“The big negative with the AfD is that beyond immigration and security....they don’t have other positions.”
How difficult will it be to come up with an entire agenda? Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t take all the top issues and simply state a position. Of course, this might also cost them votes as they apparently took votes from the two top parties as the other smaller parties got larger votes as well. Do we know if the voter turnout was higher than normal?
So, is somebody who voted AfD in favor of, say pension “reform?” What about leaving the EU? It’s hard (for me) to say what other platform positions will hurt them.
Voter turn-out was 75-percent...up around 3.5-percent over 2013.
Personally, I think most people went to the AfD purely on a frustration vote with the other five parties and having other things on the platform would have meant a challenge for some.
But there’s other odd factor....for over forty years...alternating between tax-reform and pension-reform every four years...the parties kept people engaged but there really wasn’t any true reform. If you were a pensioner...you got 12-Euro more a month, and that didn’t mean much of anything. If you were single and got some tax reform....it meant you 18-Euro more a month, which is mostly nothing to get all happy about.
At some point, when the AfD guy was challenged last night by the media guy on a forum...the response was that Merkel and company had two years to fix what they did in 2015...doing mostly nothing....here we are now, with more promises from Merkel and company to continue doing nothing. We just took an opposing view.
I would sit back and view this coalition discussion. I have my doubts that the national Greens can come to some agreement involving the three other partners. It’s an obvious thing...the national Greens are a totally different creature than the state-by-state Greens. We may come to early November and find no coalition possible, and another election slated for mid-January. It would be awful weird, but that public forum business from last night really showcased six parties with obvious hostile feelings left over from the election.