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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on the idiocy of the SPD ("wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten")... but this time, the Justice Ministry belongs to the FDP. They have alienated an awful lot of voters with their effective denial of reasonable covid measures, they'd be completely done for if they would not manage to get cannabis legal-ish enough that people can buy cannabis products in stores and smoke on the streets without fearing arrest.

We have elections in Bavaria and Hessen in 2023, the FDP will need at least something to show off, and cannabis is the easiest thing to pass, particularly as the Greens and parts of the SPD have long fought for it.

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advocatus diaboli: the FDP has a long track record of advocating for legalisation and then voting against it or abstain in parliamentary elections. Their core clientel are small business owners and (other) anti-regulation folk, I strongly doubt that they lose big margins of voters due to their covid policy, maybe even the opposite is the case.

Point being: if the FDP is the reason to have faith in this, I'm not feeling much more confident than before.

> They have alienated an awful lot of voters with their effective denial of reasonable covid measures

they also won a number of sympathizers ... and "reasonable measures" - what a funny moment to write that nonsense.

> they also won a number of sympathizers

LOL, they lost massively in all elections since the Bundestagswahl - mostly because of their disastrous performance during covid, with NRW's education minister Gebauer being the most obvious example. They may have gained some people from the AfD, but lost so much more instead.

Basically the FDP is now learning the hard way what Söder's CSU learned after the clusterfuck in the 2018 Bavarian elections: copying the far-right and ultra-libertarian demands may earn you some votes from there, but alienate so much more of the moderate vote that it can even threaten your existence.

Germany is not the US - ultra-libertarian attitudes may give you applause from Twitter crowds but not from voters.

> and "reasonable measures" - what a funny moment to write that nonsense.

The FDP vetoed anything to reasonably deal with the pandemic - they were the reason tests were cut down, they are even opposed to mask mandates, and forget about a vaccination mandate.

every region can declare itself a hotspot and make masks mandatory. beyond that they don't serve any purpose except being a nuisance.

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