>>100031
I keep hearing that we need to pay attention to German politics because the AFD seems to be gaining large ground everywhere and they're further right than our Nige/Reform.

I wish I knew more, the whole thing is very puzzling.

>>100037

>and they're further right than our Nige/Reform

That's an understatement. The AfD is known for having members who are openly neo-Nazis.

The gamble with Merz is that he is a right-leaning Conservative, and the German Conservatives are hoping he will get voters back that have migrated from the Conservatives to the AfD.

What is problematic is that Merz is very unpopular both among Conservative voters and the general population alike. The only reason he stands a chance is that the incumbent left-wing chancellor Scholz is even more unpopular after three years of leading a bumbling three-party coalition that can't seem to get anything right.

>>100037
This is bullshit. The AFD has gained no support and the lot of them are stilll cunts. They are cunts. If I ever meet a supporter of them, I'll punch them until they are blue in the face. Again and again until they have no face left. They are facists. And need to be fought.

>>100042

>The AFD has gained no support

They came second in the European elections. They won the state election in Thuringia and came a very close second in both Brandenburg and Saxony. They're polling in second place for the next federal election. Your violent anger isn't going to change reality.

>>100041
>That's an understatement. The AfD is known for having members who are openly neo-Nazis.
I doubt Nazis would be enthusiastic about joining a party headed by a lesbian and especially a lesbian whose wife is brown. Sure there's people who might say some dodgy stuff, but they're just the typical "the government doesn't do enough about are border" and "they made lederhosen woke" party that basically every European country has it's own version of.

>>100041

>The AfD is known for having members who are openly neo-Nazis.

I thought they take that very seriously in Germany and arrest people over it? I'm inclined to take this with a pinch of salt honestly, the term nazi gets thrown around a lot nowadays and I think when it comes to German politics that's the one place we should be careful that it really means something.

>>100053

You can't be arrested just for being a Nazi. What they usually get them for is active hate speech or being a member of an illegal Nazi organisation. Which, again, isn't always the same as identifying with Nazism.

>>100051
>>100053
The current leader of AfD in the state of Thuringia, where they recently topped the poll in the state legislative election, is Björn Höcke. In 2015, he co-founded a faction within the party called Der Flügel ("The Wing", advocating for Völkisch ethnonationalism). The group was supposed to have been officially dissolved in 2020, at the request of the AfD's federal executive. At the time, the then-head of Germany's equivalent to MI5 was asked whether, with "The Wing" officially dissolved, Höcke was still to be considered a right-wing extremist.

His response (original emphasis): "Björn Höcke is the right-wing extremist."

Also, for a party that is supposedly full of people who are definitely not Nazis, they keep doing an awful lot of Nazi shit. Such as when one state party held their conference this year over Hitler's birthday in a small town near a concentration camp that used to provide forced labour for Reichswerke Hermann Göring in what was otherwise a rather odd choice of a local parish hall in a not-very-central location.

>>100057
They probably wouldn't be very fascistic if they ever lead Germany. People made a massive fuss about Georgia Meloni's party having a very dubious past when it came to links with Nazis but neither she nor her party have done anything fascist since gaining power. Every right wing populist party is going to have a few Nazis because of the whole "optics" thing, you can't really avoid it without banning any party to the right of the CDU, which isn't very democratic.

>>100058

The Germans have tried to ban right-wing parties before. Before the AFD, there was the National Democratic Party (NPD). The German parliament has made two earnest attempts, the second one in the late 2010s was eventually dismissed by the German high court because of the party's "insignificance" in membership numbers and actual impact on German politics, despite clear right-wing and neo-Nazi tendencies that even that high court couldn't ignore. By that time, they were getting maybe 1-2 percent of the vote in each election.

Of course, nobody can say the AFD is insignificant, with 20-30 percent of the vote in recent elections. What makes them harder to tackle is that they are not as openly right wing and neo-Nazi as the NPD. They know how to cover their tracks and have given their right-wing platform a much more mainstream veneer. But they're still a wolf in sheep's clothing, and nobody should assume that they'd just be watered down nationalists if they ever actually came to power in Germany, either in regional or general elections.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/22/germany-brandenburg-state-election-afd-spd-exit-poll-latest-live-news-updates

>Germany: exit polls show Olaf Scholz’s party narrowly beating far-right AfD in key state election

>>100064
>BSW in the top 5
2030, COMRADES...

>>100059

>>100059

>What makes them harder to tackle is that they are not as openly right wing and neo-Nazi as the NPD. They know how to cover their tracks and have given their right-wing platform a much more mainstream veneer

When there are deliberate attempts to try get a party legally blocked from existing and the accusation is that they are just crypto fascist when does the conclusion get reached that you don't actually have a belief in democracy if you are trying to disenfranchise everyone who has "wrong think"?

>>100067
Y'know what, mate? It actually is wrong to think "what if we gave Nazism another shout, eh?" And while they should have their party shitcanned, you should have your nipples cut off for being a contrarian arsehole about it. AfD is riddled with neo-nazis and they had several senior members at that big meeting of the German speaking far-right last November. A meeting where the discussion centred around "remigration", which is exactly the line of thought that lead to the Holocaust. Which I, as a student of history, can tell youwas very bad.

>>100068
>which is exactly the line of thought that lead to the Holocaust.
“Send ‘em back” isn’t the same as “these people are behind everything I don’t like and thus must be exterminated”.

>>100069
Also, nothing ever happens.

>>100069
I'm sure I don't need to condescend to you by explaining this, but for anyone unaware some Nazis had reckoned on a mass "relocation" of European Jewry until the Wannsee conference in 1942, at which the "Final Solution" was decided upon.

>>100070

Mind-bogglingly thick.

>>100072
I’m not thick for stating a simple fact. Nothing ever happens. Nothing will ever happen.

>>100073
Have you taken your head out of your arse even once for the past... forever? Just the past five years have been non-stop "things" happening all of the time. From Hong Kong protests being quashed in late 2019 to a huge and terrible famine looming in Sudan in 2024, there are littany hugely consequential events happening at any one time.

>>100074
None of these are anything to shit yourself over.

>>100075
Who's "shitting themselves"? What are you even talking about? You just said "nothing happens" and once you're shown that's totally untrue you start claiming knowing stuff is some kind of irrational foible you've managed to overcome. I, regrettably, have to agree with otherlad when he says you're just thick.

>>100068

> AfD is riddled with neo-nazis and they had several senior members at that big meeting of the German speaking far-right last November. A meeting where the discussion centred around "remigration", which is exactly the line of thought that lead to the Holocaust.

That's the thing, though. The AFD didn't publicly take ownership of the idea of that kind of remigration. You won't hear any of them say in parliament, "Well, but we're right about it, aren't we". You've got high-ranking members doing all this behind closed doors in their free time while they are not acting in their capacity as elected MPs. That way, the AFD can always claim that as a party, it is not directly responsible for what some of its members get up to.

But in the end, it's just them pulling the wool over your eyes about what most AFD members really think and stand for. Maybe the AFD's main feat, in a country whose government and public institutions keep much more close tabs on extremist movements than some other European democracies, has been to get 30 percent of voters to believe that that's not what they are. That they're just a bit more conservative than the mainstream Conservatives. While the truth is that they are the Far Right's most meaningful inroad into parliamentary politics since the Third Reich.

>>100077
But hold your horses there. Every party has this problem and it periodically emerges as a news story whenever some councillor or MP gets excited - especially for the upstarts where they've not had the time and exposure to tidy it up. There's a lot you can read into memberships that leads to a perception of politics where it's dominated by dim-witted extremists and the only thing stopping them from murdering a good portion of the population and laying lizard eggs in our brains comes from the democratic constraints on power.

And maybe calling everyone a Nazi doesn't work. We've seen far-right parties emerge across Europe and 'send them all back' is probably the norm these days with policies of paying people to go away.

>>100078
>Every party has this problem
They really, really don't. It's mostly only very right-wing parties that have to distance themselves from members doing a Nazism.

>>100079
Left wing parties splinter too much to have any big party with holodomor deniers or Russia supporters in it.

>>100080

Die Linke is still lousy with tankies, much as the leadership tries to keep a lid on it.

>>100080

That's actually a major problem for the Left in Germany nowadays. They now have three left-wing parties that aren't always on speaking terms with each other. The SPD as Germany's version of Labour being Germany's oldest extant political party going back to the 1890s. The far-left Die Linke split off some time around the mid-2000s, and now they've got another new far-left party with the BSW, provisionally named after former SPD and Die Linke figure Sarah Wagenknecht.

The SPD has been the backbone of recurring government coalitions both at state and national levels all the way since the founding of post-war Germany, but with much of its left wing now missing and doing their own thing as separate parties that compete with the SPD, the SPD is struggling to gain majorities. Which explains much of their poor results in recent elections. It's not that there weren't enough left-wing/socialist voters, but they were spread out over two or even three distinct parties that were unlikely to form coalitions with each other.

The German Conservatives (the CDU) have similar problems on their right fringes. The AFD was founded in the early 2010s as a bourgeois/middle class dissent movement by right-wing CDU members and voters who were dissatisfied with Merkel's wishy-washy middle of the road platform which they felt lacked a clear Conservative profile. It was only later that the AFD was almost entirely subverted by neo-Nazis and nationalists, but the damage remains, in that the AFD has taken over the former right-wing voter base of the CDU, in turn often preventing it from reaching clear majorities in a similar way as the SPD.

It's never a good thing when a democratically elected Parliament becomes too splintered and too fragmented. This was already a problem during the Weimar Republic, and more recent examples include post-war Italy. But then again, in a true democracy, it's difficult to argue at which point there are too many separate political parties. Because then you'd also have to determine which ones need to go, just because you're worried that they will threaten political stability by their mere existence. An idea that would be irreconcilable with the constitutions of most Western democracies.

>>100081
>>100084
Die Linke has nothing to do with the SPD, but rather is mostly made up of the PDS, which was the rump of the SED after it lost control of East Germany in 1989, which might explain at least some of the tankies.

>>100085

Die Linke was formed both from the PDS and with far-left SPD members. In any case, it has been stealing much of the SPD's thunder and is an important reason why the SPD is nowadays struggling to win majorities.

>>100079
We recently had a Labour councillor caught on camera calling for counter-protestors to have their throats slit. Before that there was the Corbyn saga, whatever the Tories are up to on a given day and the Greens getting the knives out over TERFs.

>>100088
I think we can all agree that, with the possible exception of the occasional Tory, these are not, nor are they equivalent to, old-fashioned Nazism.

The issue with AfD isn't merely the occasional idiot, or run-of-the-mill extremism. It's sympathy for the former NSDAP specifically. It's not just the Roman salutes, it's quoting Hitler, meeting near random Göring factories, visiting the grave of Rudolf Hess, denying the Holocaust, etc.

At a European level, AfD were chucked out of the far-right Identity and Democracy group, because the parties of le Pen, Salvini, Orbán, and Wilders felt that AfD was just a little bit too Nazi for them.

>>100089

Commies killed many, many more people than Nazis. The far left are given an extraordinary amount of latitude when it comes to denying the crimes of totalitarian regimes and venerating genocidal maniacs.

I'm not saying this as whataboutery, but to say that we should be equally unwilling to allow the AfD and the BSW to gain a foothold in mainstream politics.

>>100090

>Commies killed many, many more people than Nazis. The far left are given an extraordinary amount of latitude when it comes to denying the crimes of totalitarian regimes and venerating genocidal maniacs.

Most Western European socialist or left parties had close ties to Soviet Russia. Being the European motherland of socialism, many of them looked to the Soviet Union as a socialist utopia. In fact, Labour openly cheered and expressed their excitement over the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s. Even Stalinism didn't seem to bother many socialists in western Europe, and was even defended by some, along the lines of, if you're going to make an omelette, you'll have to send a few eggs to the gulag.

It was only after the fall of communism in the 1990s and after movements like New Labour divorced many of the British Left's old core socialist ideas (which they were tacitly still maintaining) that left-wing parties as they exist today became centrist and market liberal. With a thin veneer of still being advocates for the lower half.

>>100090
You’re right, but I always think it’s worth remembering that communists kill people by mistake. Nazi death camps actively want people to die; Pol Pot wanted most of his people to survive, but they all starved to death due to incompetence. Mao killed 70 million Chinese people, but he didn’t order soldiers to massacre them; he just had a passionate vision where everyone grew lots of food, none of which actually grew so everybody died. Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. But do obviously bear that level of failure in mind when they ask you to vote for them.

>>100092

Apart from the millions of people they deliberately killed. The Khmer Rouge tortured and executed monks, ethnic minorities, intellectuals and anyone else they didn't like. Mao executed hundreds of thousands during the Cultural Revolution. Stalin had at least 700,000 people executed during the Great Purge. There's an ongoing debate over whether the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide, but millions were knowingly and maliciously sent to die of starvation or disease in the Laogai and Gulags.

Even the deaths of famine were only a "mistake" in the most generous terms. The Soviet Union executed, imprisoned or exiled most of their best botanists, agronomists and geneticists, and replaced them with a cadre of ideologically pure morons.

>>100092
>but I always think it’s worth remembering that communists kill people by mistake.
Unless they're political opponents.

>>100091
Long before the fall of the USSR pretty much every European communist party of note had pivoted away from the USSR and towards Eurocommunism. The British Labour party only briefly flirted with serious "old core socialist ideas" in the 1970s: Labour in the 1940s-50s was mostly concerned with building a viable national economy from a bankrupt empire and spent far more on warfare than on welfare. Nationalisation of some sectors came about not for distributional reasons, but because they thought the private owners of those industries had done a bad job and were a barrier to economic efficiency. Harold Wilson, not Attlee, is the most left-wing PM we've ever had and we've never forgiven him for it.
(For more, see David Edgerton.)

>>100093
We (alongside the US) backed the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the UN until 1993 - long after the Vietnamese booted them out (c. 1979, following an insane attempt by Cambodia to invade Vietnam) and replaced them with a socialist government that wasn't a gang of genocidally insane Khmer Nationalists lead by an electrical engineer who thought Marx and Lenin were "too hard" to read. Why did we do this? Seemingly purely on the basis that the US were still furious that Saigon was Saigone and that Vietnam had scored another win.

>>100095
>lead by an electrical engineer who thought Marx and Lenin were "too hard" to read.
This man should be to .gs as Haile Selassie is to the Rastafarians.

>>100093

>Apart from the millions of people they deliberately killed.

You should be under no illusion that that isn't what happens under most communist governments. They usually end up becoming repressive because it is the only way you can get the majority of people to keep supporting communism. That isn't to say that market capitalism can't be repressive. There is something very repressive about the way it forces people to center their entire existence around their own economic survival. But it still tends to allow people more personal freedoms, including the freedom of dissent, than most socialist or communist regimes in history have ever afforded their citizens. In the long run, anyway.


>>100095

>Nationalisation of some sectors came about not for distributional reasons, but because they thought the private owners of those industries had done a bad job and were a barrier to economic efficiency.

Ah, the irony.

Two words: British Leyland. Whose conglomeration and (partial) nationalisation marked the beginning of one of the most disastrous eras of the UK's car industry, with appalling build quality and supply chain shortages on a massive scale, which almost directly led up to its dismantling from the late 80s to early 1990s onward.

It's like the old saying - what would happen if the Sahara Desert became socialist? - for a few years, nothing, and then they'd run out of sand.

>>100097
I think this is too focused on the economics of it. The simpler statemen would be that states kill people when they end up totalitarian or otherwise break into violent factionalism. The left/whatever has had to contend with its own version of wingnuts and other assorted bullshit to stop people dancing/grilling.

Returning to the actual point though, so we're not having another tedious argument on the merits of socialism on the internet. There are a lot of unsavoury people in politics - either the naïve zealots, incompetently malicious or the genuinely evil people. In the German context this is emblematic in Russia's connection with all German political parties that extends from the European far-right to the German left that still think they're working with the USSR, all of which would happily be complicit in the destruction of the Ukrainian people.

>>100098

> In the German context this is emblematic in Russia's connection with all German political parties that extends from the European far-right to the German left that still think they're working with the USSR, all of which would happily be complicit in the destruction of the Ukrainian people.


It's all part of Putin's 4D chess nowadays. Since the early 2000s, Putin had been cosying up to the Germans, and former East German communist party members and supporters in particular, who weren't that thin on the ground despite German reunification, and who had old loyalties to Russia. That, and there was a general sense that Russians and Germans needed to be friends, in order to prevent another conflict like WWII from happening. And so you had a strong growth of economic and political ties between Germany and Russia. To the point where Germany became Russia's most important trade partner in the EU. If we're being a bit naïve for a moment, then that was not a bad thing in itself. Why not be friendly with other countries, especially after all that history. But it was all part of Putin's plan to eventually have a foot in the door of EU and geostrategic politics, especially when things got a bit angry-shouty after the annexation of Crimea. And for some time even after the whole Crimea what-have-you, Germany was instrumental in softening EU sanctions against Russia, not least to protect the financial interests of vast numbers of German companies who were trading with, or doing business in Russia. The beginning of the Ukraine invasion in 2022 was then a very rude awakening for many Germans who had trusted Putin.

With Germany's mainstream political establishment now having duly severed its ties with Russia, Putin's way of maintaining influence on German politics is by supporting fringe, far-left and far-right parties both with covert money transfers and resources in an effort to destabilise German politics as a whole. The main goal probably being to destabilise Germany, or any other Western country where Putin is suspected of doing the same, as part of hybrid warfare.

>>100101
I'd somehow forgotten about East Germany / DDR . Is Putin hankering for that back? Do the population there want to put the clock back? Is there even still a divide?

It amuses me how some people are dismissive of socialism the same way I am dismissive of organised religion. Even when they are trying to give it a fair shake and write a balanced perspective and include the nuance that capitalism is bad too, they still clearly and obviously think it might as well be a fairy tale and there's no way it can ever work. Except all the times it did work and continues to work, those don't count, obviously.

>>100106
The thing is, mate, we've got such a good system up and running now it's probably not even worth changing it. I can barely afford the rent, my pre-ripped jeans gave a child silicosis during manufacturing, no one in the UK knows how to use a computer and there's a thing called "Climate Crisis", who I think is like a wrestler or something idk. Basically, why would I try to finagle myself into Heaven 2.0 when I've already got Heaven Original Recipe on tap?

>>100097
British Leyland was the 1970s, not the 1940s, and is better understood in the context of that time: it was nationalised because it had collapsed under private ownership and the alternative was becoming the only major economy to not manufacture domestically designed cars. In the end, nationalisation didn't fend off that fate, but it wasn't a doomed idea at the time. In the early 1970s Heath nationalised Rolls Royce for the same reason - they'd bankrupted themselves in the private sector by designing a new jet engine, the RB211, which turned out to actually be a damn good engine - it sold very well and they still make it! Everyone remembers the failures of interventionism and forgets the success stories. Everyone imagines we had a second round of nationalisation as a socialist lark rather than as a hail mary for the idea of Britain as a country that makes things, one indulged to different degrees by both major parties, just as the rules changed from "trade deficits are very bad" to "trade deficits don't matter"
(Fun fact: Even the infamous IMF loan was effectively taken out to cover the overseas exchange needed to fund an imaginary trade deficit, not - as is generally assumed - a public spending deficit!)

>>100106
>It amuses me how some people are dismissive of socialism the same way I am dismissive of organised religion

So socialism is the same as a religion. And you're still r/atheist from the mid-00s.

>>100106
Are you conflating socialism and communism again? Socialism is Sweden and Denmark; communism is Albania, Cambodia and North Korea. I imagine I am not one of the posters you are referring to, but I would love to hear about a communist country that "continues to work" after the initial boost that all the shitholes got when they overthrew their feudal overlords.

>>100111
The problem is that none of these words really mean anything: strictly, Sweden is social democracy and the USSR was self-proclaimed socialism with the long term aim of building communism. But in the UK context Blair was a social democrat and prior labour leaders were socialists despite every single one of them offering a society "more capitalist" than Sweden.

Sometimes socialism means worker control of industry, sometimes it means state ownership, sometimes it means a welfare state, sometimes it means a minimum wage, and sometimes it means "whatever a labour government does", so we can all argue incoherently with one another about how any attempts to make Britain a little more like Sweden are the thin end of the Holodomor

>>100111
>Are you conflating socialism and communism again? Socialism is Sweden and Denmark; communism is Albania, Cambodia and North Korea.
But I thought communists don’t believe in a state? Aren’t Albania, Cambodia and North Korea states? They’ve got governments haven’t they?

>>100113
This is just the Louise Mensch latte argument again.

>>100111

Sweden and Denmark are capitalist countries that happen to have high taxes and a large public sector - i.e. social democracies. The key distinction is that socialist states are, to varying degrees, centrally planned. In a socialist society, the people (via the state) control the means of production; in a social democracy, they just get a bigger share of the output of an essentially capitalist society.

To revive the British Leyland argument, what made BL a socialist enterprise wasn't the fact that it was state-owned, but the fact that it was state-controlled. They decision to build the TR7 in Speke was effectively dictated by central government for political rather than commercial reasons. It didn't make business sense to build a car in an area without a skilled workforce or close connections to the existing supply chain in the West Midlands, but it made political sense to create a load of jobs in a deprived area.

All of the major socialist economies became less socialist and more mixed over time, because it turns out that planning an economy is fiendishly difficult. Any benefits you might get in terms of directing productive effort towards things with a social benefit are obliterated by inefficiencies. States aren't omniscient, things never quite go to plan and the sheer amount of data is impossible for any single entity to collect, let alone analyse.

I could say a lot about pricing mechanisms and supply and demand, but one of the most valuable traits of a capitalist economy is bankruptcy. If you're sufficiently shit at business, you lose all your money and someone else gets to have a go. Conversely, one of the worst vices of a planned economy is backing losers - rather than investing in promising new ventures that might eventually be brilliant, centrally planned economies tend to pour money into inefficient, badly-run or just obsolete enterprises to stop people from losing their jobs.

China is the notable exception to this. Communism with Chinese Characteristics relies heavily on state control, but it's also brutally Darwinist; they operate more like a venture capital firm, investing relatively small amounts of resource into a diverse range of companies in a strategically important industry, on the expectation that most will fail but some will be wildly successful.

>>100105

There's still a massive political divide in Germany. The far-right and far-left parties do vastly better in the former East than the former West. To a certain extent it's just our north/south divide on steroids, but there are a lot of subtle and unique factors too.

Retaking the DDR is beyond the wildest dreams of Putin, but he is undoubtedly funnelling resources into stoking that divide.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/commentary/long-take/die-mauer-im-kopf-the-legacy-of-division-in-german-politics/

>>100105

>I'd somehow forgotten about East Germany / DDR . Is Putin hankering for that back? Do the population there want to put the clock back? Is there even still a divide?

If Putin really had his way, he'd probably reclaim all of the former satellite states for a neo-USSR. That said, the territory of the former GDR is so thoroughly integrated into Germany today that even he must know that that's impossible. But the real problem is that many East Germans, 34 years on, still feel like they got the short end of the stick following reunification. Unemployment is far higher than in most other German states, average incomes are lower, and you've got more people below the poverty line and on benefits than in almost every West German state. Which goes a long way explaining why they have been drawn to parties like the AfD, but also far-left parties, all of whom have succeeded in turning people's rejection of the current economic and political system into votes for them. When your own personal and economic situation is dire, then you're not really invested in your country's status quo. What is the point of putting your faith in a system that has been letting you down. Where all the freedoms you have on paper are meaningless to you because you're poor, jobless and without ways to participate in society. And that's where right- and left-wing demagogues come in. As they did before in German history.

Do people in the East want the old days of the GDR back? Well, to a lot of people who are old enough to remember daily life in the GDR, there just hasn't been any true benefit in switching very literally over night from socialism to democracy and a market economy. Back in the old days, at least everybody had a job and affordable housing and bearable costs of living. Supermarkets were chronically understocked with even the barest essentials and you could be arrested by secret police and declared an unperson for thoughtcrimes, but, you know, swings and roundabouts. I'm not sure many Easterners want that part of it back. But what the GDR did provide, if you were willing to shut up and put up and didn't mind the government making many decisions for you without your say, was an almost bulletproof social safety net. And that's the main thing that many Easterners miss sorely, and why there is so much nostalgia for the old days.

>>100117

Also there was a dramatic brain drain after the wall came down. Anyone with an ounce of ambition went west at the earliest opportunity. Bluntly, a lot of Ossies are nostalgic for the days when talent and hard work counted for nothing.

>>100118

>Also there was a dramatic brain drain after the wall came down. Anyone with an ounce of ambition went west at the earliest opportunity.

That was 30 to 35 years ago though. Surely there are enough highly skilled jobs in formerly East German cities today that nobody has to leave and go to the West.

>>100122

The federal government has invested an unbelievable amount of money in trying to achieve that, but it has mostly failed. The east is still dramatically poorer than the west. The high-paying jobs don't exist in enough numbers, but that's only half the problem - you need good housing, good schools, good neighbourhoods, good nightlife and culture. You can fix some of those problems with money, but not all of them.

How much would you have to offer a young professional to convince them to move from London or Manchester to Doncaster? How much would the government have to spend to make Doncaster a nice place to live?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRDP_per_capita

>>100110

>And you're still r/atheist from the mid-00s.

It's still amazing how we've slid backwards on this, as though organised religion has started offering anything beneficial to society and stopped being regressive and harmful in nearly all respects in the last decade. Rather, what really happened is that one fat wanker shoved a banana up his arse, and then all the cool progressive liberal people decided religion is good actually just so they could distance themselves from the fedora tipping chuddies, without any hint of self awareness.

Humans are pathetic tribal apes and we will never rise above it, sadly.

>>100123

>How much would the government have to spend to make Doncaster a nice place to live?

Never really occurred to me that Doncaster is such a shithole, but boy that place looks bleak.

>>100129
I wouldn't want to walk down a street like that without knowing it, but I can't really see anything wrong.
I grew u on a small estate similar to that, the only major visual difference being an additional meter of public grass on each side of the road, a slightly larger road and quite a few more trees.

As is, the only thing that'd make me anxious around here is how common it looks, though digging into it a bit shows there's a builder type who's gonna be physically capable and easy enough to get on with, and I presume plenty of stay at home benefit moms to keep an eye on the street.
You've got satellite dishes on every house, so the sofas will be populated most nights.
Providing the back gardens are genuine grass™, should be an okay place to call home.

>>100130

>You've got satellite dishes on every house, so the sofas will be populated most nights.

Which means nobody will have an eye out on the street. You could get mugged or stabbed while they're all watching Strictly with the volume up.

>>100125
I think it has more to do with a bunch of the "New Atheists" being arseholes, rather than any webcam videos featuring micro-celebs. However, I don't disagree with your opinions on religion.

>>100132
>You could get mugged or stabbed while they're all watching Strictly with the volume up.
Is that were muggin's and stabbin's happen? I'd presumed they were in towns and dark alleys. With a road that close I'd expect a few doors to open if a scuffle or scream was heard.

>>100130

Doncaster isn't the worst place on earth, it's just one of many northern towns that are stuck in a slow cycle of decline.

The problem as I see it isn't that the bad bits are particularly awful, but that there aren't any good bits. There are many more reasons to leave than there are reasons to stay. If you've gone off to Liverpool or Birmingham for university and loved the nightlife, going back home to Doncaster is going to feel like a huge downgrade. If you're starting out in your career, a place like Doncaster doesn't have a lot of thriving companies with lots of opportunity for growth. If you're settling down to have kids and you're thinking about giving them the best chance, a place like Doncaster doesn't really have a nice neighbourhood with a good school.

The people of Doncaster are mostly respectable people with normal jobs and normal lives, but there's only so long that a community can survive if the brightest and most ambitious people keep leaving. The average keeps getting dragged lower, the social problems keep getting more concentrated. Once that pattern has set in, there's no obvious answer for how to reverse it.

>>100134
I live on a worse street than that, in Manchester, and it's probably culturally quite similar but looks worse. One thing here that makes me slightly uncomfortable is the regular screaming I hear. It's just children and teenagers playing, but not every scream is immediately identifiable as a positive and happy scream. That could just be me, though; everyone came out and clapped when the police arrested a scumbag right outside my garden gate, and I wasn't the only person to open my bathroom window when a drunk woman was shouting about being raped in the middle of the night. She wasn't actually being raped; she was just arguing with some man she was with.

>>100136

This goes back to the sort of discussion we were having a bit ago about the rough areas and nice areas of a city, but I'd be pretty confident that a big city like Manchester is all around more dangerous of a place to live compared to a shit but relatively small town like Doncaster or wherever. Just the fact there's more people of all levels of the social spectrum means you're more likely to bump into the belligerent elements.

The area I live in seems rather grim on the surface but I've been here a couple of years now and I am starting to rather like it. If you stick to the roads you'll see a lot of drab, rusty looking warehouses and garages owned by the sort of companies that don't even have websites and only get business by a land-line phone number, but you don't have to veer far off the main through-routes and there's a lot of accessible, walkable green space and parks and the like. The whole place looks scruffy, but I can't say I have ever felt unsafe.

Really I guess like anything else money is all it comes down to. People talk about all the window dressing but in reality all anyone cares about is if you can get a decent steady job and support yourself living somewhere. If you could get paid London wages living in Grimsby nobody would be moaning about what a shithole it is. For a lot of these places, somebody who has managed to claw their way into one of the half decent jobs will be able to live very comfortably, it's just a matter of actually being able to do that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/06/german-government-on-brink-of-collapse-after-olaf-scholz-sacks-finance-minister

>The German government is on the brink of collapse after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, unexpectedly sacked his finance minister, throwing Europe’s largest economy into political disarray.

>Christian Linder was thrown out of the three-way coalition during a meeting of high-level government members on Wednesday evening, after months of bitter infighting that has contributed to the administration’s growing unpopularity.


ITZ ES IST!!!

>>100520
Fair enough really. The German economy has been in deep trouble for years now where Scholz and Grüne don't seem to be fountains of new ideas and Lindner has fast become a useful idiot for Putin that blocks aid and even the delivery of weapons.

>>100521

It was always an alliance at the lowest common denominator. Born out of the sheer necessity of a simple-majority government coalition in an increasingly frayed political party landscape.

Germany has a much bigger tradition of coalition governments than the UK, and you have to go all the way back to the 1950s for the last time that there was a one-party government at the federal level.

In fact, that tradition goes all the way back to the Weimar Republic. Where it sadly contributed to its downfall, because years of short-lived, ever-changing coalitions caused a great deal of parliamentary instability and political inefficacy.

>>100523
I wonder what it is in German society that gives them such an odd party system. The Swedes use more or less the same voting system but became a weird voluntary social democrat perma-regime from like 1930 to 1990. They've had some awkwardness with the Sweden Democrats, but the Left-vs-Bourgeois bloc dynamic is still fairly clear. NZ's voting system is similar too, but is immediately familiar to the UK voter: Labour or Tories, supported by Greens on the left, Libertarians on the right, and occasionally, for spice, a one-man-band populist org in the middle who breaks ties. Meanwhile Germany throws out SPD-CDU grand coalitions, the FDP is a regular feature of Social Democrat lead coalitions despite being privatising neoliberals, and the system keeps reverting to an endgame of coalescing all the normal parties in a disagreeable alliance to keep some anti-constitutional nutters out.

>>100526

Italy is even more mental, where you've got as many as nine different significant parties in parliament. And on top of that, another eight small parties. Governments usually consist of alliances of anywhere between three and five parties. Italian politics has been notoriously unstable pretty much since the end of WWII, with over 70 different incumbent governments, sometimes in very short succession.

Germany has a five-percent threshold of general election votes that a party must overcome in order to gain seats. This was done specifically to avoid the kind of political fragmentation that the Weimar Republic parliament was notorious for. But what it doesn't prevent is a fragmentation of parties that are above those five percent. Which has happened in recent years, and which has greatly complicated the formation of government coalitions after an election.

>>100520
It's never fun when you're thrown out of a 3-way.

>>100531

It especially wasn't smart on the part of the FDP, Germany's Lib Dems, because they are below the 5% threshold in the polls, so they are jeopardising their entire existence in the Bundestag in the next four-year term.

You almost want to respect them for standing by their principles even in the face of complete self annihilation. But then again, not all principles are equally worth standing by.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/28/elon-musk-germany-afd-party

>Elon Musk pens German newspaper opinion piece supporting far-right AfD party

>Billionaire Trump adviser said his ‘significant investments’ in the country justified his wading into German politics


Feudalism redux, eh? Politics is too important to be left to the plebs.

>>100736
I don't think it would fix anything, but we're rather beyond that now.

>>100736
I mean he's just giving his celebrity opinion isn't he? I have 10% of my portfolio in the DAX and would like to state that the AfD is a useful idiot for Russian and Chinese interests. The CDU will turn things around next year in a coalition with the SDP.

Although I'll admit that I won't go shouting that in German newspapers because I'm not as the Americans say, a 'jackass' nor a celebrity.

>>100737
He's currently having an autistic meltdown on twitter over visas with Trump's base so I expect it's a problem that will soon solve itself and he'll storm off in a huff.

>>100738

Trump appears to be siding with Musk on this one. It's looking like either Trump will do his Jedi mind tricks, or it'll turn into a much deeper rift within the MAGA right.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-vows-war-over-h-1b-visa-program-amid-rift-with-some-trump-supporters-2024-12-28/

>>100736

I was thinking I see it as somewhat inevitable that democracy as we know it will recede, eventually, in the West. For a long time "democracy" has both been the ultimate virtue of our political systems, but at the same time our biggest weakness. In the face of aggressian from Russia and China, who are not democratic in anything but name and can thus enact long term planning and strategy with a much greater coherency, democracy leaves us floundering, rocking back and forth dependent on public opinion, and worse, our governments hijacked by the cordyceps like influence of the media or corporate lobbying.

I've long argued that the US isn't a democracy at all, hasn't been for a long time, and arguably on a national level, never really was. The US uses "democracy" as a sort of imperialist dogwhistle, when it strong arms foreign nations into adopting "democratic" system of government what it really means is a system of government where American money and American soft power is free to influence policy. But it never realised it has exactly the same vulnerability, and it never imagined that American money might not even necessarily align with American interests.

The trouble is for America itself (and arguably therefore, the rest of us in the Free World), it's not not a democracy in the same way as Russia or China. Those countries are autocracies where the government calls the shots. America isn't- America is a puppet of a democracy where guys like Elon call the shots.

So what's the solution? I really don't know. But I don't think the sham will hold up for much longer, and I don't think it will really do the West in general any good to simply be a weathervane spinning in the wind when China becomes ascendant. It's really incredible how right Orwell got it all those years ago. That's exactly where we are going.

>>100738
>>100739

If what passes for the left nowadays wasn't crewed by completely fucking mindbroken conservativeolds they could seize on this and gain a real foothold. I think a pretty big part of the reason Stürmer did well in this years election was because a significant portion of British middle of the road average right wingers finally had that "You mean the right actually wants load of immigrants and they've been lying to us all these years?!" *shocked pikachu face* epiphany. He hasn't capitalised on it, just like he hasn't capitalised on any of the other easy wins he could have, but nevertheless.

>>100738
How do people follow this stuff, as close to source as possible? I've no idea any of this was going on.

>>100742

I just wait for lads here to post about it.

>>100742
I heard it through the meme vine.

https://www.gbnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-afd-support-urges-people-not-liken-party-leader-hitler

>Elon Musk doubles down on AfD support and urges people not to liken party's leader to Hitler

Ok, so it's GB News. Take all the grains of salt you want. I couldn't find another source that's similarly to the point at the moment. But he is in fact doubling down on his musings.

What a fucking cunt.

>>100746
My brain is pea soup so I forget whether I mentioned this in passing here or in real life recently. However, there is a story with two possible realities, both of which confirmed Elon Musk to be a cunt years ago.

Hyperloop, remember that? In 2019 when it was all but dead in the water Musk claimed his ethusiasm for the project had only ever been a ploy to stifle the construction of new, state-wide, rail infrastructure in California. Apparently the insufferable Boer doesn't like public transit, so didn't want to see it's expansion in the state that was then his base of operations. This claim is either evidence of a deeply malignant, corrupting, narrowminded, spoilsport, or someone who is so insecure that he made up the stuff about not liking trains because his stupid, pie-in-the-sky, non-tech was a bad idea that never amounted to anything.

There is a deep inadequacy within Musk that could well make him uniquely dangerous. Egomania seems to be a by-product of being that wealthy, but unlike the Gates's and Bezos's of the world, Musk doesn't seem to enjoy anything. And I reckon, if you don't enjoy anything for long enough, you start to fill that void with cruelty. Combine that with the money and the ego, and his alleged fondness for ket, and I can scarcely imagine what kind of a shitstorm is brewing on the horizon of Musk's mind.

They'd have loved that "insufferable Boer" gag on Radio 4.

>>100747
I hate to defend Musk but this is a clickbait story. Hyperloop was thrown out as a proposal but it wasn't the cause for the US being utterly useless at building its rail network and plasters over why California in particular has such a disjointed rail network.
https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-california-high-spee-1849402460

If you'd like an update on Elon Musk, he was caught using a burner account with a voice changer but then got so angry he forgot to use the voice changer and now he's banning people for making fun of him.

This isn't the first time he's been caught using an alt. He's really become an old-school forum moderator.

>>100749

A lot of people imagine what they'd do if they were a billionaire. I find it vaguely comforting that for a lot of actual billionaires, the answer seems to be "spend half the day shitposting".

>>100748
I was ready to eat humble pie once I clicked that link, but it doesn't exactly expunge my theory. Especially when this Vance chap is saying shit like:
>“In all this time we’ve been talking about high-speed rail, there’s still almost none that’s built.... In that time, Elon built a worldwide electric car charging network and shifted the entire world onto electric cars.”

Which is complete bunk-cum-hagiography.

>>100750
That's only really true for Musk. I do think it's funny that, amongst what I'll call "public facing billionaires", none of them do any self-improvement. I know Zuckerberg has gotten a stylist and Bezos takes roids or whatever, but that bollocks hardly counts.

>>100751
>none of them do any self-improvement

Does anyone?

>but it doesn't exactly expunge my theory

Let's look at it another way: it's a flimsy conspiracy theory at best with a lot of holes in it. It should have something more than 'a guy trying to sell a book suggested it' but a lot of people lap it up because they like the narrative. There are lots of reason to call Musk a sad cunt, you don't need to grasp at straws on that count.

>>100751

https://supercharge.info/map

I can't stand the hate towards Elon... the guy is solving the biggest problems the planet is facing, Climate change via solar, energy storage, congestion, he's trying to solve paralysis and blindness, He's basically dedicated his fortune to building a self sustaining colony on Mars so when the inevitable asteroid blows one of the planets to shit the only known source of consciousness in the universe will continue. He's developing the only AI thats training data isnt based around lying for the sake of inclusivity... something that will be super important once it surpasses human intelligence. He is building the most advanced humanoid robot ever made so we can live in a world of abundance where work is optional and we can live as we please. He brings things like population collapse and the harm of hormone therapy in children into the public sphere. he's created a worldwide internet constellation that he gives out for free wherever there's a natural disaster, the guy is a living legend for all of these things. plus he was the number 1 ranked player in diablo 3 which is unreal lol oh and buying twitter, creating the now facebook adopted and open source community notes has done wonders for freedom of speech in the countries that allow it... we all lived through covid and it is shameful how the entirity of social media handled that. Blocking voices that were speaking reason... masks that didnt do anything, 2 meter rules, every other seat blocked, a vaccine that was utter bollocks for the healthy and under 50s and if you questioned it you were shut down. Thank fuck for Elon Musk

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>100854

Why would you waste all your bait in one post?

>>100857

I didnt mention teslas cars.. the model y received a 98% safety assist score in euro NCAP tests, the best ever recorded.

Which of the points I raise do you dispute? there's plenty to choose from.

>>100859

'Murrica!

>>100854

>He is building the most advanced humanoid robot ever made so we can live in a world of abundance where work is optional and we can live as we please.

Not that it matters now that Murrikinlad is banned, but doesn't that go entirely against U.S. capitalist mantra? The idea that work is optional and you'll live in abundance whether or not you work? Isn't that more socialism's end goal?

As I understand it, in America, if you don't want to work, many people will think you don't deserve the air that you breathe. Especially with grind culture nowadays, which has people indoctrinated to think that every waking moment not spent working is a sin against the gods of capitalism.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/29/german-immigration-motion-passes-breaking-taboo-on-cooperation-with-afd

>The German parliament has narrowly passed a motion urging tough restrictions on immigration that was highly controversial because it was backed by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party.

>The motion was brought by the conservative opposition CDU-CSU and backed by, among others, the AfD, breaking a longstanding taboo on cooperation with the anti-immigration party.


This will cost Merz the election.

You've read it here first.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/31/german-parliament-rejects-immigration-bill-backed-far-right-afd

>The German parliament has rejected a bill to tighten immigration controls brought by the frontrunner to be the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with the backing of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

>It came after a similar but non-binding motion was passed by parliament on Wednesday with the votes of the AfD, prompting a wave of protest from those who said it was a breach in Germany’s longstanding “firewall” between the far right and the mainstream.


I guess it's a classic case of a political gamble blowing up in somebody's face. The fact that the German Parliament has rejected the bill, which it probably couldn't have done without a number of Conservative MPs also voting against it behind Merz's back, is now going to hurt him more than if they'd passed it. The outcome itself is going to placate the Left, for the time being, but it will probably annihilate any perception of leadership that Conservative-leaning voters had of him. And for the remainder of the election run-up, the Left will rightly be able to point fingers at the CDU for collaborating with right-wing fascists.

Polymarket now has Merz with a 95-percent chance of becoming chancellor this weekend.

The odds for a Conservative/Social Democrat coalition government are seen at around 52 percent.

Merz is more of a right wing Conservative, and not known for being a big fan of the left wing Social Democrats. So it's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out, as they're far from being Merz's obvious choice as a coalition partner. The Social Democrats will probably agree to whatever demands Merz will have for them to stay in power, even if it's a shit way of being in power when you've just come down from being the chancellor's party.

Das exit polls
Things are looking good for Merz.

>>101190

It's still early. If the German Lib Dems FDP end up getting five percent after all, it's going to make the formation of a coalition government once again a bit complicated. The most likely result in that case will be a CDU/SPD/FDP coalition, and not a CDU/SPD/Greens one, because the Conservatives have said that the Greens are far from their preferred coalition partner.

I quite like the idea of parties having to form coalitions. Our last coalition adventure with Cameron and Clegg may have been a bit of a disappointment, but the general idea of no one party having too much power has its charms. The Germans have done it that way pretty much since after WWII.

>>101191
>Our last coalition adventure with Cameron and Clegg may have been a bit of a disappointment

I confess that I voted no on the AV referendum in 2011 because I thought that it would preclude us from having stable governments and invite loons into government. Time really does make fools of us all.

Anyway I'm hesitant in trusting exit-polls in this case, I think FDP will face a shortfall from their supporters deciding that they can't support them. I've got money on it.

>>101192

>because I thought that it would preclude us from having stable governments and invite loons into government

And instead, now we're got ARE Keir. Which is so much better.

It's settled. The Conservatives can form a coalition government with just the Social Democrats. Giving Germany the fifth Grand Coalition since WWII.

This man is going to be the next German Chancellor ... if everyone that's supposed to be backing him remembers to vote for him.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgp22zlrgko

>Germany's conservative leader has unexpectedly fallen short of a majority in a parliament vote to become chancellor.

>Friedrich Merz needed 316 votes in the 630-seat Bundestag but only secured 310, in a significant blow to the Christian Democrat leader, two and a half months after winning Germany's federal elections.