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Posted on 07/17/2025 7:26:01 AM PDT by MtnClimber
With everything happening in the world, I've been neglecting to post on a lot of what's been happening in Germany.
Right now, there are a number of moving parts coming together that are rather ominous for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party's future.
One thing that isn't gloomy at all is their continued growth in popularity. Alice Weidel's 'hard-right' group, as it's often derided, has done nothing in the face of Chancellor and Christian Democrat head Friedrich Merz's continued bumblings but gain followers. This has come at the expense of the traditional coalition partners of the past few decades.
AfD closes in on conservatives as far right gains in new poll
Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has narrowed the gap with the conservative CDU/CSU bloc, according to a new YouGov poll.
The AfD gained two points since last month to hit 25% support, while the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, slipped one point to 27%.
If an election were held this Sunday, the poll showed the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) stuck at 14%. The environmentalist Greens dipped to 11%, down one point, while the socialist Left Party rose two points to 10%.
This has created a certain amount of angst and resentment among a group who are used to being players in German government coalitions regardless of their actual Bundestag numbers, while only occasionally swapping out the party of the chancellor. The Greens have enjoyed outsized influence over German policy because their participation is required to form a government, as no one ever has an outright majority. In current times, when one factors in the perceived, almost dogmatic insistence on maintaining the so-called cordon sanitaire to deny AfD their rightful participation in a functioning government, deals made with parties of minor representation give them clout that their numbers do not reflect.
It's easy to get used to being a prince.
In the Social Democrats' (SPD) case, by the time their leader, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in concert with the Green Party's lunatic fringe, was done leading the country down the primrose path of a forced and onerous Green transition, deindustrialization had begun to sweep the country along with a massive immigration wave. SPD's stock has now fallen so far that it barely blips above 10% alongside the Greens.
But they are still agitating as if they were running the show, and one of their biggest moves has been aimed at cutting the legs out from under the ascendant AfD. Not through winning elections, but by having them banned as a legal party.
Their attempts in the Bundestag failed earlier this year to have it done through legislative means, so they are attacking on a new front. The German parliament is who gets to elect judges to the German Constitutional Court when vacancies come up, and this year there are three openings to be filled.
The SPD is moving Heaven and Earth to put two firmly anti-AfD people on the bench, which is very difficult in a fractured legislature for a vote requiring a two-thirds approval.
...Anyway, one of the things the Bundestag has to do, is periodically elect new justices to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. These justices wear pseudohistorical red robes designed to recall the Prussian judiciary and they decide on matters of constitutional importance.
The time has come to appoint three new justices to this court, and for the present government this is an incredibly delicate matter. This is because these elections require a two-thirds supermajority of the Bundestag, and two-thirds of the Bundestag are very hard to achieve with all of the firewalling going on. On the one hand, the CDU and CSU have a firewall against Die Linke, or the crazy Left Party; on the other hand and as stated above they have a firewall against the AfD. Because the AfD and Die Linke together command a bit more than one-third of the Bundestag seats, there is strictly speaking no way for the Union parties to elect anybody to the Federal Constitutional Court without violating some firewall or other.
As blogger eugyppius says, the smartest thing to do would have been to nominate the most boring, middle-of-the-road jurist possible that most everyone could agree on, which is what the CDU side did. SPD, though, wants blood.
...The SPD, by contrast, did not feel any need to stay boring. They nominated two hyphenated crazy women named Ann-Katrin Kaufhold and Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf.
The one is not only anti-AfD, she is an abortion advocate up to the moment of birth, where Merz's CDU has always been firmly pro-life.
In the brouhaha over the wild candidates, the chancellor was asked the gotcha question:
...On Wednesday in the Bundestag, Beatrix von Storch of the AfD had an opportunity to put a question to Chancellor Merz, and she pressed the issue of Brosius-Gersdorf’s candidacy:
I ask you: can you in good conscience vote for Ms Brosius-Gersdorf, who does not believe that human dignity applies to people who have not yet been born? Ms Brosius-Gersdorf has said that a nine-month-old foetus has no human dignity two minutes before birth. Can you in good conscience vote for this woman, knowing that she will probably soon vote to abolish Section 218 [i.e., our abortion criminalising statute]?
...With a look of triumph and after some prefatory AfD bashing, he said: “My simple answer to your question here is: Yes.” He looked to the CDU benches, feeling that he had properly owned that obnoxious AfD woman. Instead there was nothing but stunned silence, then a smattering of pro forma claps. Merz had implicitly endorsed von Storch’s characterisation of Brosius-Gersdorf as a rabidly pro-abortion candidate and thrown his support behind her.
(For the record, abortion is still ILLEGAL in Germany.)
The entire vote blew up in the face of German Catholic bishops going on a public rampage, CDU members telling the press they could not support such a woman, and the SPD and Greens howling about misogyny.
They're going to try again because that's how determined the Left is, and they have an enormous amount of political heft to lose if they cannot pull this off.
...This matters because Brosius-Gersdorf and Kaufhold have both argued in favour of ban proceedings against Alternative für Deutschland. What is more, both candidates would be appointed to the second senate of the Constitutional Court, which is the division responsible for banning political parties. And as if that were not enough, the SPD nominated both candidates in the wake of their party congress, where SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil said that banning the AfD was his party’s “historical duty.” Many have therefore concluded that the SPD are trying to stack the court in advance of an application to prohibit Germany's second-strongest political party, banish all of its elected politicians and seize all of its assets.
Things are sliding so far out of whack in the country that it soon could be irretrievable.
...Keep in mind that this is not about the AfD, but about imperatives within the left itself. No amount of moderation, polite messaging or triangulation on the part of the AfD can get the left to stop or pursue other goals. Unless some exogenous force introduces a new unifying obsession for the left parties and their activists, they will never stop gnawing on this particular chew toy.
Practically, this probably means that the AfD has an expiration date. If they can’t get into government at the federal level and if nothing else changes, they will find themselves facing ban proceedings before a court stacked with leftists who hate them in the next 10 or 15 years. The federal elections in 2029 seem like the last opportunity to normalise the AfD before this final escalation.
........................SNIP
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How is it that they call AfD “far right”, but no one calls the left “communists” or “fascists”?
Democracy is too important to be left in the hands of the voters.
Correct name is German National Socialist Party.
Eventually the German Deep State will place an agent at an AfD rally. That agent will do a Hitler salute.
Then, poof! The AfD is banned.
Call em “lil HOs”. As in Ho Chi Min. Or ‘Karls’.
The AfD is going nowhere. This will only draw more supporters.
This is a problem in (((ALL Western))) so-called democracies, at least the big ones with a massive intel apparatus like the US, UK, Germany and France.
We make fun of the Russians, but don’t realize we have the same exact things happening here.
We have created a monstrous security apparatus.
We have a near police state (sorry for the liberal cliche term, but appropriate), we have rebuilt our intel services to a size larger than in the Cold War and oriented them inward (Patriot Act), and created a government where there is little transparency (everything is behind a wall of secrecy).
Politicians will be politicians. They will use any tool to their disposal to win an election, to give their party an advantage.
You can rationalize damn near anything (using these tools on an opponent). The human mind literally can rationalize throwing 6.5 million people in gas chambers and doing the most horrific scientific experiments on them. And if you think that is a German unique problem, think again, they copied much of what they did from us and our Eugenics programs when the Nazi’s seized power. We were far ahead of them and the German Wiemar Republic didn’t have any of that.
Do you really think when you have such power, politicians are not going to use these to their advantage?
These powers are precious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz-8CSa9xj8
Germany is going full fascist. Never go full fascist.
There will be a ban.
There will be protests.
The muslims will take advantage.
Germany will add further totalitarian restrictions 9n n9nmuslims.
The muslims will take over.
Sounds like the Social Democrats have learned from the master: Adolph Hitler banned opposition parties including the Social Democrats.
My understanding is that abortion IS LEGAL in Germany, but only for a specified time? I don’t recall the time. I think it’s roughly first trimester ?
Angela Merkel the Obama of Germany really screwed up Germany up ,LOL
They don’t own the microphone like the Marxists do.
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