Quotulatiousness

October 17, 2024

Democratic Germany considers banning 2nd-largest political party “to save democracy” of course

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s totally a normal democratic urge to try to outlaw the second-largest political party in Germany and not in the least bit “authoritarian”, right?

This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.

Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD are accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.

A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talkshow tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would’ve long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.

Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by political editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue“. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.

Let’s read it together.

Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.

    The problem … is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.

What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans“, the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.

September 30, 2024

Saving German democracy seems to require not following the law for some reason

Filed under: Germany, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

[Update below] I’m sure that Germany is being well-served by their politicians who only seem to want to obey the law when it suits them. I mean, that’s how you save democracy, right? By ignoring democratic laws for a “higher good” every now and again?

Jürgen Treutler, the supergenius fascist who discovered that all you need to do to establish fascism is follow all democratic laws and procedures rigorously and to the letter.

They never tire of telling us that we live in a democracy.

This means that that dreaded mass known as “the people” are permitted – with however much groaning and reluctance – to present themselves every four years to choose their representatives. These representatives then betake themselves to the parliament, where they form some manner of government, which proceeds to rule us in highly democratic ways. This is is literally the best thing ever, except for the fact that “the people”, in their profound stupidity, cannot always be relied upon to vote for the right parties. Sometimes they vote for the wrong ones, and in these cases democratic solutions must be found to rein in the rabble’s undemocratic exercise of democracy.

The people of Thüringen have proven themselves particularly inconvenient to democracy, in that they have exercised their democratic rights to vote overwhelmingly for the evil, fascist and antidemocratic party known as Alternative für Deutschland. What makes the AfD so evil and fascist is never quite explained, but we hear all the time that they are very bad so the point must be beyond question. The people of Thüringen transgressed against democracy so powerfully, that they gave the AfD 32 seats of their 88-seat state parliament – far more than they granted to any of the upstanding, democratic parties. These parties include such paragons of democratic virtue as Die Linke (the Left Party), which somehow manages to be both officially democratic and also the direct successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party (they got a mere 12 seats); the Linke-offshoot party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wageknecht (they got 15 seats); the Christian Democrats (they got 23 seats); and the Social Democrats (they got 6 seats, lol).

Now, a naive person might think that the AfD, being the party most favoured by the people of Thüringen, should enjoy certain parliamentary prerogatives. Existing procedures, for example, grant the strongest party the right to propose candidates for the office of parliamentary president. The president is the person who presides over the meetings of the parliament; he is like a glorified committee chair and his powers are not all that great. The very idea that the AfD might have the right to suggest their own candidates for president, however, strikes enormous fear into the hearts of the “democratic” parties, who are determined to save Thuringian democracy by all the antidemocratic means at their disposal. If necessary, we must destroy democracy itself, to save the Thuringian parliament from the spectre of a democratically elected AfD president.

This brings us to the absolute unprecedented clownshow that unfolded yesterday at the Thuringian parliament in Erfurt. It was set to be a day of boring, routine procedure, when the newly elected parliament would constitute itself and elect a president. Thüringen is anomalous, in that this state – alone of all the federal states of Germany – has a specific law mandating adherence to parliamentary procedures. New parliaments cannot just change these procedures on the fly; they have to be officially constituted as a legislative body first. These legally mandated procedures require that an acting “senior president” preside over the first meeting of the new parliament. This senior president is simply the oldest member of the dominant party – in this case an affable rotund AfD politician named Jürgen Treutler.

Update: eugyppius updates the state of play in Thuringia after the relevant court rules that the law can be set aside in this case:

In not-so-good news (but as I predicted), the state constitutional court in Thüringen ruled in favour of the CDU last Friday. The other parties were able to change the procedural rules in the Thuringian parliament and exclude the AfD not only from the office of president, but also from the entire executive committee of the Landtag. The “democratic” parties have also altered procedural rules to reduce AfD representation on parliamentary committees, effectively preventing the strongest party in the Landtag from exercising their blocking minority there.

They really are determined to destroy the democracy to save it.

September 23, 2024

Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel wants to help you keep your kids from the perils of right-wing ideology

Filed under: Education, Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

eugyppius on the help Berlin’s leading daily newspaper is offering to their readers whose kids are hearing the siren call of non-progressive politics:

This obviously charming, cheerful and not at all withered or overwrought woman is named Eva Prausner. She is a social worker, and she directs something called the “Project for Strengthening Parents“, which provides “Training, networking, and counselling in the area of family and right-wing extremism”. This means that she runs around telling parents what to do when they suspect their children are succumbing to political wrong-think. And this in turn makes Frau Prausner the woman of the hour, for never before in the history of the Federal Republic have so many undemocratic children bloomed under the noses of so many upstanding democratic parents.

It is very hard to understand how this happened. The leftists and the Greens, after all, have been doing the Lord’s work teaching leftism and Greenism in schools for decades now, but despite their valiant efforts we are rapidly losing our youth to malign antidemocratic forces. It can’t be that elevating leftoid lunacy into an establishment ideology has backfired, transforming the once cool, counter-cultural left into a political movement for middle-aged scolds and schoolmarms – the kind of thing from which teenagers flee in terror. No, nothing could be less plausible. The real reason for the pandemic of right-wing children must simply be that we haven’t indoctrinated them enough. If parents will not do their part and bring indoctrination also to the home, our democracy will collapse and it will be 1933 all over again, just like it was 1933 all over again two weeks ago after the elections in Thüringen and Saxony.

For these reasons, Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, interviewed Prausner on her advice for parents who find themselves forced to deal with their evil, right-leaning spawn. The product is a prescient write-up for the ages bearing the headline “Help, my child is turning right-wing! Eight tips for democratic parents with undemocratic children“.

    The rightward shift in East Germany is a shift above all among the youngest, as the elections in Saxony and Thüringen have shown. One in three young people there voted for the far right. In Thüringen, as many as 38% of 18- to 34-year-olds cast their ballot for the AfD – more than in any other age group. Many a parent who values living in a democracy will have wondered: “What have we done wrong?”

    In Brandenburg, too, it is becoming clear that even the youngest are now leaning towards the right. In the under-16 vote a week before the state election, the AfD came out on top with around 30% … In the state elections on 22 September, the AfD could become the strongest force, thanks in part to young first-time voters.

    Do parents still have any influence over their AfD-voting children?

Alas, Prausner is not very certain that they do, but she believes that democratic parents “should at least try” to rescue their children from the grave heresy of voting for the wrong political parties. Children in Brandenburg are particularly endangered, because Brandenburg is largely rural, and Prausner has discovered that the countryside is absolutely dripping with “condensed prejudicial attitudes”. There is so much racial prejudice in the Brandenburg air that it is collecting on cool surfaces, like windows and beer glasses, that is how bad things are there. Also all children everywhere are in danger because the internet is a powerful right-wing force that helps bad organisations like the AfD pump their fascist mind virus directly into millions of young yet-forming cerebral cortices.

September 19, 2024

German opinions are changing on the migration question

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On of our key European commentators is back from a brief internet vacation and reports on recent changes in official German views on mass immigration:

There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.

For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.

Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.

The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises they are up against the limits of their ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift, to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise their understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.

In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore tabu thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.

Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever “the extreme right” is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.

September 9, 2024

Update your Overton Window – “[A]nyone to the immediate right of 2024 liberal democracy is a fascist”

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Niccolo Soldo’s weekly commentary, a few insights into European “mainstream” political views on extreme right-wing crypto-fascists like … everyone who doesn’t support far left positions:

If you think that US media is bad, you should check out just how awful their German colleagues are. Their media is filled to the brim with daily hysteria about the Russians, Nazis, fascists, and so on. Every single day is a struggle to survive against these existential threats.

To the mainstream German media, a conservative Christian Democrat (the kind that ruled much of Western Europe during the Cold War) like Viktor Orban is a fascist in disguise. To the mainstream German media, a statist centrist like Vladimir Putin is Hitler without the disguise. A 90s Clinton Liberal like Donald Trump is both.

Thankfully, Der Spiegel reached out to writers and researchers who specialize in fascism to tell us that all of the above are fascists, and some are Nazis too:

    The reversion to fascism is a deep-seated fear of modern democratic societies. Yet while it long seemed rather unlikely and unimaginable, it has now begun to look like a serious threat. Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions in Russia. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India. The election victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Marine Le Pen’s strategy of normalizing right-wing extremism in France. Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina. Viktor Orbán’s autocratic domination of Hungary. The comebacks of the far-right FPÖ party in Austria and of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Germany’s AfD. Nayib Bukele’s autocratic regime in El Salvador, which is largely under the radar despite being astoundingly single-minded, even using the threat of armed violence to push laws through parliament. Then there is the possibility of a second Trump administration, with fears that he could go even farther in a second term than he did during his first. And the attacks on migrant hostels in Britain. The neo-Nazi demonstration in Bautzen. The pandemic. The war in Ukraine. The inflation.

Meloni, Modi, Milei, Wilders, Bukele … all are suspected of crypto-fascism here.

Trump? “Fascist”, says neo-conservative Robert Kagan:

    In May 2016, Donald Trump emerged as the last Republican standing following the primaries, and the world was still a bit perplexed and rather concerned when the historian Robert Kagan published an article in the Washington Post under the headline “This is how fascism comes to America.”

    The piece was one of the first in the U.S. to articulate concerns that Trump is a fascist. It received significant attention around the world and DER SPIEGEL published the article as well. It was an attention-grabbing moment: What if Kagan is right? Indeed, it isn’t inaccurate to say that Kagan reignited the fascism debate with his essay. Interestingly, it was the same Robert Kagan who had spent years as an influential member of the Republican Party and was seen as one of the thought leaders for the neocons during the administration of George W. Bush.

    The article has aged well. Its characterization of Trump as a “strongman”. Its description of his deft use of fear, hatred and anger. “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes,” Kagan wrote, “but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party – out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear – falling into line behind him.”

Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, says that fascism has already come to America:

    Six years ago, Stanley published a book in the U.S. called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. The German translation only appeared two months ago, a source of annoyance for Stanley. He also has German citizenship and says that he loves the country despite everything.

    So how does fascism work? Modern-day fascism, Stanley writes, is a cult of the leader in which that leader promises rebirth to a disgraced country. Disgraced because immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals and women have taken over the media, the schools and cultural institutions. Fascist regimes, Stanley argues, begin as social and political movements and parties – and they tend to be elected rather than overthrowing existing governments.

Timothy Snyder says that both Trump AND Putin are fascists:

    Timothy Snyder speaks thoughtfully and quietly, but with plenty of confidence. Putin is a fascist. Trump is a fascist. The difference: One holds power. The other does not. Not yet.

    “The problem with fascism,” Snyder says, “is that it’s not a presence in the way we want it to be. We want political doctrines to have clear definitions. We don’t want them to be paradoxical or dialectical.” Still, he says, fascism is an important category when it comes to understanding both history and the present, because it makes differences visible.

Austrian Political Scientist Natascha Strobl says that fascists are now everywhere:

    But this kind of violence can be seen everywhere, says the Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl. It merely manifests itself differently than it did in the 1920s, when, early on in the fascist movement in northern Italy, gangs of thugs were going from village to village attacking farmer organizations and the offices of the socialist party, killing people and burning homes to the ground. Today, says Strobl, violence is primarily limited to the internet. “And it is,” says Strobl, “just as real. The people who perpetrate it believe they are involved in a global culture war, a struggle that knows no boundaries. An ideological civil war against all kinds of chimeras, such as ‘cultural Marxism’ or the ‘Great Replacement’.”

For Bulgarian think-tanker Ivan Krastev, AfD is a fascist organization:

    It is all rather perplexing. Back in Berlin, Ivan Krastev makes one of his Krastevian jokes. An American judge, he relates, once said that he may not be able to define pornography, “but I know it when I see it”. The reverse is true with fascism, says Krastev: It is simple to define, but difficult to recognize when you see it.

    The “F-word”. F as in fascism or F as in “Fuck you”. It is permissible, as a court in Meiningen ruled, to refer to Höcke as a fascist. The question remains, though, what doing so actually achieves.

So there you have it: anyone to the immediate right of 2024 liberal democracy is a fascist.

September 1, 2024

The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany

Filed under: Business, Food, Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:

In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.

Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …

… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.

That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:

    Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?

    If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”

    Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.

    And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.

    So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.

For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:

There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.

April 30, 2024

The CDU’s “five-point plan to protect German democracy from … the free and open internet”

Filed under: Germany, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

German mainstream politicians are struggling to keep extreme right populist anti-democratic voices from being heard by innocent and trusting German voters, so the leader of the CDU in Thuringia has a master plan:

The duel between our leading Thuringian politicians was all but unwatchable, as indeed almost all political debates turn out to be. While [AfD leader Björn] Höcke could’ve acquitted himself better, [CDU leader Mario] Voigt’s performance was flat, uninspired and profoundly banal. Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect; he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings. After the event, the CDU took to the press to declare victory, but polls showed that viewers found Höcke on balance more persuasive, which is of course the real reason that everybody told Voigt to avoid the confrontation. Voigt is intensely democratic and therefore extremely right about everything, but somehow – and this is very awkward to discuss – his being eminently righteous and correct in all things does not manifest in an ability to defeat the very wrong and evil arguments of his opponents. It’s very weird how that works, perhaps somebody should look into it.

Stung by this failure, Voigt has set off to find other means of defending democracy. This week, in the Thüringen state parliament, he gave an amazing speech outlining a five-point plan to protect German democracy from that other great menace, the free and open internet:

    So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:

    Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.

    There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.

    Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.

    We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.

    And we also have to improve media skills.

For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.

Because Voigt’s regulatory regime would entirely abolish online “freedom of expression”, it is unclear how banning bots and pseudonymity could ever defend it. Generally speaking, for a thing to be defended, it must first exist. Equally curious is Voigt’s belief that any “diversity of opinion” will survive his social media license scheme to benefit from the regulation of social media algorithms.

April 24, 2024

Alternative für Deutschland is gifted a blueprint for governing by their entrenched opponents

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Was it Napoleon who said to never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake? If so, the German populist Alternative für Deutschland leaders must be congratulated for not interrupting the latest mistake by the statists they want to replace:

Every day I encounter yet another hamfisted pseudoacademic propaganda operation eagerly churning out oceans of text to shore up the German political establishment. The idea seems to be that with just enough whitepapers, bursting with just enough words, the situation might still be saved.

There are just so many of these outfits, they grow like weeds in the fertile soil of government funding. This Sunday, it has been my dubious pleasure to stumble across the “academic and journalistic open access forum of debate on topical events and developments in constitutional law and politics” billing itself as the Verfassungsblog (the “Constitution Blog”). This factory of tedious prose and political special pleading that nobody will ever read is not just the eccentric side project of a very socially concerned lawyer named Maximilian Steinbeis, oh no. It is funded by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (and therefore, indirectly, by the German taxpayer) and also by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. We would do well to take these people seriously, in other words, and you should keep that in mind, because things are about to get very ridiculous.

Last year, our state-funded Verfassungbloggers realised that elections were approaching in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg. This worried them terribly, because Alternative für Deutschland dominates polling in all three states. They feared that this “authoritarian populist party” might seize control of one or more state governments, just as other authoritarian populist parties have seized control “in Poland and Hungary, in Florida and Texas”. These parties are very bad, because they “use … power … so that they no longer have to relinquish it”. They “manipulate electoral law” and “stifle opposition” and “pack the administration and judiciary with their own people”. As if that were not bad enough, they also “make the media, scientific and cultural institutions dependent on their will”. Of course, the Federal Republic is presently ruled by a party cartel system that is already doing all of that, but the difference is that none of the parties involved are “authoritarian” or “populist”. The priests of democracy get to do whatever they want, and whatever they do is by definition democratic.

In this spirit, our Verfassungsbloggers launched the “Thüringen Project”. Their aim is to identify how the forces for humanitarian pluralism might manipulate the law, stifle the opposition and pack the administration and judiciary in even more extreme ways than have yet been imagined, all to subvert the will of east German voters and more effectively blunt the power of the AfD when they become the strongest party in the Thuringian Landtag.

[…]

All of this iterative looping has culminated in an overproduced, 36-page .pdf file bearing the characteristically cumbersome title “Strengthening the resilience of the rule of law in Thüringen: Action recommendations from the scenario analysis of the Thüringen Project“. No syllable can be spared in our campaign to defend democracy. In the pages of this plan, they finally define what “authoritarian populist parties” are. These are parties that “use the narrative of a natural, ‘true’ people in opposition to ‘corrupt elites’, for the purpose of delegitimising pluralistic democracy and establishing an authoritarian regime”. The AfD are of course “a clear example of such a party”. The more panicked all of these people get, the closer they come to saying plainly what they’re really afraid of, namely the growing hostility of native Germans to an increasingly isolated political elite, which plainly does not care much about “authoritarianism” (they are responsible for plenty of that themselves) as much as they are terrified of losing their hold on power.

April 20, 2024

How much of your language do you have to destroy to avoid the taint of historical fascist usage?

Filed under: Germany, History, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For understandable reasons, German governments since the end of World War 2 have been twitchy about any symbols, songs, words and phrases that were used by Hitler’s various fascist organizations … to the point of making many things illegal. eugyppius outlines one particular case where the use of a simple German phrase by an AfD politician has landed him in court, facing a possible three-year prison sentence even though he denies that he knew the phrase had such connotations:

Today, the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, appeared before the district court in Halle for the first day of his long-awaited speech trial. He stands accused of having used a forbidden Nazi slogan favoured by the Sturmabteilung at a political rally in Merseburg on 29 May 2021. Höcke pleads that he used the three-word phrase in a moment of spontaneous elaboration at the end of his speech, without knowing its National Socialist associations. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t quote the phrase here, even in translation, but I’ll provide it in context below; it begins with the words “Everything for” (“Alles für“) and concludes with the name of the Federal Republic. As slogans go, it is so seemingly banal that before the trial many Germans would have been surprised to know it had any Nazi associations at all.

For the moment, not much has happened. Höcke’s lawyers filed a variety of requests, among them that the Federal Constitutional Court answer a question surrounding the court’s jurisdiction. In consequence, it’s unclear whether the trial will continue as scheduled next week or whether it will have to be substantially delayed. The state prosecutor’s position is that Höcke’s background as a history teacher makes his claims of ignorance implausible. The prosecutors’ office have also added an additional charge for Höcke’s defiance at a rally in Gera last December, where he shouted the first two words of the slogan at the crowd, and invited them to supply the last one. I fear that this was a grave mistake, because as we will see, the original case against Höcke is laughably weak.

If found guilty, Höcke could be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. It is also conceivable that his right to vote and run for office could be suspended. Whatever you think of Höcke or his politics, the political dimensions of this trial are undeniable, as it is occurring mere months ahead of the Thuringian state elections, and as Alternative für Deutschland commands a solid plurality of polling numbers in that state.

[…]

That Höcke deliberately used the SA slogan as a subtle enticement to the extreme right is more than doubtful; that he also did so in hopes that he would be prosecuted and profit politically from his victimisation is so ridiculous, I can’t imagine that even Hillje really believes this. This obnoxious thesis nevertheless recurs whenever the German press report on the harassment of AfD politicians; it is somehow their fault, because they are held to benefit from it.

Der Spiegel, always a source of unintentional amusement, ran a headline today mocking Höcke as a “history teacher with no knowledge of history“. “He claims not to know it was an SA slogan”, they report, “but there are doubts about this”. Alas, the very same news magazine last September accidentally used the forbidden phrase to headline an approving article on Olaf Scholz’s proposed “Germany Pact”. They rapidly changed the headline, appending this brief and embarrassing correction to the bottom:

    An earlier version of the article was headed with a line that was used by the SA as a slogan. This was not intended by the author and editors and has now been changed.

February 19, 2024

The heirs of Walter Ulbricht

Filed under: Germany, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray linked to this fascinating — and depressing — report on the German government’s plans to crack down on “extreme” “right-wing” groups and individuals … to “protect our democracy”, of course:

After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Walter Ulbricht returned from exile in Moscow to become one of the founding politicians of the DDR. The new state, he said, “must look democratic, but we must have everything under control“. It has been 80 years since Ulbricht spoke those words, and while the DDR has faded away, their spirit lives on in the political establishment of the Federal Republic. Our present rulers are doing everything in their power to re-establish pseudodemocracy in the West. This is not a mere eugyppius exaggeration, and it is not sensationalism for internet clicks. It is what our politicians themselves are saying.

As in the DDR, we hear that these antidemocratic measures are necessary to protect us from the threat posed by the right. The truth is much more mundane: Germany has one of the oldest party systems in Europe. As has already happened in many other countries, this post-war establishment is coming apart. While our neighbours have endured the rise of new parties and political structures with some measure of equanimity, our cartel politicians in Germany are terrified of losing power, and they will use all the tools at their disposal to keep hold of it – up to and including the suspension of democracy itself.

Alternative für Deutschland find themselves in the targets of our nominally democratic priesthood not because they are extremely right-wing, or racist, or xenophobic or anything like that. Politically, they’re hardly different from the CDU of the 1980s. Their real crime is having achieved enough strength to threaten the establishment ecosystem. The stronger AfD become, the harder it will prove for the reigning parties to form anti-AfD coalitions. [my emphasis, NR] Some of these parties, like the FDP, seem destined to disappear entirely; others, like the SPD, fear a future of permanent irrelevance. The once-dominant centre-right CDU, meanwhile, will find itself unable to form workable governments with partners on the left, and thus without any excuse not to enact the mild nationalism that a clear majority of voters demand, and that is so deeply out of fashion with our globalist rulers.

This is the purpose of the unceasing, astroturfed agitation “against the right” that the establishment have visited upon Germany for over a month now. The protests have not worked to destroy support for the AfD, so now they are being repurposed as a license to take enforcement action against “right-wing extremism”. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) said at a press conference on Tuesday that the protests have given her both “encouragement” and a “mandate” to proceed against the right. “This really is a very positive signal,” she said, “because it is about defending our open society against its enemies. As a democracy on the defence, we must stand up to the extremists.”

Faeser spoke these words in the course of announcing a range of measures via which she hopes to combat “right-wing extremism”. These are also outlined in a 16-page Interior Ministry paper on “Resolutely Combating Right-Wing Extremism: Using the Instruments of Defensive Democracy“. Here, it is important to note that Faeser is among the most unpopular politicians in all of Germany. Last year she suffered a humiliating defeat in her effort to become Minister President of Hessen, and 60% of Germans view her unfavourably. That is powerful motivation to bring German democracy back under control. Her “package of measures” to combat “the right” are some of the most openly antidemocratic, dictatorial policies I have ever seen any Western politician articulate. In other nations these kinds of things are surely said behind closed doors, but in Germany they are printed in all the major papers. You can only imagine what these people contemplate in secret. [again, my emphasis. We already know that at least one Canadian government minister wanted to send the tanks in against the Freedom Convoy in 2022 – NR]

Faeser and her fellow political enforcers have such a wide-ranging, fluid understanding of what “right-wing extremism” constitutes, that the label can be deployed against basically anybody. The Interior Ministry paper claims that “The aim of right-wing extremists is to abolish liberal democracy and reshape our society according to their nationalist, racist and anti-pluralist ideas”. You might think, “well, that’s okay then, I’m a pluralist liberal,” but that would be as naive as thinking you were safe from the Stasi because you were not a fascist. The same paper proceeds to complain that “the extremist … New Right … aims to discuss topics and use terms that give their inhuman plans a harmless appearance”. Translated from democratese: “There are people out there who are not saying anything illegal but they have made themselves inconvenient anyway”. The president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, likewise spoke at the press conference of the tendency of “right-wing extremists” to “dress up and camouflage themselves”. They must “be unmasked and exposed … [as] enemies of our democracy”.

This construction of “right-wing extremism” as a cryptic, hidden quality that requires unveiling by the political police is unimaginably dangerous. You are never safe from a regime that thinks this way, because what you actually say, do or even believe doesn’t matter. You are guilty of “right-wing extremism” if Haldenwang’s office thinks you are. This flexibility is important, because the establishment are not actually interested in driving out zombie National Socialists. They want to neuter the political opposition, whatever its form or programme.

July 22, 2023

In European politics, “far right” doesn’t mean what Americans think it means

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Italy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The European Conservative, Rod Dreher tries to put the various “far right” European political parties into context for North American readers:

If you are an American who depends on the U.S. and other English-language media for news about continental European politics — and most Americans obviously do — then you might well be afraid that a wave of fascism is poised to sweep Europe.

The European Conservative, obviously, is a great source of news and information about Europe for our American readers — and I hope with this column to help American conservatives better understand what’s going on with the European Right — because there are very few venues for them to do so.

American and British news agencies are reporting that the “far-right” party VOX is likely to do well in this weekend’s Spanish elections. The “far-right” Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is surging in German opinion polls. It seems like just yesterday that the “far-right” party of Giorgia Meloni topped Italian elections. “Far-right” parties are key to governing coalitions in Finland and Sweden.

And, of course, the BBC website informs its readers to mind “the ultra-conservative, authoritarian-leaning governments in Poland and in Hungary”. Far-rightists to the fingertips, the lot, right?

Well, no. Not even close. American conservatives should understand that by U.S. standards, the “far-right” parties are basically center-right contemporary Republicans. The declining establishment conservative parties of the European continent are more or less Clinton-style Democrats. There do exist genuinely far-right parties in Europe, but they aren’t anywhere near government.

(Though in this spring’s Hungarian elections, the actually far-right party Jobbik, which considers Viktor Orban to be a squish, went into coalition with the left-wing parties. This caused the coalition prime ministerial candidate to boast moronically that his side was truly diverse, because it spanned the ideological spectrum from communist to fascist.)

When U.S. journalists describe these nationalist and populist parties as “far-right”, they intend to call up images of burly fascists marching down cobblestone streets in hobnail boots, shouting abuse at Jews and minorities. I can’t decide if they do this deliberately to mislead American readers into thinking Europe is two tics away from a gran mal Nazi seizure, or if the reporters themselves are so absorbed in the ideology of their class that they honestly cannot discern gradations of right-wing politics.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

September 13, 2019

The new German populists – Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sabine Beppler-Spahl discusses the rise of Alternative für Deutschland:

Germany is just two months away from commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But for many commentators, east and west Germany are more divided than ever. The success of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the recent state elections in Brandenburg and Saxony has fueled this concern. The AfD came second in both elections. In Brandenburg, it won 23.5 per cent of the vote, just 2.7 per cent below the ruling centre-left SPD. In Saxony, it won 27.5 per cent of the vote, 4.6 per cent behind the incumbent centre-right CDU. “When I, a Wessi [west German], leave Berlin … I see nothing but right-wingers … These are people whose sensitivities I don’t understand… Thirty years after the fall of the wall, there is still no unity”, said a writer for Der Spiegel.

Many in the east are just as keen as their western counterparts to distance themselves from AfD voters. The “most important message” from Saxony’s election result was that the “friendly Saxony” had won, said Michael Kretschmer, the state’s CDU minister president. As if reading from the same script, Brandenburg’s minister president, the SPD’s Dietmar Woidke, emphasised that “the face of Brandenburg would remain friendly”. Of course, “friendly” is a code word for mainstream or pro-establishment. But presenting the elections in these terms may have helped the governing parties to their narrow victories. Some analysts suggest that voters, who would otherwise have opted for the Greens or Die Linke (the Left Party), supported the ruling parties for fear of the AfD coming first.

The debate about the east-west divide is deeply anti-political. It focuses solely on the question of what is wrong with east German voters – and the roughly one million AfD voters in particular – rather than on what has gone wrong with German politics as a whole. As a result, there is a great deal of snobbery in the discussion. For Brigitte Fehrle, former editor of the left-liberal Berliner Zeitung, the AfD‘s success can be explained by a mixture of voters’ “disappointment” and their “unrealistic expectations about what is possible in politics”. Sociologist Cornelia Koppetsch, author of a bestselling book on right-wing populism, describes AfD voters as a “cross-section of globalisation’s losers”. This is despite research finding that people who voted for the AfD in 2017 don’t see themselves as “losers” of globalisation at all, and even rate their personal economic situation as above average. That AfD voters might simply hold different political values or views on climate policy, immigration and the family is rarely considered.

[…]

The established parties have ceded ground to the AfD by refusing to take it seriously. Instead of engaging AfD representatives in as many debates as possible, they have relied on trying to expose the party’s far-right connections. For instance, the AfD leader in Brandenburg has been accused of joining a Neo-Nazi demonstration in Greece in 2007. Though these accusations are not trivial by any means, they have only helped to strengthen the impression among AfD supporters that the established parties prefer to vilify the party morally, rather challenge it politically.

Ultimately, the desire for political change is not limited to east Germany. If the mainstream parties continue to be complacent, all voters will look elsewhere. On this front at least, the east and west might be closer than suspected.

May 26, 2014

Triumph of the Euro-skeptic parties

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

The Irish Times looks at the Euro election results which have seen big gains for several Euro-skeptic parties:

Among the victors was Ms Le Pen’s National Front party which topped the poll in France with a quarter of the vote, bypassing the conservative UMP party, and leaving François Hollande’s Socialist Party in third place. The party is now in line for 24 seats in Strasbourg.

UKIP was expected to top the poll in Britain, with exit polls last night predicting the party could win 31 per cent of the vote. “Up until now European integration has always seemed inevitable … I think that inevitability will end tonight,” UKIP leader Nigel Farage said last night in a live video link to the European Parliament in Brussels, describing the decision to allow former Soviet countries into the European Union as one of Europe’s “great errors.”

Greece’s main opposition party Syriza topped the polls there, while the far-right Golden Dawn party came third with between 8 and 10 per cent of the vote.

In Germany, support for Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) an anti-EU party formed barely two years ago, reach 6.5 per cent, with the party in the running for six seats.

In Austria, the far-right Freedom party was expected to win 20 per cent of votes, up from 13 per cent in 2009.

However, some extreme anti-EU parties in smaller countries did not poll as well as expected, with the far-right Vlaams Belang in Belgium losing support.

Of course, not all Euro-skeptic parties are the same. UKIP is somewhat nativist and has a vocal anti-immigrant wing. Vlaams Belang has a larger and more vocal anti-immigrant component, while the Greek Golden Dawn are as close to modern day Fascists as you’ll find anywhere; not a party you want to be sharing newspaper space with.

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