Go to any bigger Eastern European city and these places are thriving. There's basically no crime, you can get shitfaced beyond recognition and nothing will ever happen to you even if you are a woman.
As a middle class german you must see the decay in german cities with everything becoming too expensive, out of order and decaying in front of your eyes while you are being told you live in one of the richest places on Earth.
I am an experienced Muay Thai fighter and don't feel safe anymore. I live in Düsseldorf, used to be the most beautiful city in Germany, and seeing this city decay is so sad.
Western values will be eradicated in a few years. It's pure mathematics if you look at the birth rates. You have to be extremely naive to think different.
We will move out of the country next year and never look back.
I have a lot of Turkish and other first and second generation migrant friends. A majority will vote for AfD.
It’s indeed a sad development and one of the reasons I emigrated to Thailand.
The Netherlands was a lovely place when I was young, in the 80s - 90s, but the country has been going downhill fast in the past few decennia.
I think most people at this time still don’t realize their pensions will be gone, social security will provide less as time goes on and cities will become unsafer. And since people don’t realize this, they keep voting the status quo until it’s too late. I don’t think at this point there’s a way to go back.
My girlfriend asked me to arrange a Dutch passport for our daughter, but I haven’t bothered as of yet. I think Asia has a much brighter future ahead compared to Europe (mainly EU), so I doubt my daughter will need the passport to study abroad. She’ll be able to create a good life for herself here in Thailand or perhaps some other ASEAN country.
Politics in the modern age requires you to have different views on controversial matters to avoid being commoditised. If 10 parties share the same view on some issue, they will be compared on competence, and no politician wants that. It is much easier to capture a subset of votes by taking a specific position, however good or bad it is, as long as you get a monopoly in that segment.
On New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees *as they were occurring* on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I did not imagine that those subreddits, as well as mass media in general, were collectively suppressing reports of the attacks until the sheer volume made it impossible to continue to do so.
(Cue "/pol/ was right" couplet)
>Western values will be eradicated in a few years. It's pure mathematics if you look at the birth rates. You have to be extremely naive to think different.
A minority does not have to become the majority to greatly affect the overall society. Hacker News, a quick pop quiz: What percentage of Americans is black? What would you guess based on American news and pop culture? Go ahead, guess; I'll wait.
I have been living in Germany my whole life and cannot, for the life of me, understand your viewpoint. Never felt unsafe in Germany or had the feeling that our 'western values will be eradicated' (which sounds like right wing fearmongering to me tbh).
It's not a wild statement for crime rates or that the cities are thriving.
Even the statistics show this.
Yes there's petty crime but not random, violent crime where you run into gangs of people trying to mug you.
If you are not a european you will not understand the disparity in wealth. Most traditional businesses all around Europe are owned by old Western-European businesses.
Banks, insurance companies, construction companies, supermarkets, energy companies all around Europe are in the hands of few major corporations. It's generational wealth and it's impossible for Eastern Europe to compete with that.
How many UIPaths Romania needs before it can catch up with Austria? Way too many.
1) Overly excessive bureaucracy combined with not enough civil servants.
2) A housing market that's essentially not a market anymore.
3) Several problems with governmental services that have been under-invested and not well managed in the past, e.g. schooling.
Sure, there's crime. There's also slightly higher crime-rates in cohorts of refugees/immigrants compared to the average but not compared to cohorts of of "German young men".
We see a lot of far right propaganda tho along with the delusion of "the mainstream opinion shifted to the left". That's an old fascist trick.
The real issue is that the far right is taking up the traditional points of the left. And I don't think it really needs to be explained by the CSU/CDU steadily loses voters in the 20th century.
1) limit immigration (so as to provide better wages, better working conditions for the workers already here). For the left it's not about race, it's about managing the availability of labor for the local market to improve living conditions. Even limiting emigration is on the table.
2) "common sense" policies influenced by the opinion of the "unwashed masses" or whatever you want to call them
3) protection of jobs and unions over things like "the economy". Bad (livable and even "livable") jobs for all takes priority over trade (so borders largely closed). This also means limiting the scope of EU membership.
4) very high policy priority for things that directly influence the life of common people. Things like medical care (and training new medical personnel), schooling and housing having absolute priority over "the economy", or over Ukraine or Climate change
The left does not work like this anymore, and hasn't for a decade or two at least, because this is not what they attract young people with. And that was fine, when the economy was doing well and the left could pretend they were providing jobs for all while giving priority to climate change, when they weren't really accomplishing anything, and it was really China getting lots of things to build itself up.
This is what they call the generational conflict. A LOT of traditional leftist voters are worried about their life, finances, pension, medical care, ..., and don't care about climate change, Ukraine, essentially any international problem. There was no conflict as long as both could be reasonably provided that was fine. But that only applies as long as the medical care, schooling, housing, ... situation doesn't seriously deteriorate. And it has. So they run to the only party that agrees with them, at least in rhetoric.
Maybe someone ought to create more extreme leftists parties, from a real leftist party to even an outright communist one, that would also get these voters in. A party that would build housing, right in the middle of cities, with ZERO care what it would do to housing values or bank balance sheets. That would make employees essentially unfireable. That would kill imports and exports (or heavily tax them) to support more personnel in schools. Etc.
Left/right is an oversimplification, and because people are unwilling to compromise at all (You aren't allowed to be leftist and anti-immigration. You can't be leftist and anti-EU. So if you get frustrated enough you find your natural allies for that: racists. Not because you're a racist, but out of shear frustration)
There is another under-addressed aspect, which is that mainstream left and right parties are lobbied (i.e. bribed) by the same groups. Coupled with a media that is also aligned with it all, and it is a perfect recipe for outsiders like the AfD to come along with all the points you state above.
I recently read some books on history of Postwar Europe, and they contains a lot of things which were counter to what I had previously assumed.
* Postwar European countries were almost all homogeneous, as non majority ethnicities were driven out either during the war (Germany) or during the immediate post war period (Poland, Czechslovakia).
* Before Europe became prosperous, it very not welcoming of other ethnicities, even Europeans of other countries.
* Apart from America, we have not seen evolution of prosperous countries which are both democratic and heterogeneous, and America faces it's own problems due to the same. Europe was not used to these, but the same thing seem to be playing out there.
* A lot of liberal European policies came into existence only after the prosperity. A slight dip in prosperity can easily turn things very ugly.
Given all this, the rise of far right in Europe doesn't feel surprising.
There were waves of migration within Europe before WWII, that sometimes created some tension but by and large it only took a generation to assimilate them because in general (1) they made efforts to assimilate and (2) cultures were close enough that it wasn't too difficult.
An example is Italian migrants to France (and other European countries) in the late 19th and early 20th century.
What has happened since and is still happening, is a combination of continuously very large numbers of migrants and lack of assimilation.
> Postwar European countries were almost all homogeneous
Where are you getting this from? From Spain through France to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, with Belgium as the cherry on top, many countries in Europe had ethnic and religious minorities, sometimes quite significant ones, or flat out multiple main ethnic and religious groups (Belgium or Yugoslavia that had 4 main ethnic groups from 3 religions). Even Germany had two religious groups (Catholic and Protestant). Also it's exactly after WW2 that immigration from the colonies to France ramped up, both of pieds noirs (French people from the colonies getting expelled from the now independent countries) and not, with the associated building boom of new cities around Paris to have somewhat to house all the people.
Unless you're using "homogenous" as a racist dog whistle for skin colour, as if it matters, it's simply untrue.
Yugoslavia (and all the violence that happened during and post it's collapse) is not a good example of what happens in a heterogeneous countries once the dictator was out.
Belgium and the two main areas/languages of it only came to harmony after the prosperity, and it mostly functioned like two countries within a state with almost all the powers to the two separate regions.
Ethnic minorities did exist in Europe before the wars, but in the post war period most countries kicked their ethnic minorities out.
Catholic and Protestants had to endure centuries of violence (almost as long as the history of the USA itself) together before learning to live together. Sure, after a long long period of assimilation everything can become assimilated together like that.
> it's exactly after WW2 that immigration from the colonies to France
The immigration to France was almost entirely from Algeria, not multiple colonies. And that too didn't go well and the immigrants faced tons and tons of discrimination.
By homogeneous I mean culturally homogenous here.
You seem to use the word racist very casually, as if anyone whose opinions sound untrue to you is driven by racism.
You also state something as simply untrue yet cite nothing to back such strong claims.
I have to say I feel like there's a lot of comments in this thread that are just totally detached from reality. I moved from Toronto to Berlin in 2017 and a lot of comments in here about living in fear of Muslims is just ... I don't know what part of Germany you are living in, and I visited a lot of it. I went to Karnival in Köln, and small beer festivals in the Bavarian countryside, I talk to locals in every city I go to.
I do however distinctly remember that when I lived in Toronto my social media feed was absolutely polluted with hype about how refugees are taking over Europe and the migrants are everywhere and there are countless no-go zones and endless rapes and the end of Europe was imminent.
Then I moved here, and literally not even once have I seen or felt any of that. I have however seen the far-right media endlessly look for bad events and a way to pin it on migrants. I have seen AfD marketing to tell people they will somehow "fix things" by replacing burkas with burgundy wine.
I've also seen that the neo-Nazis try to overthrow the government (Reuß) and carry out domestic terrorist acts (Hanau for example), the constant planning for "Tage X" and stealing weapons from the army, and the arm of the government charged with constitutional protection constantly needing to stop Nazi activity or investigate problems with the AfD or the military or other important authorities.
There are multiple areas in Berlin alone that the police officialy declares as No-Go Areas, among them:
- Alexanderplatz
- Görlitzer Park and Wrangelkiez
- Warschauer Brücke
- Hermannstraße and Bahnhof Neukölln
- Hermannplatz and Donaukiez
- Rigaer Straße
- Kottbusser Tor
Görlitzer Park is officially lost to African drug dealers, they just group raped a woman in front of her boyfriend.
In other cities it's similar. I go to Hamburg and Dresden regularly, can't even befin to describe how much downhill St. Pauli and Alaunpark are going. No sane person goes there after dark anymore.
Do you live in Berlin? I do, right near Bahnhof Neukölln. I live or have lived in many of the areas you list, and have spent time in all of them. Neither myself, nor my wife, nor my friends have any fear about these areas, even if there are sometimes people we would avoid (like any big city). None of these areas are no-go zones for the police, the police are all over the place.
Alexanderplatz being a no-go zone? Are you joking? It’s full of tourist traps and has some pickpockets potentially, but that’s because they are popular areas full of people.
The gang rape in Gorlitzer is horrible, but is by no means a regular occurrence.
Your entire description reads like a farcical joke. I don’t expect to convince you of anything, but for anyone else reading this, it’s a laughable description.
It looks like there's a blatant contradiction between statement B:
> AfD supporters see Germany’s migration policy as a catastrophe
an statement A (made just before B):
> There has not been a general shift to the right
Used to have some respect for Tooze, I actually quoted one of his books in here twice or thrice, but people like him should get their heads out of the proverbial sand and look at facts straight in the face. If it quacks like a duck ("migration policy as a catastrophe") and whacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck.
If you are generally supportive of a migration policy, but consider the implementation a catastrophe, is that really a shift to the right?
Put yourself in the shoes of those designing, implementing and managing the migration policy. If you were in that position and the results of your incompetence were writ large, calling anyone who criticises you racist is one hell of a defense strategy.
It doesnt just shut down criticism, it also has a chilling effect on people even discussing your incompetence for fear of social ostracisation.
I guess for some people it's easy to become a duck. As someone with a passionate hatred for ducks, I want it to be said there has to be compassion for those who are tempted to become ducks in an effort to protect their environment. If there's no way to voice your concern for western and democratic values without being labeled a duck, should they just not quack at all?
There is no contradiction there, many Former voters of christian democrats kept their anti-immigration policies, but the party has changed their positions. The AfD cashes in on the political void that this move left.
What contradiction? One statement refers to the entire population and the other refers to the subset of the population who are AfD supporters. There’s no problem with both statements being true.
"You might wonder how someone who, on account of their xenophobia was willing too support the AfD, could not be counted as at least far-right in their political views.
This is a reflection of the Allesnbach methodology which scores respondents on their responses to the 10 prompts. Only those giving 5 positive responses count as far-right and 7 as “rechtsradikal”. So if xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia are your thing, but you do not “otherwise” have right-wing preferences, you fall outside the Allensbach classification."
As the article says, other conservative/right-wing opinions have not seen concomitant increases in support, so the superficial contradiction is resolved.
We rather have an anti-democratic and populist surge in Germany (the article also confirms that there is no particular shift in opinion to the far right).
The interesting thing is that we will probably get another party on the far left next year (founded by Wagenknecht, a prominent member of the parliament for The Left party. It is probably only delayed to next year due to some party funding rules for new parties in connection with the upcoming election.).
People want more simple solutions and are fed up with complexities (like all over the world). The other parties particularly as part of the governing coalition only offer more confusion and no clear vision where to go with a lot of internal fights.
While Wagenknecht is a member of a party called "The Left", her political views are identical with far-right views. If she founds a new party, then I wouldn't consider it a party "on the far left".
Wagenknecht is anything but far-right. She has no far-right views, she is just very clever in appealing to the "rightish" anti-mainstream protest voters.
That's because the term "far right" actually does mean "far left". It's meant to be a synonym for the Nazis who were definitely not a conservative party in any sense of the word.
AfD positions: socialism is bad, smaller state, deregulation, strong law and order, no European unification, introduce Swiss-style referenda.
"Far right" (Nazi) positions: socialism is good (it's even in the name), state is totalitarian, run your own street army to destroy law and order, start a war to unify Europe and immediately abolish all voting.
These are opposing positions yet we are told they are the same. It is a rhetorical trick that renders people confused everywhere it is deployed.
The world is getting more complex over time but it seems the BILD-population does not change much. Social media conflate theses issues and create new ones but do not help solving them. I believe it’s high time for a number of changes:
- simple voting should be replaced by quadratic voting to take into account a small number of passionate voters
- more direct democracy like direct voting and referendum. And a smaller parliament.
- increase the rights of the states and weaken the federal government to facilitate social experiments and competitive solutions. For example, let Bayern experiment with a no-refugee policy but also let them face the consequences (like paying for other states which are taking in refugees). A decline in democracy could be counteracted by more involvement of citizens in the decision processes and grassroots movements.
- encourage kids to play more games like Democracy 4 :) Debates about politics and role playing of organizations like the UN and EU should be a part of the general education. Because if anything, only the youth could bring hope for the future.
It's funny to see it described as "simple" voting. I sometimes lose track of the number of parties here (I guess it's 6 over 5%?) and the interplay of their shifting alliances. It's a far, far, FAR better system than the USA or England. First past the post is cancer.
Not to mention the federalized system works pretty well.
Germany has to be at least in the top 10 for democratic systems in the world
That's a great lesson learned from strategy games (Democracy, Paradox series, Civilisation, etc.). At the country scale, nothing is simple, and therefore anyone claiming otherwise is either dumb and shouldn't be anywhere near power, or lying and thus shouldn't be anywhere near power.
Easily. For instance, if a movement portrays itself as being supported by the common people and against the elites, then one possible next step is to argue that the mechanisms of democracy have been perverted by those elites, and therefore must be "reformed" or even swept away.
(If you've been paying any attention at all to US politics in the last few years, this should sound pretty familiar.)
Cause the average voter attacks his system if it does not work for him? The acid eats the stomach? Populists do degrade the host system all the time?
First the system degrades to the point it does not provide to significant part of the population. Then the populists arrive and attack the system. The excuse is usually: It aint no longer democratic anyway, as in a democratic system this whole affair could be altered by flushing the elites out. New faces time, but you still get the old faces.
Which ignores the real iceberg of the problem, situational physics, for which some elites are just a drive-through-workers handing it out. If a society gets energy poor, or for example a whole planet decides to life like usa, there is simply not enough to go around for the now and the longterm.
Can vote all you want against the rain, protest the sky gods, burn your leaky house down in protest, it still will pour on your head. Only thing changing the circumstances is science, by unlocking new pockets of riches.
Comp science is a tremendous waste in that regard. Physics and applied physics is were its at for longterm stabilizing society. Free Energy (gas) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process feed the world, not SV.
It's not just migration.
Many Germans I know are just not happy with the government.
And have not been for a while.
People feel like their lives are worse, they can't afford apartments or houses and feel like their wealth is slowly melting away.
They pay more and more taxes but feel the service they get in return is worse and worse. Cities are not kept clean, infrastructure from small too large is breaking apart.
On the other hand an expensive cluster fuck of a public broadcasting system is kept alive where recent scandals made it look like they are dishonest and try to teach moral lessons instead of neutrally informing the people.
Health care got worse, many doctors just not taking new patients and people having to wait for specialist appointments for months.
People that earn more are also desperate, because they usually live in larger cities where they cannot afford apartments or houses anymore.
Also retirement gets worse and worse every year. Why should someone work 45+ years in a low wage job only to then the same money as someone who always worked?
All this shines a particularly bad light on the fact that no politician takes the blame anymore.
There are scandals, people do a bad job...and then they end up leading the commission in Europe or some other large state agency (looking at you vdL and Nahles). They do not face any consequences anymore.
The people have the subconscious feeling that many things go wrong in Germany and the country needs bigger and radical changes but that those changes will not spawn within the current players.
Or shorter: whoever they vote for, it's always the same stupid faces and swamp.
And last but not least I'd say that for years and years voters for the right wing party have been called fascists and Nazis by the (mentioned above) public media , even if they were just conservatives. They were (maybe rightfully?) judged by who their peers are in those parties.
But this made many people being afraid to vote for those parties. Now they "had enough" and don't care about public opinion.
In my family there are some examples of definitely not racist people that will vote far right...
And I stopped judging them but started listening to them. And I think all of them are brought back by implementing the right policies.
This is a question I've been asking myself.
I honestly don't know.
The country feels...stuck.
You want more wind turbines? Nimbys will block it.
You want more infrastructure and build something? Someone's gonna find some rare protected lizard where you wanna build and this will take you years!
You want to shrink the public broadcasting stations?
Well there are pensions to be paid which is the biggest share of the cost so even if you shrink it you won't save much.
Personally, I'd start at digitalization and try to make processes more efficient.
Think of software, only adding features but never thinking about cleaning up or refactoring might break your framework.
In government, there was no cleanup. It grows monotonically and it feels like for every little thing ten Departments need to approve it.
Government is a good example of parkinson's law.
No one ever says they have enough people, every year when being asked for next year's resource needs they claim and use the max because having not used everything might make departments subjects to cuts...
An example: a family member worked in a company acquired by our town, so she became a public service worker. Some normal office stuff.
She has a great working attitude...basically her shit got done in half a workday and then she asked for more tasks. Instead of doing that she was told to not break the team spirit and atmosphere there...shed put everyone else in a bad light.
Also, political culture needs to change. If someone is bad...and obviously does a bad job...fire them, don't give them a promotion.
This is more to appease people.
Also, media culture needs to change. Media seem to fight a fight "us against the Nazis" and therefore end up supporting current politics too much.
Recently read an article that said "more than half of the 2015 surge immigrants are working! Yay!".
Turns out, it was SLIGHLTY more than 50%. After 8! years. Most women didn't work...because of culture. And out of those 50% a large part got state money to make a living. This is not a success. At first it was sold as refugees, then as workers we desperately need.
But to be honest, I don't think anything will be done and nothing of significance will change.
I try to work on my skill portfolio and think about jumping ship to some other European nation.
Readit News
As a middle class german you must see the decay in german cities with everything becoming too expensive, out of order and decaying in front of your eyes while you are being told you live in one of the richest places on Earth.
The tipping point was already NYE 2015/2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_New_Year%27s_E...)
I am an experienced Muay Thai fighter and don't feel safe anymore. I live in Düsseldorf, used to be the most beautiful city in Germany, and seeing this city decay is so sad.
Western values will be eradicated in a few years. It's pure mathematics if you look at the birth rates. You have to be extremely naive to think different.
We will move out of the country next year and never look back.
I have a lot of Turkish and other first and second generation migrant friends. A majority will vote for AfD.
They have enough.
The Netherlands was a lovely place when I was young, in the 80s - 90s, but the country has been going downhill fast in the past few decennia.
I think most people at this time still don’t realize their pensions will be gone, social security will provide less as time goes on and cities will become unsafer. And since people don’t realize this, they keep voting the status quo until it’s too late. I don’t think at this point there’s a way to go back.
My girlfriend asked me to arrange a Dutch passport for our daughter, but I haven’t bothered as of yet. I think Asia has a much brighter future ahead compared to Europe (mainly EU), so I doubt my daughter will need the passport to study abroad. She’ll be able to create a good life for herself here in Thailand or perhaps some other ASEAN country.
Politics in the modern age requires you to have different views on controversial matters to avoid being commoditised. If 10 parties share the same view on some issue, they will be compared on competence, and no politician wants that. It is much easier to capture a subset of votes by taking a specific position, however good or bad it is, as long as you get a monopoly in that segment.
I bet. Turkish people != Kurdish people != Arab people
A lot of people don't seem to appreciate this.
On New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees *as they were occurring* on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I did not imagine that those subreddits, as well as mass media in general, were collectively suppressing reports of the attacks until the sheer volume made it impossible to continue to do so.
(Cue "/pol/ was right" couplet)
>Western values will be eradicated in a few years. It's pure mathematics if you look at the birth rates. You have to be extremely naive to think different.
A minority does not have to become the majority to greatly affect the overall society. Hacker News, a quick pop quiz: What percentage of Americans is black? What would you guess based on American news and pop culture? Go ahead, guess; I'll wait.
[...]
You probably guessed a figure between 25 and 40% <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3ncaz8/til_th...>. The answer is 12-13% <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...>. Yes, a group less than 13% of the population continues to pose many dilemmas for a nation of 320 million, 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the end of legal oppression.
(More at Reddit. <https://np.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/u6uv4w/dear_swedes_s...>)
I am not saying you don't have a problem in Germany but this is just a wild statement about a huge land mass.
Yes there's petty crime but not random, violent crime where you run into gangs of people trying to mug you.
If you are not a european you will not understand the disparity in wealth. Most traditional businesses all around Europe are owned by old Western-European businesses.
Banks, insurance companies, construction companies, supermarkets, energy companies all around Europe are in the hands of few major corporations. It's generational wealth and it's impossible for Eastern Europe to compete with that.
How many UIPaths Romania needs before it can catch up with Austria? Way too many.
1) Overly excessive bureaucracy combined with not enough civil servants.
2) A housing market that's essentially not a market anymore.
3) Several problems with governmental services that have been under-invested and not well managed in the past, e.g. schooling.
Sure, there's crime. There's also slightly higher crime-rates in cohorts of refugees/immigrants compared to the average but not compared to cohorts of of "German young men".
We see a lot of far right propaganda tho along with the delusion of "the mainstream opinion shifted to the left". That's an old fascist trick.
1) limit immigration (so as to provide better wages, better working conditions for the workers already here). For the left it's not about race, it's about managing the availability of labor for the local market to improve living conditions. Even limiting emigration is on the table.
2) "common sense" policies influenced by the opinion of the "unwashed masses" or whatever you want to call them
3) protection of jobs and unions over things like "the economy". Bad (livable and even "livable") jobs for all takes priority over trade (so borders largely closed). This also means limiting the scope of EU membership.
4) very high policy priority for things that directly influence the life of common people. Things like medical care (and training new medical personnel), schooling and housing having absolute priority over "the economy", or over Ukraine or Climate change
The left does not work like this anymore, and hasn't for a decade or two at least, because this is not what they attract young people with. And that was fine, when the economy was doing well and the left could pretend they were providing jobs for all while giving priority to climate change, when they weren't really accomplishing anything, and it was really China getting lots of things to build itself up.
This is what they call the generational conflict. A LOT of traditional leftist voters are worried about their life, finances, pension, medical care, ..., and don't care about climate change, Ukraine, essentially any international problem. There was no conflict as long as both could be reasonably provided that was fine. But that only applies as long as the medical care, schooling, housing, ... situation doesn't seriously deteriorate. And it has. So they run to the only party that agrees with them, at least in rhetoric.
Maybe someone ought to create more extreme leftists parties, from a real leftist party to even an outright communist one, that would also get these voters in. A party that would build housing, right in the middle of cities, with ZERO care what it would do to housing values or bank balance sheets. That would make employees essentially unfireable. That would kill imports and exports (or heavily tax them) to support more personnel in schools. Etc.
Left/right is an oversimplification, and because people are unwilling to compromise at all (You aren't allowed to be leftist and anti-immigration. You can't be leftist and anti-EU. So if you get frustrated enough you find your natural allies for that: racists. Not because you're a racist, but out of shear frustration)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/denmark-zero...
?
* Postwar European countries were almost all homogeneous, as non majority ethnicities were driven out either during the war (Germany) or during the immediate post war period (Poland, Czechslovakia).
* Before Europe became prosperous, it very not welcoming of other ethnicities, even Europeans of other countries.
* Apart from America, we have not seen evolution of prosperous countries which are both democratic and heterogeneous, and America faces it's own problems due to the same. Europe was not used to these, but the same thing seem to be playing out there.
* A lot of liberal European policies came into existence only after the prosperity. A slight dip in prosperity can easily turn things very ugly.
Given all this, the rise of far right in Europe doesn't feel surprising.
An example is Italian migrants to France (and other European countries) in the late 19th and early 20th century.
What has happened since and is still happening, is a combination of continuously very large numbers of migrants and lack of assimilation.
Where are you getting this from? From Spain through France to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, with Belgium as the cherry on top, many countries in Europe had ethnic and religious minorities, sometimes quite significant ones, or flat out multiple main ethnic and religious groups (Belgium or Yugoslavia that had 4 main ethnic groups from 3 religions). Even Germany had two religious groups (Catholic and Protestant). Also it's exactly after WW2 that immigration from the colonies to France ramped up, both of pieds noirs (French people from the colonies getting expelled from the now independent countries) and not, with the associated building boom of new cities around Paris to have somewhat to house all the people.
Unless you're using "homogenous" as a racist dog whistle for skin colour, as if it matters, it's simply untrue.
Yugoslavia (and all the violence that happened during and post it's collapse) is not a good example of what happens in a heterogeneous countries once the dictator was out.
Belgium and the two main areas/languages of it only came to harmony after the prosperity, and it mostly functioned like two countries within a state with almost all the powers to the two separate regions.
Ethnic minorities did exist in Europe before the wars, but in the post war period most countries kicked their ethnic minorities out.
Catholic and Protestants had to endure centuries of violence (almost as long as the history of the USA itself) together before learning to live together. Sure, after a long long period of assimilation everything can become assimilated together like that.
> it's exactly after WW2 that immigration from the colonies to France
The immigration to France was almost entirely from Algeria, not multiple colonies. And that too didn't go well and the immigrants faced tons and tons of discrimination.
By homogeneous I mean culturally homogenous here.
You seem to use the word racist very casually, as if anyone whose opinions sound untrue to you is driven by racism.
You also state something as simply untrue yet cite nothing to back such strong claims.
I do however distinctly remember that when I lived in Toronto my social media feed was absolutely polluted with hype about how refugees are taking over Europe and the migrants are everywhere and there are countless no-go zones and endless rapes and the end of Europe was imminent.
Then I moved here, and literally not even once have I seen or felt any of that. I have however seen the far-right media endlessly look for bad events and a way to pin it on migrants. I have seen AfD marketing to tell people they will somehow "fix things" by replacing burkas with burgundy wine.
I've also seen that the neo-Nazis try to overthrow the government (Reuß) and carry out domestic terrorist acts (Hanau for example), the constant planning for "Tage X" and stealing weapons from the army, and the arm of the government charged with constitutional protection constantly needing to stop Nazi activity or investigate problems with the AfD or the military or other important authorities.
This is the new reality we live in and these controls are now happening every Friday and Saturday night:
https://www.breakinglatest.news/news/police-checks-against-k...
We don't even bother anymore enjoying the city on a weekend.
- Alexanderplatz - Görlitzer Park and Wrangelkiez - Warschauer Brücke - Hermannstraße and Bahnhof Neukölln - Hermannplatz and Donaukiez - Rigaer Straße - Kottbusser Tor
Görlitzer Park is officially lost to African drug dealers, they just group raped a woman in front of her boyfriend.
In other cities it's similar. I go to Hamburg and Dresden regularly, can't even befin to describe how much downhill St. Pauli and Alaunpark are going. No sane person goes there after dark anymore.
Alexanderplatz being a no-go zone? Are you joking? It’s full of tourist traps and has some pickpockets potentially, but that’s because they are popular areas full of people.
The gang rape in Gorlitzer is horrible, but is by no means a regular occurrence.
Your entire description reads like a farcical joke. I don’t expect to convince you of anything, but for anyone else reading this, it’s a laughable description.
I have visited Hamburg many times and I know there are a few streets which I don't go to, but it's only a few.
Immigration works for Germany and mostly the Biodeutschen (1) and the immigrants get along well.
However, there is also a racist milieu and even right-wing terrorists that politics and the police tolerate too much.
Immigrants become scapegoats in a (self-inflicted) difficult economic situation.
(1) satirical name for ethnic Germans (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodeutsch)
> AfD supporters see Germany’s migration policy as a catastrophe
an statement A (made just before B):
> There has not been a general shift to the right
Used to have some respect for Tooze, I actually quoted one of his books in here twice or thrice, but people like him should get their heads out of the proverbial sand and look at facts straight in the face. If it quacks like a duck ("migration policy as a catastrophe") and whacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck.
Put yourself in the shoes of those designing, implementing and managing the migration policy. If you were in that position and the results of your incompetence were writ large, calling anyone who criticises you racist is one hell of a defense strategy.
It doesnt just shut down criticism, it also has a chilling effect on people even discussing your incompetence for fear of social ostracisation.
"You might wonder how someone who, on account of their xenophobia was willing too support the AfD, could not be counted as at least far-right in their political views.
This is a reflection of the Allesnbach methodology which scores respondents on their responses to the 10 prompts. Only those giving 5 positive responses count as far-right and 7 as “rechtsradikal”. So if xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia are your thing, but you do not “otherwise” have right-wing preferences, you fall outside the Allensbach classification."
The interesting thing is that we will probably get another party on the far left next year (founded by Wagenknecht, a prominent member of the parliament for The Left party. It is probably only delayed to next year due to some party funding rules for new parties in connection with the upcoming election.).
People want more simple solutions and are fed up with complexities (like all over the world). The other parties particularly as part of the governing coalition only offer more confusion and no clear vision where to go with a lot of internal fights.
AfD positions: socialism is bad, smaller state, deregulation, strong law and order, no European unification, introduce Swiss-style referenda.
"Far right" (Nazi) positions: socialism is good (it's even in the name), state is totalitarian, run your own street army to destroy law and order, start a war to unify Europe and immediately abolish all voting.
These are opposing positions yet we are told they are the same. It is a rhetorical trick that renders people confused everywhere it is deployed.
- simple voting should be replaced by quadratic voting to take into account a small number of passionate voters
- more direct democracy like direct voting and referendum. And a smaller parliament.
- increase the rights of the states and weaken the federal government to facilitate social experiments and competitive solutions. For example, let Bayern experiment with a no-refugee policy but also let them face the consequences (like paying for other states which are taking in refugees). A decline in democracy could be counteracted by more involvement of citizens in the decision processes and grassroots movements.
- encourage kids to play more games like Democracy 4 :) Debates about politics and role playing of organizations like the UN and EU should be a part of the general education. Because if anything, only the youth could bring hope for the future.
Not to mention the federalized system works pretty well.
Germany has to be at least in the top 10 for democratic systems in the world
(If you've been paying any attention at all to US politics in the last few years, this should sound pretty familiar.)
First the system degrades to the point it does not provide to significant part of the population. Then the populists arrive and attack the system. The excuse is usually: It aint no longer democratic anyway, as in a democratic system this whole affair could be altered by flushing the elites out. New faces time, but you still get the old faces.
Which ignores the real iceberg of the problem, situational physics, for which some elites are just a drive-through-workers handing it out. If a society gets energy poor, or for example a whole planet decides to life like usa, there is simply not enough to go around for the now and the longterm.
Can vote all you want against the rain, protest the sky gods, burn your leaky house down in protest, it still will pour on your head. Only thing changing the circumstances is science, by unlocking new pockets of riches.
Comp science is a tremendous waste in that regard. Physics and applied physics is were its at for longterm stabilizing society. Free Energy (gas) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process feed the world, not SV.
https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2017-04-12_afd...
The chapters are:
1. Democracy and core values
2. Europe and the Euro
3. National security and Justice
4. Foreign and security policy
5. Labour and social policy
6. Families and children
7. Culture, language and identity
8. Schools, universities and research
9. Immigration, integration and asylum
10. Economy, digitalisation and consumer protection
11. Finances and taxes
12. German energy policy
13. Nature and environmental protection, agriculture, forestry
14. Infrastructure, housing and transport
People that earn more are also desperate, because they usually live in larger cities where they cannot afford apartments or houses anymore. Also retirement gets worse and worse every year. Why should someone work 45+ years in a low wage job only to then the same money as someone who always worked?
All this shines a particularly bad light on the fact that no politician takes the blame anymore. There are scandals, people do a bad job...and then they end up leading the commission in Europe or some other large state agency (looking at you vdL and Nahles). They do not face any consequences anymore.
The people have the subconscious feeling that many things go wrong in Germany and the country needs bigger and radical changes but that those changes will not spawn within the current players. Or shorter: whoever they vote for, it's always the same stupid faces and swamp.
And last but not least I'd say that for years and years voters for the right wing party have been called fascists and Nazis by the (mentioned above) public media , even if they were just conservatives. They were (maybe rightfully?) judged by who their peers are in those parties. But this made many people being afraid to vote for those parties. Now they "had enough" and don't care about public opinion.
In my family there are some examples of definitely not racist people that will vote far right... And I stopped judging them but started listening to them. And I think all of them are brought back by implementing the right policies.
Personally, I'd start at digitalization and try to make processes more efficient. Think of software, only adding features but never thinking about cleaning up or refactoring might break your framework. In government, there was no cleanup. It grows monotonically and it feels like for every little thing ten Departments need to approve it. Government is a good example of parkinson's law. No one ever says they have enough people, every year when being asked for next year's resource needs they claim and use the max because having not used everything might make departments subjects to cuts... An example: a family member worked in a company acquired by our town, so she became a public service worker. Some normal office stuff. She has a great working attitude...basically her shit got done in half a workday and then she asked for more tasks. Instead of doing that she was told to not break the team spirit and atmosphere there...shed put everyone else in a bad light.
Also, political culture needs to change. If someone is bad...and obviously does a bad job...fire them, don't give them a promotion. This is more to appease people.
Also, media culture needs to change. Media seem to fight a fight "us against the Nazis" and therefore end up supporting current politics too much. Recently read an article that said "more than half of the 2015 surge immigrants are working! Yay!". Turns out, it was SLIGHLTY more than 50%. After 8! years. Most women didn't work...because of culture. And out of those 50% a large part got state money to make a living. This is not a success. At first it was sold as refugees, then as workers we desperately need.
But to be honest, I don't think anything will be done and nothing of significance will change. I try to work on my skill portfolio and think about jumping ship to some other European nation.