on Facebook and Twitter, with very little coherence to other media and the actual state of things. Its output is achieved by informally and ideologically recruiting laypersons as influencers who constantly create content which acts as a sort of pyramid scheme of attention, thus self-replicating.
The content also appears on the feeds of already right-wing journalists of very popular and sensationalist newspapers of the Axel-Springer-Verlag (very sketchy and influential publisher) with half a century of experience manipulating the German political landscape.
For additional context it is also necessary to consider that yesterday (Sunday, 2023-10-08) there were elections in two German states, one of which (Bayern) has a history of being more right-wing and religious than the other West-German states.
I would say a lot of people in Germany are feeling left out/alone with their problems.
It's been like this for at least 10, if not 20 or more years.
Most stuff is lobby and economy driven and we're getting nowhere.
In came the afd offering easy solutions and appealing to the public (never mind their program stating completely otherwise) so I guess it gave people the feeling of someone doing something and caring for them.
And if not, pissing off the rest of the politicians.
At least the latter is working.
I do not support or condone this behaviour but it is not that hard to read.
And instead of approaching the real current issues (inflation, money issues, buerocracy, environment) directly most parties even try to move further right, to get the afd voters back, which is the worst they could do.
I think your last paragraph is a big part of the problem. Instead of acknowledging that we blundered away the last decades, time critically needed in the transformation of Germany towards a carbon neutral, digital future, the democratic parties are trying to chase the AfD immigration rhetoric. It's fucking infuriating.
Looking at the election results I think the Greens did remarkably well, in the face of an almost constant hate campaign from conservative media. For me that reads like that there is a good amount of people in Germany ready to tackle the future constructively. The FDP on the other hand lost bad and their take away is not that they fucked up by blocking all initiatives in government but by not being tough enough on immigration. Seriously wtf
It's pretty much just immigration. There's some other topics but in all the polls done they absolutely dwarf compared to people not wanting "immigrants" (this includes refugees, including those from Ukraine for example, since those people are deep into Russian propaganda).
That being said, the headline and statement made here by the Guardian is absolute rubbish.
No it's not that simple. It's immigration, energy prices, inflation, fear of war, denial of ecological catastrophes, a good portion of racism and a lot of lies and propaganda about our current government (which also makes some mistakes) that are fueling those nazi fucks right now…
It actually is. Energy prices, inflation etc. are all just fractions of the immigration replies in polls. "Fear of war" is hilarious since the AfD wants to just let Russia take the whole of Ukraine and stop all weapon deliveries. And things like "ecological catastrophes" aren't even a thing with AfD voters as they're all climate change deniers and want to increase coal power usage. lol
The things you list are at best part of the anti establishment propaganda, but those are just tools to discredit other parties, especially the Greens.