Hamburg election: Greens make major gains, AfD support falls

euronews.com ^ | February 23, 2020 | Alice Tidey

[Berlin_Freeper]

The Green party surged in Hamburg state election on Sunday to claim the second place while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could lose all their seats.

[dp0622]

An attack that killed NINE and it wasn’t reported here AT ALL???

Or did I miss it?

wow.

Usually FR is pretty on top of big news so maybe I was away that day.

[dfwgator]

I’ve always said, as bad as Merkel may be, she’s about the best you’re going to get in Germany, the alternatives are even worse.

[dfwgator]

Must be all those St. Pauli fans.

[Mark17]

Wow. I didn’t know Americans were allowed into East Berlin

Yes we were. It was part of SOFA, though we had to be in uniform. I proudly wore my US Air Force dress blues in East Berlin. The Russians were allowed to come west too, in uniform. Once I was in the Army PX in Frankfurt. From a distance, I saw two guys in red trimmed uniforms. I asked the employees, who said they were Russian soldiers, who were allowed in our PX. As they got closer, I was hit with an invisible wall of utter stench. These Russians had the worst BO I ever had the misfortune of smelling. It was utterly awful. 👎 They were smiling at everyone, like, yeah, we are in your PX, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

[dfwgator]

Hamburg has pretty much always been the most Left of German cities.

[dp0622]

Yuck

[pepsionice]

This is another part to the story as well...it’s typically been a SPD-win state, all the way up to the 2004, and then went through a 10-year period of CDU (right-of-center governments).

A lot of this goes back 700 years to the Hanseatic League period, and the entire northern coast area being extremely dedicated to commerce, progressive politics, and rights. As much as one can say that Bavaria has a totally different view of things than the rest of Germany....you might be able to say the same of Hamburg.

[Mark17]

If we drove to Berlin, we had to go through checkpoint Alpha, at Helmstedt. It was there that the Russian soldiers tried to sell us their stuff. The most popular stuff was the Soviet Army fur hats, and Soviet Army belt buckles. What a bunch of capitalists. 😁 Then, we drove 110 miles across a barren, desolate landscape, more commonly called East Germany, to Checkpoint Bravo. The US Army guys at Checkpoint Bravo, asked us if the Russians tried to sell us anything, and didn’t believe us when we said no. 😁 Then, we went through Checkpoint Charlie, into East Berlin. The East German customs guards were not allowed to check us out, and if they got a little too big for their britches, we would tell them we wanted to see a Soviet official immediately. They didn’t want any Russian officers being called. The East Germans really liked seeing American women in Air Force uniforms too.

[drop 50 and fire for effect]

I did a TDY trip to Berlin in Jan-Feb ‘86. We took an East Berlin tour in Class A uniform. We were briefed beforehand to keep conversations to a minimum necessary for a transaction. The Stasi was being rough on any East Berliners who talked to Americans, so we were told to stay in pairs, be polite, but brief. The Army didn’t want us to inadvertently get someone beaten up.

While we wandered around the shopping ares we stopped at, the Stasi made no effort to hide themselves and openly shadowed each pair. It was a surreal trip.

[Mark17]

I was actually stationed in Wiesbaden (Mainz-Kastel) 30 seconds walking distance from the huge shopping center, the stereo club, the sports club, where I bought numerous pairs of skis. I went TDY to Tempelhof CA, but not to control aircraft, but to help Tempelhof with their instrument flight procedures. I was in their radar facility the whole time I was there. You can DuckDuckGo the radar and actually see real pictures of the radar scopes, with the 3 corridors going in and out of Berlin. The corridors were pretty narrow, so they used mostly altitude separation, cuz traffic was always going in opposite directions, in and out of Berlin. They called it Berlin Center, but it was all USAF enlisted guys, at Tempelhof, who were the controllers, and mostly they worked traffic into Tegel. Rarely did Tempelhof itself, get any traffic. Previously, the pilots could fib when reporting their altitudes, until we got height finding radar. After that, we knew exactly what their altitude was. 😁 No more fibbing. We could see it on the screen. I especially liked narrow band radar. It was beautiful. 👍

[Bonemaker]

“In Bavaria, they would have laughed you out of the bar for that suggestion.”

Bavaria is sort of the Texas of Germany and should secede from the lunacy.