🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[republicanbayer]

In terms of the "normalization" of Germany's party system, I see no reason to dismiss Merkel's relevance in the rise of the AfD - which should be regarded as her most important legacy. Merkel has created a party completely devoid of any sort of coherent ideology and of course committed a cardinal error in August of 2015. That has played a huge role in the rise of the AfD. Of course her supporters are now rewriting the CDU's history in a 1984-like manner, claiming that the CDU has always been a party of the center and not a conservative party at all (that's the sound of Adenauer spinning in his grave you are hearing). It wouldn't have required a right-wing CDU leader to prevent the rise of the AfD, just someone with any sort of discernible center-right ideological preferences. It's quite telling that some of the most glowing tributes to Merkel's time in office have come from the left.

And AKK subscribes to the interpretation of the CDU as a party that essentially does anything to stay in power as well.

True. Just not letting in 1.5 million illegals would have been enough to prevent the rise of the AfD. They were polling at 3% in the summer of 2015 and would've followed the Pirate Party's path to irrelevancy.

[republicanbayer]

Gerhard Schröder gave a big newspaper interview in which he declared Andrea Nahles incompetent and all but said that Sigmar Gabriel should return to the helm. That's all nonsense though IMO. As a general rule, incumbent SPD chairs are always seen as incompetent with a lot people simultanously having the opinion that person X would of course be much, much better. If Gabriel were really to return it would take about three to six months until people start to say how much he sucks and that Nahles was much better and/or Olaf Scholz would be much better. In addition, Gabriel was Schröder's protege at one point and therefore he naturally supports him.

Schröder is not wrong. Andrea Nahles is an ineffective leader who is not liked by the public and certainly not somebody who will ever come close to the chancellorship. Sigmar Gabriel is a master politican and very smart guy. As member of this party, I'd love to have him back. He's just never been threated fairly by his part and parts of the media. Especially during his time as Minister of Economics.

Isn't that what the SPD is all about? They've been sh**tting on their leaders for years. And arguably both Gabriel and Nahles have been highly efficient party leaders. Their ministers are in charge of most of the relevant departments. One could say that SPD voters were the only ones who got the policies they've been voting for. Maybe their politicians should stand by those policies instead of apologizing for it and calling for even more radical spending and regulation, because that obviously doesn't work.