Politics German Politics & News

The rise of AI companies on the share market illustrates how close it is before millions need to get something new. Polititians must realize this is only going to worsen future domestic bliss.
 
The newest leading poll by German public broadcaster 'ZDF' shows that 0% of the electorate favour the current government coalition over any other option. ZERO percent. (Source)

That's never happened before. That's actually quite the achievement, colour me impressed!

And Scholz's personal approval rating has dropped to 25%. If the nation went to the polls tomorrow, the result would be as follows:

CDU/CSU (centre-right): 38%
SPD (centre-left): 17%
AfD (right-wing populism): 13%
Greens (left-wing): 13%
BSW (left-wing populism): 6%
The Left (left-wing): 4%
FDP (pro-business): 3%

The latter two would fail to win caucus recognition. Compare the size of the biggest opposition party to the size of the three-party government coalition. My goodness.

Adjusted to the 5% caucus recognition threshold, the new parliament would be as follows:

CDU/CSU: 43.7%
SPD: 19.5%
AfD: 14.9%
Greens: 14.9%
BSW: 6.9%

There's a small rounding error, but you'll get the picture.

Scholz and his minions may hope they'll be able to wait this storm out; the next regular elections are still a year out. But that ain't gonna work. His SPD's 160-year-history is virtually going to end with him. There won't be another social democrat Chancellor for a pretty long time after this. Not unless they realise that they can't win elections by appealing exclusively to geography teachers and arts section columnists.

And the CDU under their new actually conservative leader Friedrich Merz will have to find a way to deal with AfD. Their previously preferred coalition partner FDP is tainted goods, they need a new one. And they'll have to explain to voters on the right why that shouldn't be AfD, given that the numbers above suggest a centre-right-right potential of almost 60%.

What I don't understand is why they allow themselves to be cornered by the other parties, who invented that ban on any cooperation with AfD whatsoever. Here's what I'd do if I were Merz, I'd be like: "Of course we'll enter into a coalition with AfD if the following conditions are met …" And those conditions would obviously be the corner stones of my manifesto, i.e. reduced immigration, returning to conscription, no leaving NATO, no leaving the EU, no interfering with the judiciary …

That would put AfD on the spot. They'd have to either move somewhat closer to the centre line again or explain to their voters why they let a chance for a right-leaning government go to waste. I mean, everyone acts as if only CDU needs a coalition partner; but the fact is, AfD needs one as well. So there's ample justification to actually put demands to them.

Of course Merz wouldn't even be able to get that "if" out. The press would virtually flay him alive. Still, it's beyond me why he doesn't try to put AfD on the spot. Especially since the very same thing happened less than twenty years ago to SPD (so-called The Left is an offshoot of theirs, as much as AfD is an offshoot of CDU). So there's a precedent as to how not to deal with a situation like this.
 
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Germany v Poland 2: underwater boogaloo.
 
The newest leading poll by German public broadcaster 'ZDF' shows that 0% of the electorate favour the current government coalition over any other option. ZERO percent. (Source)

That's never happened before. That's actually quite the achievement, colour me impressed!

And Scholz's personal approval rating has dropped to 25%. If the nation went to the polls tomorrow, the result would be as follows:

CDU/CSU (centre-right): 38%
SPD (centre-left): 17%
AfD (right-wing populism): 13%
Greens (left-wing): 13%
BSW (left-wing populism): 6%
The Left (left-wing): 4%
FDP (pro-business): 3%

The latter two would fail to win caucus recognition. Compare the size of the biggest opposition party to the size of the three-party government coalition. My goodness.

Adjusted to the 5% caucus recognition threshold, the new parliament would be as follows:

CDU/CSU: 43.7%
SPD: 19.5%
AfD: 14.9%
Greens: 14.9%
BSW: 6.9%

There's a small rounding error, but you'll get the picture.

Scholz and his minions may hope they'll be able to wait this storm out; the next regular elections are still a year out. But that ain't gonna work. His SPD's 160-year-history is virtually going to end with him. There won't be another social democrat Chancellor for a pretty long time after this. Not unless they realise that they can't win elections by appealing exclusively to geography teachers and arts section columnists.

And the CDU under their new actually conservative leader Friedrich Merz will have to find a way to deal with AfD. Their previously preferred coalition partner FDP is tainted goods, they need a new one. And they'll have to explain to voters on the right why that shouldn't be AfD, given that the numbers above suggest a centre-right-right potential of almost 60%.

What I don't understand is why they allow themselves to be cornered by the other parties, who invented that ban on any cooperation with AfD whatsoever. Here's what I'd do if I were Merz, I'd be like: "Of course we'll enter into a coalition with AfD if the following conditions are met …" And those conditions would obviously be the corner stones of my manifesto, i.e. reduced immigration, returning to conscription, no leaving NATO, no leaving the EU, no interfering with the judiciary …

That would put AfD on the spot. They'd have to either move somewhat closer to the centre line again or explain to their voters why they let a chance for a right-leaning government go to waste. I mean, everyone acts as if only CDU needs a coalition partner; but the fact is, AfD needs one as well. So there's ample justification to actually put demands to them.

Of course Merz wouldn't even be able to get that "if" out. The press would virtually flay him alive. Still, it's beyond me why he doesn't try to put AfD on the spot. Especially since the very same thing happened less than twenty years ago to SPD (so-called The Left is an offshoot of theirs, as much as AfD is an offshoot of CDU). So there's a precedent as to how not to deal with a situation like this.
Could almost be the UK.

The point of AFD/Reform, is to get the very moderate slightly to the right party, to move a bit more right, and actually deal with the issues they say they will deal with. For the UK its immigration. This time round we voted out the conservatives, as they had truly ran out of ideas after 14 years.
 
NSDAP was also more popular in the eastern part of Germany before the WW2.

Yes, they were a kind of "unique" in the Eastern Bloc. 2% of their population were STASI agents. It's something remarkable.

My personal observation is, they still have this vigilante mindset. Back in the 90s and 2000s, if they saw a Polish registration plate, they tried to get interested in that car, asked you what you were doing there, etc.

I heard a Polish analyst saying that some Ossis just don't want to experience what they did in 1944-1945 and that's why they want the Russo-Ukrainian war to stop. They think RuZZia may go further after defeating Ukraine and visit them again.

Who can know the Ossis better than a person who was born 2 km from their border and lived less than 20 km from them for almost 31 years including 14 years before they united with the Wessis?

Like in the case of NSDAP, it's correlated with a higher unemployment rate and infrastructural undevelopment.
Upon the unification, the Ossis experienced something like the Americans did in the Rust Belt.

Let's imagine, you truly believe you are the best person in the Eastern Bloc. Your television tells you that and you believe in that. Your products are of a better quality than in the case of your Eastern Bloc neighbours and they really were in most cases. You compare your coffee maker to the average Polish coffee maker or a motorbike to a Polish motorbike. It's so much better. Your heavy industry is very developed and you produce a lot of goods. Remember, you are the best German, exactly the way the North Koreans are the best Koreans. The Soviet Army did not conquer you but liberated you from the evil Nazis. The real Nazis originated from the western part of Germany. Cannot it be true? Did not the first Bundeswehr General with no history of being an NSDAP member appear in the 70s? Did the Wessis even make their Nazis accountable? No, they employed a fvckton of them, as there was hardly anybody available with the relevant experience who could do many high-profile jobs.

Your grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, but he says that he was just a cook or a driver. By no means he could be a Nazi!

Your athletes have outstanding successes and outcompete West German ones by a very big margin maybe apart from football even if your population makes up just a bit more than 25% of the one in West Germany. Your athletes earn a fvckton of medals and you are proud of them.

Your intelligence is far more effective than the West German intelligence and you are able to install far more agents in West Germany than the other way around.

Your government engages you in different activities and organises a lot of mass events, making you proud and relevant.

Out of the blue, 1990 comes and everything goes to the sh1tter.

Your "great" products, you were so much proud of, turn out to be of a bad quality compared to the ones produced by the Wessis.
Your factories produce a lot of unnecessary and uncompetitive goods. Many of them get closed. You heavily rely on lignite, so your economy is not green enough. The Wessis don't like it and flood you with their products. Particularly, they don't like your big factories, as they are not green enough and generate a lot of emissions.
Unemployment goes up to 25%+ and your factory gets shut down. You have no perspectives, becoming disenchanted and depressed. Nobody is interested in keeping you busy and you realise somebody had misguided you about you being the best and your products being great. You can now explore the world without taking your commie neighbours as a reference point and you experience a clash with reality.

These evil Wessis even show you your favourite female athletes having beards now. It's too much.

When you used to go to Poland, you could experience bad Polish roads that made you laugh. Your reference point was a country that did not have any motorways and you had a lot of them. Now, you can visit the Wessis without your homies trying to shoot you. Your motorways made of concrete slabs with big gaps between them look like a joke compared to the ones in the Wessiland. Your Trabbi, which you waited 13 years for, equipped with a 2-stroke engine, looks like a joke compared to a VW Golf (was it even possible to kill its engine?) used by the poorest Wessis. Mercedeses and BMWs appear to be cars from a different planet.

How can you be happy about all this sh1t?

You decide to vote for someone who will make you relevant again and blames other people for your problems.

My personal observations from the 80s and 90s were:
- East Germans were obsessed with saving money and they did it at the expense of their health. Many of them smoked the cheapest cigarettes possible and their priority was saving money. They had their day when the East German mark was exchanged into the DEM at the rate of 1:1.
- they didn't mind walking nude on the beach or at least changing their clothes in public without covering their private parts. I think it's not normal amongst West Germans and they felt uncomfortable seeing that. I think it's still like that.
- the unification of Germany caused a massive increase in neo-Nazi movements amongst the Ossis due to the high unemployment and not being socially engaged the way they used to be in the past. Back in the '90s or 2000s, it was much more likely to be randomly attacked in the Ossiland just because of being Polish. It has never happened to me, though. The Wessis tended to look random Polish people down, but extremely rarely attacked them verbally or physically. Some neo-Nazi organisations were banned and their voters turned to AfD. It does not mean all, or even most of the Ossis, are neo-Nazis.
- Russian names were quite popular amongst the Ossis. For example, I don't know any Polish person called Ivan and I know just one Igor. I know some Ossis, though, and they are not the "Germans" who were imported from the former Soviet Union.
- the Ossis named some of their cities after communists, like Karl-Marx-Stadt or Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt, while the Polish commies dropped this idea after Stalin died. Many names went back to normal right after that.
- the number of monuments commemorating the Red Army is astonishing in the Ossiland. In contrast, there are hardly any left in Poland.


Still, I have never had any personal problems with the Ossis. I did not notice any difference between the proportion of bad and good people in Poland and the Ossiland.

Ossis gave their kids even western names to flee their captivity at least in naming.

Doreen , Ronny , Nancy, Mandy etc.

A Mandy in the 90s was 100 % Ossi.
 
NSDAP was also more popular in the eastern part of Germany before the WW2.

Yes, they were a kind of "unique" in the Eastern Bloc. 2% of their population were STASI agents. It's something remarkable.

My personal observation is, they still have this vigilante mindset. Back in the 90s and 2000s, if they saw a Polish registration plate, they tried to get interested in that car, asked you what you were doing there, etc.

I heard a Polish analyst saying that some Ossis just don't want to experience what they did in 1944-1945 and that's why they want the Russo-Ukrainian war to stop. They think RuZZia may go further after defeating Ukraine and visit them again.

Who can know the Ossis better than a person who was born 2 km from their border and lived less than 20 km from them for almost 31 years including 14 years before they united with the Wessis?

Like in the case of NSDAP, it's correlated with a higher unemployment rate and infrastructural undevelopment.
Upon the unification, the Ossis experienced something like the Americans did in the Rust Belt.

Let's imagine, you truly believe you are the best person in the Eastern Bloc. Your television tells you that and you believe in that. Your products are of a better quality than in the case of your Eastern Bloc neighbours and they really were in most cases. You compare your coffee maker to the average Polish coffee maker or a motorbike to a Polish motorbike. It's so much better. Your heavy industry is very developed and you produce a lot of goods. Remember, you are the best German, exactly the way the North Koreans are the best Koreans. The Soviet Army did not conquer you but liberated you from the evil Nazis. The real Nazis originated from the western part of Germany. Cannot it be true? Did not the first Bundeswehr General with no history of being an NSDAP member appear in the 70s? Did the Wessis even make their Nazis accountable? No, they employed a fvckton of them, as there was hardly anybody available with the relevant experience who could do many high-profile jobs.

Your grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, but he says that he was just a cook or a driver. By no means he could be a Nazi!

Your athletes have outstanding successes and outcompete West German ones by a very big margin maybe apart from football even if your population makes up just a bit more than 25% of the one in West Germany. Your athletes earn a fvckton of medals and you are proud of them.

Your intelligence is far more effective than the West German intelligence and you are able to install far more agents in West Germany than the other way around.

Your government engages you in different activities and organises a lot of mass events, making you proud and relevant.

Out of the blue, 1990 comes and everything goes to the sh1tter.

Your "great" products, you were so much proud of, turn out to be of a bad quality compared to the ones produced by the Wessis.
Your factories produce a lot of unnecessary and uncompetitive goods. Many of them get closed. You heavily rely on lignite, so your economy is not green enough. The Wessis don't like it and flood you with their products. Particularly, they don't like your big factories, as they are not green enough and generate a lot of emissions.
Unemployment goes up to 25%+ and your factory gets shut down. You have no perspectives, becoming disenchanted and depressed. Nobody is interested in keeping you busy and you realise somebody had misguided you about you being the best and your products being great. You can now explore the world without taking your commie neighbours as a reference point and you experience a clash with reality.

These evil Wessis even show you your favourite female athletes having beards now. It's too much.

When you used to go to Poland, you could experience bad Polish roads that made you laugh. Your reference point was a country that did not have any motorways and you had a lot of them. Now, you can visit the Wessis without your homies trying to shoot you. Your motorways made of concrete slabs with big gaps between them look like a joke compared to the ones in the Wessiland. Your Trabbi, which you waited 13 years for, equipped with a 2-stroke engine, looks like a joke compared to a VW Golf (was it even possible to kill its engine?) used by the poorest Wessis. Mercedeses and BMWs appear to be cars from a different planet.

How can you be happy about all this sh1t?

You decide to vote for someone who will make you relevant again and blames other people for your problems.

My personal observations from the 80s and 90s were:
- East Germans were obsessed with saving money and they did it at the expense of their health. Many of them smoked the cheapest cigarettes possible and their priority was saving money. They had their day when the East German mark was exchanged into the DEM at the rate of 1:1.
- they didn't mind walking nude on the beach or at least changing their clothes in public without covering their private parts. I think it's not normal amongst West Germans and they felt uncomfortable seeing that. I think it's still like that.
- the unification of Germany caused a massive increase in neo-Nazi movements amongst the Ossis due to the high unemployment and not being socially engaged the way they used to be in the past. Back in the '90s or 2000s, it was much more likely to be randomly attacked in the Ossiland just because of being Polish. It has never happened to me, though. The Wessis tended to look random Polish people down, but extremely rarely attacked them verbally or physically. Some neo-Nazi organisations were banned and their voters turned to AfD. It does not mean all, or even most of the Ossis, are neo-Nazis.
- Russian names were quite popular amongst the Ossis. For example, I don't know any Polish person called Ivan and I know just one Igor. I know some Ossis, though, and they are not the "Germans" who were imported from the former Soviet Union.
- the Ossis named some of their cities after communists, like Karl-Marx-Stadt or Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt, while the Polish commies dropped this idea after Stalin died. Many names went back to normal right after that.
- the number of monuments commemorating the Red Army is astonishing in the Ossiland. In contrast, there are hardly any left in Poland.


Still, I have never had any personal problems with the Ossis. I did not notice any difference between the proportion of bad and good people in Poland and the Ossiland.


Yeah some of them still have this broken "Stolz" problem. And not all are politically aligned like that you have the idiot share everywhere. I think its more of a "uniting feeling" they follow rather than rationale. And its more widely spread in the east as its their "heritage" we Wessis are practically Americans and brainwashed to our detriment.
 
Could almost be the UK.

The point of AFD/Reform, is to get the very moderate slightly to the right party, to move a bit more right, and actually deal with the issues they say they will deal with. For the UK its immigration. This time round we voted out the conservatives, as they had truly ran out of ideas after 14 years.
I'm a disappointed pragmatist. A course correction vote like what you're describing can only work if the party that is to be corrected can realistically make that correction without losing face and plunging itself into irrelevance. If it can't make that correction, what good does a protest vote do if it'll only lead to someone else entirely obtaining power? Votes for Reform paved Starmer's way into Number 10.

And something similar could happen in Germany. If AfD's leaders are the patriots they claim to be, they'd do what's necessary for the country. It's better to make baby steps into a positive direction than lunge two steps forward and be pushed three steps back. With Merz, a course correction is still possible and I hope the electorate will not squander that chance. Wilders and Meloni showed how it's done. What AfD is doing is very unlikely to ever amount to something, at least on the federal level.
 
Could almost be the UK.

The point of AFD/Reform, is to get the very moderate slightly to the right party, to move a bit more right, and actually deal with the issues they say they will deal with. For the UK its immigration. This time round we voted out the conservatives, as they had truly ran out of ideas after 14 years.
Why do you believe this will improve under Labour if they have been trying to attract immigrants' votes for years?
Their pro-immigration stance was visible during the last protests.

Everybody with a bit of a brain knows that Labour used to be a party of the working people, while it's a party of the work-shy and immigrants right now. Apart from that, they look for voters among Islamists. It turns me off instantly.
 
Why do you believe this will improve under Labour if they have been trying to attract immigrants' votes for years?
Their pro-immigration stance was visible during the last protests.

Everybody with a bit of a brain knows that Labour used to be a party of the working people, while it's a party of the work-shy and immigrants right now. Apart from that, they look for voters among Islamists. It turns me off instantly.
It certainly didn’t improve under conservatives, who appeared surprised when 700k arrived last year. Starmer either will or won’t address the issue. My point is that the voters will punish parties that don’t deliver on this issue.

And overall I still don’t get why we need more people, robots will arrive, in numbers over the next 5 years, they will be dumb, but we will see 1-2 robots with a human, I.e bin men, patient lifting, warehouse picking, the human will monitor and sort out errors. With min wage at 24k, a robot at 200k would make a lot of sense.
 
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Meanwhile, the German government has declared a national security threat and closed all borders, with permanent controls instituted at all crossings.

Wait, what?

Have we not been told for ten years that Germany's borders are too long to be monitored? Whatever happened to "no human being is illegal" and all that Bo*****S?

Scholz must be scared shitless if he goes that way.
 
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Hmh, I beg to differ.

Particularly the alleged reliance on cheap labour from Eastern Europe isn't reflected in actual numbers, as far as I can tell; save some notable exceptions (like Volkswagen), most German companies are still way too under-engaged in Eastern Europe's emerging powerhouses like Poland.

In my estimation, the biggest bottlenecks for economic growth in Germany right now are government bureaucracy and a blatant failure to timely reinvigorate key infrastructures. Particularly the railway system is over-exerted to such a point that industrial growth is no longer possible.

Case in point, look at that graph and how it begins to flatten in the late tens; wanna know what happened in the late sixties i.e. fifty years prior? The great after-war infrastructure renewal programme was finished. Three-quarters of Germany's railway bridges were built during that programme, and expected to last fifty years. Nowadays, they all require repairs or replacements. It's a domino effect.

It's remarkably similar to what happened in the UK between 1950 and 1980, when their own failure to modernise cost them so dearly.

This fact has been known for decades and no one ever emerged to address it.

First, all plans to deal with the issue had to be postponed due to the costs associated with German reunification.

Then came the dot-com bubble and the financial crisis of 2008. The entire oughts were a decade of austerity for Germany, and the social upheaval changed everything. Former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did one good thing back then with his labour market reforms, massivelly cutting down welfare costs for a while, but it also spelt the end of his SPD as a catch-all party.

The Left was founded as a protest party and alternative to SPD, the old political duopoly crumbled, and all which Germany's so-called leaders have ever done since is chasing shadows, trying to create a semblance of the old system being still viable. They're not busy governing the country, they're busy herding their voters like cattle.

Schroeder moved his SPD to the right in a bid to replace voters which he'd lost on the left.

This created the impression that social democracy – historically the underdog in democratic Germany – had become mainstream.

As a consequence, Angela Merkel began to ditch CDU's right-wing positions and lurched to the left in order to challenge him over these voters. It worked for a time, but also acted as a stimulant to the extreme right. And look where we are now.
 
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I guess the ones suffering are also the ones having made those bad decisions. Times change. I don't get the doom talk it was perfectly forseeable. Now we have to go through this transformation nothing is forever.

Now those that selected China and Russia as the future as we say in Germany: "Heul leise" cry about it

BASF connected themselves to Russian gas.

VW putting all eggs in the China basket

German companies naively giving all secrets to their Chinese "partners".

Indiscriminate selling of know how through company acquisitions (KUKA)

etc etc

Anyway the chart illustrates a trend and not -26 % industrial production.

The last 2 months German manufacturers got more orders.

(Cover in the article linked is a new fleet tanker for the German Navy in the Neptun shipyard.)

 
Germany will re-introduce border checks on Monday, virtually abolishing the Schengen Zone.
Two-thirds of Germans support this policy and the reason is a massive inflow of illegal immigrants from #sh1tholeCountries plus the problems they have created..


To sum it up, the Germans try to fight the problem created by themselves when die Mitti opened the floodgates.
It's like announcing that you have a free party for 1000 people and expecting that just 1000 people will show up.

Recently, they started back-pedaling after AfD and BSW got a lot of votes in Thuringha and Saxonia plus a few Third-Wolders attacked German people with sharp objects.
 
Why do you believe this will improve under Labour if they have been trying to attract immigrants' votes for years?
Their pro-immigration stance was visible during the last protests.

Everybody with a bit of a brain knows that Labour used to be a party of the working people, while it's a party of the work-shy and immigrants right now. Apart from that, they look for voters among Islamists. It turns me off instantly.
Like the socialist party in Portugal promoting immigration at all costs. Their original base of support is getting older and older and soon they will be dead, so they need a "refresh"

I assume this to be a trend with all so called "socialist" parties in Europe
 
Germany will re-introduce border checks on Monday, virtually abolishing the Schengen Zone.
Two-thirds of Germans support this policy and the reason is a massive inflow of illegal immigrants from #sh1tholeCountries plus the problems they have created..


To sum it up, the Germans try to fight the problem created by themselves when die Mitti opened the floodgates.
It's like announcing that you have a free party for 1000 people and expecting that just 1000 people will show up.

Recently, they started back-pedaling after AfD and BSW got a lot of votes in Thuringha and Saxonia plus a few Third-Wolders attacked German people with sharp objects.
Pretty sure the only reason for tighten borders was the rising of AfD and BSW
 
Germany will re-introduce border checks on Monday, virtually abolishing the Schengen Zone.
From what I heard the German police say it's aimed at specific targets that will be stopped, dodgy looking vehicles, people on watch lists, license plates that are tagged in the system etc.

Basically an intensified way of how the police all over Europe already works.

Or as the usual suspects will cry: ETHNIC PROFIHIHIHIHILIIIIIIIIING!!!! 😭
 

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