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Very interesting times ahead for Germany

Headshot

It's not looking great for Germany at present

The Far Right and Far Left on the rise.
AFD victorious in state elections.

German carmaker Volkswagen on Monday warned it will no longer be able to rule out plant closures in the country

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/02/volkswagen-warns-of-plant-closures-in-germany-amid-cost-cutting-drive.html

Germany is the third-largest economy in the world after the United States and China, making it Europe's largest economy.

It's worrying for EU.

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DarkJager21

We will see more and more of this across Europe as publics give a massive **** you to EU policy and their own national parties that act like lapdogs for same in elections. This is only the beginning.

nullzero

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058367362/very-interesting-times-ahead-for-germany

Economic uncertainty, far left and far right gaining ground. History repesting itself. Gulp.

[Deleted User]

Great to see. We need a similar alternative in ireland.

MacDanger

Bad news, the AFD are a right bunch of scumbags

SpoonyMcSpoon

Hungary getting a €200m fine enforced over its asylum policies. The EU is going to take it from their budget allocation. And yet the Hungarian citizens did not vote for these asylum policies and the democratically elected Hungarian government decided to not adhere to them. I would have thought it should be each country’s own right to determine what non-EU people it takes into its country and the fact the EU has to point to a treaty brought in 30-40 years ago specifically to do with the Bosnian crisis speaks volumes. As such, I am not surprised to see an alternative to the mainstream gain ground; especially in Germany which has seen horrific crimes perpetrated by asylum seekers in recent years.

Headshot

What doesnt sit right with me is the likes of Olaf Scholz urging other parties to form a government without right-wing extremists.

I get it, majority of AFD policies are nuts but people are voting for them and you're not going to give these people representation? I think you're just going to drive more people to vote for ADF in the next general election at that point. Maybe I'm wrong?

NIMAN

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122575825#Comment_122575825

Perhaps we should ask why aso many people are voting for them?

fly_agaric

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122575854#Comment_122575854

Well Hungary know where the door is, if they don't like being in the EU and want to ignore the court + refuse to pay.

They probably shouldn't be in the EU any more anyway. They would fail accession if trying to join today.

They (Hungarian govt.) are splitting their sides laughing at the rest of us, while their leaders put their hands deep into our pockets, rob us blind, and spit in our eyes.

Any Irish person thinking "good on them! more power to them!" while they do that, is really quite stupid IMO

baxterooneydoody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122575825#Comment_122575825

Id like to hear more about why a right wing party is gaining traction and what are the causes behind it, granted there will always be a certain minority who vote for these parties of which i would put left wing nuts in the same category but when they start gaining popularity it needs to be asked why more people feel marginalised to the point the vote far right/left parties. You may think they're scumbags but that attitude only further alienates people who feel their voices aren't being heard

Danzy

It is a good day for Germany, might stem the severe crisis building in it for years.

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122575825#Comment_122575825

If you are left wing you can vote for Sarah Wagenkneacht party.

Her party is cutting a swathe through the neoliberal lock spittles in the Linke and Socialist party.

Mike Murdock

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058367362/very-interesting-times-ahead-for-germany

Colour me shocked that the car manufacturer has had to pay fines and penalties of around $33 billion (so far) from the emissions scandal of their own making is looking to cut costs.

Headshot

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576116#Comment_122576116

Another big factor would be they were slow on EV and the Chinese imports are doing alot of damage to them

thatsdaft

You lie with (Russian) dogs you get fleas

Mike Murdock

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576335#Comment_122576335

"Mutti" and Gazprom Gerd have a lot to answer for.

Real Donald Trump

Would be no far right/left if Europe got a grip on the immigration issue and sorted it out. Otherwise get ready for extreme politics in the near future.

mikemac2

edited out

Donald Trump

Don't mention the war

thomil

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122575901#Comment_122575901

A multitude of reasons, none of which the AfD or BSW will be willing, or even able to fix.

— WARNING: LONG POST INCOMING - GETTING A DRINK AND A SNACK IS ADVISED —

For starters, East Germany was devastated economically after the collapse of the GDR. One of the core policies of the GDR had been to establish to set up industrial production complexes in underdeveloped regions to kickstart economic development. That’s for example how you got steel mills in the middle of nowhere (Eisenhüttenstadt), or large chemical works in the middle of the Erzgebirge. Thuringia, where the AfD just had that electoral success, was one of the regions that benefited most, whilst also having quite a bit of pre-war industry. All of these factories provided loads of jobs, but were also heavily polluting and, by the 1980s, hopelessly obsolete. So when western investors moved in after reunification, a lot of these plants were often either downsized or shut down altogether, resulting in a massive spike in unemployment. This in turn led to a massive exodus of people, mostly the younger or better educated ones, to the west, subjecting Eastern Germany to a brain drain similar to the one that had occurred after the partition of post-war Germany.

Having said that, it would be grossly unfair to describe Eastern Germany as simply a corpse of a country that was picked clean. That is a narrative that has become somewhat among the population in the east, but is not born out by the facts. There have been a multitude of infrastructure projects to not only bring the transport and utility infrastructure of east Germany to a standard compatible with the west, but to, in parts, exceed it. Some of these projects are truly massive in scale, I’m thinking in particular of the Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit, which translates roughly to “Transport projects German Unity”. These projects are focused on re-establishing the East-West links within Germany that were separated post-1945 and basically amount to turning Germany’s major transportation axes by 90º. A number of these projects are still ongoing. Private industry has equally moved in to east Germany. Whilst some of this consisted of western companies taking over former East German state enterprises, Opel for example took over the former VEB Automobilfabrik Eisenach in Thuringia, which had built the popular Wartburg series of cars. Other companies built completely new plants, I’m thinking of the AMD Fab in Dresden, or DHL’s massive hub operation at Leipzig/Halle airport.

Here’s where it gets more complex though. For starters, a lot of these new factories and plants require a much smaller workforce than they would have in the days of the GDR. Secondly, most of these new developments are located in or around larger cities. Eisenach, Erfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, Jena. The days of industrial activities being spread across a region to reach a social or political goal are long gone, which means that many of the medium or small towns and cities that would have been kept afloat by these politically minded developments have been left behind. This isn’t helped by the fact that reunification coincided with a massive development that had already started many years before in west Germany. There, two of the largest state run enterprises, Deutsche Bundesbahn, the state railway company, as well as Deutsche Bundespost, the national mail company, had started closing down manned ticket counters and post offices in smaller towns and villages, concentrating on the larger stations and post offices and, in the case of the railways, replacing the ticket counters with vending machines. After reunification, and the reintegration of Deutsche Bundesbahn and Deutsche Bundespost with their eastern counterparts, these measures were rolled out to east Germany as well, which led to the double whammy of towns seemingly losing much of their public infrastructure at once.

Then, there’s re-unification itself. Quite frankly, this was completely and utterly mismanaged. Reunification had been sold to the people of east and west as a “merger among equals”. However, what the CDU government under Helmut Kohl ended up delivering was more along the lines of a hostile takeover. The way that East German state enterprises were sold off to western companies was often shambolic, to put it mildly. The level of backhanders and brown envelopes involved would have made Bertie Ahern’s tenure as Taoiseach and the worst of the Celtic Tiger excesses look like some innocent primary school shenanigans by comparison. This resulted in a number of potentially salvageable companies being wound down for no real reason. East German airline Interflug comes to mind here. At the same time, there was never any public or civic education campaign for the people as a whole to bring them up to speed on what living in a western style democracy entailed, leaving the population vulnerable to the types of scams and trickeries that most in the west had long since learned to see coming from a mile away.

As a matter of fact, let’s talk about the people, the ones from the west for a change. Despite the Iron Curtain, most people in west Germany knew not only that the GDR existed, but had a pretty decent understanding of what life was like over there. This led to a lot of people acting like know-it-alls when the borders were opened and they made their first visits to the east. They’d seen it all and heard it all before, and in their minds, none of the experiences by the people living there actually mattered, which invariably led to a lot of bad blood between “Wessis”, the people from west Germany, and “Ossis”, the people from the east. To add insult to injury, the accents prevalent in Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, the states that make up the southern part of the former GDR, are both very strong and, to be frank, not very attractive. They’ve been the subject of ridicule and parody since before the days of the Kaiserreich, and people who speak sächsisch or one of the other similar dialects are often viewed as simpletons. Again, this issue far pre-dates German partition, Walter Ulbricht, the future head of the GDR, was often ridiculed for this.

Next, we need to touch on a pretty thorny subject. There’s a term in Germany, Tal der Ahnungslosen , which translates as “Valley of the Clueless”, which refers to areas in east Germany that, due to geographic restrictions, were not able to receive western radio or TV broadcasts. Yes, people in the GDR watched western TV and listened to western radio. The Stasi tried to stop this but eventually realised that this was a fight they wouldn’t be able to win. Anyway, people living in these areas would generally only be able to receive local East German radio and TV broadcasts, leaving them much more vulnerable to SED (East German communist party) propaganda. Whilst Thuringia is not generally considered to be part of this region, it is generally associated with Saxony east of Dresden, the state is pretty mountainous, producing loads of local reception black spots. Now, the Tal der Ahnungslosen is one of the heartlands of far-right agitation even before the founding of the AfD, these areas were a haven for the NPD beforehand and were known as xenophobic even in the GDR, so it’s not much of a leap to suspect that this may also have had an effect in Thuringia.

Which leads me to the final, and probably most controversial, point. Following the war and the immediate post-war period, a long, often arduous and painful process started in west Germany, namely coming to terms with the horrendous atrocities of the nazi regime. It wasn’t easy, and it certainly wasn’t fast, only really kicking into gear once the SPD took over the government in Bonn, but it took place and it was, for all of its many failings, quite thorough. It took the form of the famous Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which were the starting point of west Germany’s efforts to bring to justice nazi war criminals and those who aided and abetted them, a process that continues to this day and that I fully support. It took the form of uncomfortable and sometimes heated discussions in family living rooms throughout the country as the children born immediately after the war began asking their parents how much they really knew about the holocaust and the other crimes. My father was one of those children, although it appears as if my paternal grandfather, who’d finished the war as a Hauptmann in the Luftwaffe, was both open and honest in his answers and genuinely remorseful and accepted his guilt, which was not the norm. And it takes the form of a heavy emphasis in the curriculum of German schools, spanning multiple subjects and starting as early as fourth or fifth grade. For most of the time I spent growing up in Germany, “Never Again” was taken very seriously.

I write all of this because none of this ever happened in the GDR. Oh, sure, they had their counterpart to the Frankfurt trial, the Waldheim trials, but these were show trials, rarely lasting more than a few minutes and often ending in death sentences. There was a concerted effort to get all this nazi business behind them as quickly as possible, because the SED wanted to build a new German, a socialist and Germany without any of the ballast of militarism and fascism, and dealing with the issue in any detail just spoiled the image. So, GDR policy was to bury the issue and while SED propaganda excoriated the west for its supposed fascist ideation, it was quietly swept under the rug at home. At the same time, whilst the GDR loudly proclaimed to be a socialist and internationalist country that strove for stronger friendship amongst the nations of the world, there was next to no actual exchange between the people. Foreign nationals, beyond a handful of hand-picked foreign students at the country’s universities, were only brought into the country for certain projects under tightly managed exchange programs and were housed in dedicated and isolated compounds. Any contact with the people of east Germany tended to happen in the form of strictly regulated cultural exchange events under the ever watchful eyes of the Stasi. As such, there was nowhere near the level of contact and relative “ease” of dealing with people from other countries as you had in west Germany, where the first Gastarbeiter , foreign guest workers from southern Europe and later Turkey had arrived as early as the 1960s. Incidentally, to this very day, east Germany has a far lower number of immigrants amongst its population than west Germany, and those that are there are generally clustered around the larger cities.

In closing, we’re looking at a witches brew of numerous, sometimes contradictory, factors. On one hand, there are some very real grievances, particularly with regards to the economy, how post-reunification reconstruction has been, and continues to be managed. This as left entire regions behind, with large scale structural unemployment as a consequence. Life expectancy, average wages, and the standard of living are all still below western states, even over thirty years after reunification. All of these are very real issues, and anyone who ignores these is quite frankly an idiot. We’re also talking about a population that has been the butt of jokes for nearly thirty years running, some of them pretty cruel. To believe that his breeds no resentment is quite simply foolhardy.

On the other hand, we’re looking at a region that, even thirty years after reunification, still hasn’t come to grips with the rights and responsibilities of a citizen in a liberal democracy. Multiple studies have shown that a large percentage of people in east Germany simply don’t trust democracy as a whole and there is a strong longing for the seeming stability of a single-party state such as the GDR was. This is set against a backdrop of a resurgence of openly xenophobic and neofascist movements that were able to remain dormant under the surface of East German society because the GDR leadership never properly addressed the issue. It is this undercurrent that the NPD and later the AfD have drawn their support, and they’ve leveraged the very real issues affecting the region to gain power.

I think I’ll leave it at that for now. Please bear in mind that even all of the above barely scratches the surface of the underlying issues. There’s multiple PhD theses worth of research material there!

99nsr125

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058367362/very-interesting-times-ahead-for-germany

Stabbings, shootings, murders and rapes by (fake) asylum seekers; eventually people will vote for a party that addresses this

Either the current government(s) address the sexual assaults, violence and gang crime or someone who is not of your ideology will

Sonic the Shaghog

Am I wrong or isn't one of the new popular left wings parties also anti immigration

sock.rocker*

Europe will drift further and further to the extremes as long as housing remains out of reach and people don't feel safe. It is political negligence to let people start to lose the most basic and critical qualities to life, and it is mockery to then pretend people are wrong and racist for voting for the people who claim they can solve the problems.

The problems have been forecast for a long time. Everyone knew this was coming. But no one wanted to fix the issues.

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576589#Comment_122576589

But, but, but...... asylum seekers

On a more serious note your post sheds a light into the old GDR.

I've been to Germany many times but never to the old GDR part, my experience of Germany is that of the prosperous west.

As you have illustrated the east can be very different, so just because AfD are making inroads there it's not a given that they can transfer that support to the old FRG.

Soc_Alt

I'm happy to see the shift in politics around the EU.

I don't believe anyone had issue with the 4 freedoms of the EU. Even the right side of center.

What the EU and the left of center have done is destroyed the EU vision by decimating the the culture in ea h country.

Poland I believe seem ti be the only country which said no to the mess the EU has caused.

I would think a shift to the right over the next few years will get us back on track to the original EU setup

Augme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576790#Comment_122576790

Yes, becuase the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were fantastic for European unity.

thatsdaft

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576726#Comment_122576726

Ah now housing is very much not a problem in eastern Germany

You are projecting Irish issues into Germany

Here is a 4 bed house in that part that AfD has gained

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/146822033?currencyCode=GBP#/?channel=OVERSEAS

4 bed, 32000 euro

Could do with a lick of paint

Montage of Feck

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576108#Comment_122576108

Looks interesting, a socially conservative and nationalist left wing party. Isn't that what our own SF is supposed to be.

twinytwo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576832#Comment_122576832

Insightful post as always.

Who was to blame for Hitler getting into power in Germany?

Current governments have created a situation where extremes are once again inevitable and then cry when it happens rather than look at why/how we got here in the first place.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576889#Comment_122576889

People always say that Hitler was 100% bad, but to be fair to him, he did kill Hitler.

Augme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122576889#Comment_122576889

The people who voted for Hitler. I wonder if the same people who voted for Hitler felt he made their lives and their situation better in the end? I somehow doubt it.