🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[DavidB.]

^^awful, frustrating poll, the German establishment need to start to making the positive case for immigration and challenge the narrative being set by the AfD,

Haha, good luck with that.

[DavidB.]

Why are there three Nazi parties on the ballot? What's the difference between them? Will III. Weg and Die Rechte cause the NPD not to make it in?

My Wahl-O-Mat result:
AfD 88.9%
FDP 46.7%
CDU-CSU 44.4%
ÖDP 32.2%
Die Linke 23.3%
Die Partei 22.2%
SPD 15.6%
Grüne 12.2%

[DavidB.]

Perhaps a difficult what-if question to answer, but to what extent do German posters here think that a Werte-Union kind of party would do better than the current AfD? There's a massive gap between CDU/FDP and AfD, though it's also a gap that's proven to be difficult to fill in other countries too.

[DavidB.]

So Scholz now wants to make vaccination mandatory, just like in Austria. His first broken promise: in September, right before the election, he said he opposed it. Truly wonder whether the FDP will accept this.

[DavidB.]

Really bad proposal. As Logical said, the entire purpose of single-member constituencies is undone if the winner of a district is not elected. To combat the explosion of the number of seats, they should have introduced either an MMM system, letting go of proportionality (not sure if this would be constitutional though), or they could have simply gone for multi-member constituencies.

[DavidB.]

I wonder if part of the story of the surge for far-right options isn't the recent success of far-right parties in other parts of the continent? The Sweden Democrats were if anything more ostracized than the AfD until 2022, but now they've entered a government and have had real influence on Kristersson's policies (or at least his rhetoric); Giorgia Meloni's party was never really ostracized in the same way, but her leading a government as Prime Minister is also sort of unprecedented. (The RN in France have not yet entered government, but in 2022 the 'republican front' clearly broke down at the voter level, with not just center-right but many centrist voters preferring the RN to left-wing candidates, which would've been unthinkable in, like, 2017.) The western European far-right had a very successful year in 2022, and so voting for an organization like the AfD must feel less unrealistic now.

In general I always tend to shy away from such "spillover" explanations, as most European voters have very little knowledge of other European countries' politics - I'd say it is first and foremost Europe-wide phenomena like high immigration and high inflation levels that affect voting patterns on a country-by country basis. But I also think German voters do know that parties to the right of the center-right have been doing well across Europe over the last year, with Meloni's win and subsequent Prime Ministership undoubtedly being by far the most prominent exponent of this.

[DavidB.]

Wagenknecht's economic views aren't so clear to me. Wasn't she part of an openly Communist faction within Die Linke? How should we see her new project's economic views vis-a-vis those of Die Linke?