First of all the CDU moved more to the center under Merkel, which squished the SPD. Now it is going back into full right wing, overshooting their previous positions.
The current government faces multiple crisis, that are excarberated by the lack of investment and political progress under Merkel, who governed succesfully on a basis of “go back to sleep, everything is fine” while infrastructure crumbled, energy dependence on Russia increased and the rising far right extremism was conveniently ignored.
Now all these crisis are used by the Nazis from the AfD and outside of parliament to attack the government for failing to make the issues go away in an instant. With that the CDU is joining force with the AfD, moving from conservative positions to far right populism and starting to work together with the AfD on local and state level.
Then the current government from the SPD - social democrats, green party and FDP - liberal party is strongly divided. The Green party tries to bring on necessary reforms that werent done in the past 16 years under Merkel. The FDP attacks them heavily and acts like an opposition inside the government, often violating agreements and changing their minds last minute. The SPD doesnt really have political positions anymore. They just want to have some power and government positions. So Scholz as a chancellor is sitting back, hiding from media and publicity in general. He then just follows who won the current issue between Green party and FDP. This tactic is failing of course because in times of crisis people want a leader that is present and they want a government that seems united.
Finally in Germany there is a lot of far right media, including the Axel Springer publisher, the one where the director of Bild Zeitung had to resign because of sexual misconduct at work and their head Döpfner, is claiming eastern Germans to either be communists or nazis, actively demand his newspapers to strengthen certain parties and last but not least claiming all other media to be like in former eastern Germany. But instead of taking position against such claims he was leader of the journalist association and most newspapers happily follow into the disinformation campaigns started by Springer against the current government.
So overall you have the same situation as in the 20s, where crisis meets a weak government and opportunistic conservative forces in politics and society, that believe they could use the Nazis to gain power and foolishly believe they could control them in the end.
Thank you for this in-depth analysis. I stopped following German politics actively early 2000s and am just shocked to see that you’re facing the same populist bullshit as the US. I was hoping Germans were smarter than us 😩
Not coincidently only the minority interested in the world is. The majority is sleeping through history lessons, gets their information from click-bait headlines (obviously never reading the article as that’s too much work), even there prefering the ones with big red letters and a lot of exclamation marks and in general have a severe aversion to thinking… so everyone giving them (obviously rediculous and false) easy solutions is great.
We see a few trends here:
First of all the CDU moved more to the center under Merkel, which squished the SPD. Now it is going back into full right wing, overshooting their previous positions.
The current government faces multiple crisis, that are excarberated by the lack of investment and political progress under Merkel, who governed succesfully on a basis of “go back to sleep, everything is fine” while infrastructure crumbled, energy dependence on Russia increased and the rising far right extremism was conveniently ignored.
Now all these crisis are used by the Nazis from the AfD and outside of parliament to attack the government for failing to make the issues go away in an instant. With that the CDU is joining force with the AfD, moving from conservative positions to far right populism and starting to work together with the AfD on local and state level.
Then the current government from the SPD - social democrats, green party and FDP - liberal party is strongly divided. The Green party tries to bring on necessary reforms that werent done in the past 16 years under Merkel. The FDP attacks them heavily and acts like an opposition inside the government, often violating agreements and changing their minds last minute. The SPD doesnt really have political positions anymore. They just want to have some power and government positions. So Scholz as a chancellor is sitting back, hiding from media and publicity in general. He then just follows who won the current issue between Green party and FDP. This tactic is failing of course because in times of crisis people want a leader that is present and they want a government that seems united.
Finally in Germany there is a lot of far right media, including the Axel Springer publisher, the one where the director of Bild Zeitung had to resign because of sexual misconduct at work and their head Döpfner, is claiming eastern Germans to either be communists or nazis, actively demand his newspapers to strengthen certain parties and last but not least claiming all other media to be like in former eastern Germany. But instead of taking position against such claims he was leader of the journalist association and most newspapers happily follow into the disinformation campaigns started by Springer against the current government.
So overall you have the same situation as in the 20s, where crisis meets a weak government and opportunistic conservative forces in politics and society, that believe they could use the Nazis to gain power and foolishly believe they could control them in the end.
Thank you for this in-depth analysis. I stopped following German politics actively early 2000s and am just shocked to see that you’re facing the same populist bullshit as the US. I was hoping Germans were smarter than us 😩
Not coincidently only the minority interested in the world is. The majority is sleeping through history lessons, gets their information from click-bait headlines (obviously never reading the article as that’s too much work), even there prefering the ones with big red letters and a lot of exclamation marks and in general have a severe aversion to thinking… so everyone giving them (obviously rediculous and false) easy solutions is great.