Who is driving Germany's far-right poll surge?
adamtooze.substack.com
adamtooze.substack.com
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 even remember a recent news that a drugged guy that was 'checked by police' several times, they found drugs but didn't want to test him for drugs, killed a bunch of ppl with his car. Or the case where a lot of ppl burned alive in a club bc of the way it was designed and till today nobody's imprisoned, or when a bridge collapsed right before a school bus(bc they've stolen the money), there wasn't tragedy, but it could have been, and still, nobody in prison. Totally thriving county!
I consider corruption and quality of services "easy" problems if your economy is growing and your democracy is improving, you just need time. The richer you are, the less likely are you to accept bribes.
City design can be a harder problem depending on the specifics but ultimately still solvable with time.
Population decline due to emigration seems like the biggest problem but maybe it will naturally self-correct, I don't have a clear opinion on this. I live in the Czech Republic and I have to say we're lucky we evaded the emigration curse that's affecting most ex-Eastern Bloc countries.
Emigrate where?
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.
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.
It is hard to understand how you can have 'Refugees welcome' and 'Full support for our LGBTQ' agendas at the same time.
Cologne and Düsseldorf were vibrant cities embracing an openly gay lifestyle. This has become impossible. You barely see rainbow flags and guys walking hand in hand or kissing each other on the streets anymore.
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.
Those are assumptions, but my answer is the following:
- I make an effort to learn the Thai language. In shops and such I converse in Thai with staff.
- I try to follow cultural norms. For example when visiting government offices, banks and such I wear respectful clothes (long trousers, nice shirt). I greet officials with a high (nose level) wai to show my respect.
- Every now and then (e.g. birthdays) I visit the temple with my girlfriend to receive blessings from a monk - and I am not religious.
As one investor stated in the past: if rising sea levels were really a problem, banks would not want to finance oceanfront property or under very strict terms.
YMMV
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 bet. Turkish people != Kurdish people != Arab people
A lot of people don't seem to appreciate this.
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.
But it is a perfect example of a highly heterogeneous society being quite prosperous (relatively for the Eastern bloc and their starting position, which was a pretty much destroyed country), held together by nothing but a dictator.
> 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
It started functioning as two separate countries within a state to an extent only in the 1970s, which is hardly "post-war". Before that the Flemish were discriminated against quite heavily.
> Ethnic minorities did exist in Europe before the wars, but in the post war period most countries kicked their ethnic minorities out.
Yes, this is your premise, but as I said, it's flat out untrue. Spain didn't kick out Catalans; France didn't kick out Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, various colonial descendants, or the Corsicans; Belgium didn't kick out the Flemish; Yugoslavia didn't kick out the Bosniaks; Italy didn't kick out the Austrians in Tyrol; Bulgaria didn't kick out the Tatars or Turks; Romania didn't kick out the Hungarians, etc etc etc.
Your premise is somewhat true in a very narrow geographic region, namely Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where mass population transfers occurred. But trying to generalise it to an European wide thing and link prosperity to it is wrong, and yes, does sound like a racist dog whistle, but not because I don't like it, simply because you're trying to link kicking the "others" out to prosperity which is what many far right parties and persons have promised.
> 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
It was mostly from the Magrheb, including Algeria, but also Portugal. And yes they did, so France wasn't homogenous yet was still hugely prosperous?
> You also state something as simply untrue yet cite nothing to back such strong claims.
The strong claims of basic demographics in multiple European countries? Wasn't aware a source was needed for them, here you go as a starting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Tyrol?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France (Immigration after WW2)
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.
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)
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
(If you've been paying any attention at all to US politics in the last few years, this should sound pretty familiar.)
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
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.
What country in Europe doesn't have the same issues?
This isn't the case anymore.
nobody ever asks "hmm what could the establishment be doing wrong that causes this"
but rather everyone jumps to "hmm what could be the conspiracy behind this"?
We have experienced demographic change. Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. We need immigration or we will live through "Japanisation" - with almost none of our cultures being as tight and homogenous from the beginning to do it as nicely as Japanese. The need for mass immigration - not only of qualified employees, but simply of "bodies" in numbers - is a fact. No amount of far-right wordplay can change that.
How about stop propagandizing against the family unit and children in the name of climate protection and freedom for starters?
(This is obv directed at the German Political Landscape (minus AfD), not you personally)
It never worked in any country. Even in those with, to say the least, highly questionable human rights record and complete control of government over mass media: see China. Or with those with ample resources and willingness to spend them towards this goal: see Sweden.
Women are not having lots of children not because some evil forces are telling them not to, but simply because they can. They never wanted to procreate in "sufficient" numbers, they just didn't have a choice then. If we go as far as to deprive them of that choice, we will completely cancel everything we know as a civilised society - and also fail, because a huge emigration wave will ensue, and if we try to ban emigration, we will quickly fail into economic, technological and cultural irrelevance.
It's a choice between being Japan (controlled, predictable dieoff, slow but certain death), being Iran (nice population growth but...), and being America. To me it sounds like a no-brainer which one of the evils to choose.
The happiest among them are those with children.
Don't take my word for it, just look it up yourself, too tired to pull up the dozens of studies for you.
Clearly women want to have children. Nobody needs to force them to.
But rather, society is (indirectly) forcing them NOT to have them.
No need to deny human nature. Your caricature of a society that has children is complete and utter fantasy which has no bearing on real life. It is a product of aforementioned propaganda.
Before having children they are a burden and a detriment to your lifestyle. After having them they are the best thing that could have happened to you.
"it could just be that people who are successful happen to be hard-working, not that working hard increases your chances of success"
The societal level of denial has reached new heights indeed.
Which takes a lot of effort and hard work.
> They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time"
Which takes a lot of hard work
> then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months
You have been tricked into thinking so, they just work so much more efficiently at some point and delegate a lot - at which point they are already successful due to their previous hard work
It's both impractical and unpopular for women to raise children and stay at home while doing it. These are the rights they've won; foremost of them is the right for their bloodlines to die out within a few generations.
Our countries resolve this by importing people from countries with more people than they can handle, but if you look at the situation globally, as countries become richer this appears to happen universally. It's a matter of 100 years until we can't play this population shuffling game anymore and we will experience a global fertility and demographic crisis. And what's more, it appears that it is unavoidable and it's not clear if humanity will stabilize to a population level or if these fluctuations are inevitable. See https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
This strange obsession with materialism is what lead to kids being considered "inconvenient".
Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children).
That's the root of the issue.
The problematic part is that most people only understand this after they have children.
Key is choice. People are not having kids for one stupid simple reason - because they can.
This is why the problem is just the same in every civilisation or culture, it is not at all confined to "Western", "Christian", "Liberal" or "Rich" world. It's everywhere without exception, maybe (hopefully) except Israel. Because Haredim don't give their women a choice.
The only thing that's changed is the migration of children from net capital assets for the family to net cost centers. The same thing has happened to animals. What used to be productive workers on the farm are now wholly decadent useless eaters, earning their keep only by being adorable.
Imagine how the calculus of couples saying "we can't afford children" would change if little Timmy could start defraying his own costs in only eight years by doing some basic bookkeeping, junior development tasks, running errands, cooking, personal assistant work, etc for the family. And then becoming a net capital asset from 12 to 20. That's how it was for most of human history, just with slightly less modern tasks.
Not me for sure. If your utmost measure of value in life is GDP, then I feel like we won't understand each other.
Worst part is I can't escape this mindset here, thanks to US billionaires generously bankrolling "NGO's","think tanks" and "independent news outlets"
So we can say, the multiculturalism is not the cause of the wealth. The truth is, the causes of the wealth are the sizeable population, regardless of origin, and the vast natural resources it controls. The US is a westphalian state, run like a business. The European nations once were nation states, but have also adopted this model. It works, if your goal is economic output, and unfortunately your goal must be economic output because otherwise you can't compete militarily with a rival who's goal is economic output and you'll get subsumed.
The "New Colossus" that adorns the Statue of Liberty is a fun little poem, but it does not in any way reflect the actual policies of the United States for much of its early and middle existence. We were a country that was happy to import wealthy people, scientists, conscientious hard workers, etc, while keeping the riffraff out.
The option that policy makers see is 5) bring in enough migrants to maintain healthy demographics and 6) making more domestic babies. 6 is, however, a mirage; no policy we have tried worked (see SK, HK, SG, TW, JP, and many more).
Do I have a solution to this problem? No. But there has to be a solution that doesn't include my country getting a Wikipedia article of it's own about a list of granade attacks commited, like Sweden has...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
So yes, it’s going to be a solution for as long as America has been a country, France as a republic, longer than Germany and Italy united, more than many modern countries have existed. If that’s not a long-term solution, I don’t know what is.
There are no thousand year solutions here. We can only pass the problem to our (many-times) descendants and hope that they figure it out.
In the US, successful assimilations look mostly like this. Kids go to American public schools, start forgetting their parent’s language and culture, leading them to look pretty much like every other American. The Chinese do it much more harshly without a drastic increase in efficiency, so the soft route seems to be the sweet spot. There’s no reason to think that you can’t assimilate them. Discourage mosques, try to disperse high concentrations of non-assimilated cultures, it’s not new and it mostly works.
No policy lasts forever. We’re not looking for the next thousand-year solution to the demographic crises; immigration is the 100-year plan, so to speak. We can’t — and shouldn’t —- try to write policy for the next thousand years. There is no other area in which we demand solutions for more than a century. Eventually this policy too will wear out and our descendants will have to go back to the drawing board.
Extinction. What a strange thing to resign oneself to.
In what way are you far right though? Based on what I read here (pro mass-immigration regardless of skill, against the family unit) I would classify you as far left.
And no i am not at all against family unit. I only accept the objective fact that sustaining population through natural procreation is no longer possible in any halfway advanced society and that measures should be taken to do it otherwise. Anything that gives a chance of doing it through natural procreation will go way beyond acceptable for any Western political entity, no matter far left or far right. A simple proof to that is that it doesn't happen in any rich country anymore - except Israel because of a large chunk of their people bent on religion a lot more than any other free country could accept.
Most people who criticise immigration, housing or other policies in the view of demography, usually have their perception confined to one particular country and come to logical conclusion: "things are bad and getting worse and politicians seem to be moving them even further into wrong direction". If they looked at the world at whole they'd stop blaming their politicians, because same shit happens everywhere - and it is in fact mildest in Western, rich, Protestant, liberal countries.
Regarding your stance on immigration, I don’t know why we should try to keep replacement levels of population. Time will tell, but I suspect in the long run a country like Japan will do fine.
Keeping population always growing seems like a kind-of pyramid scheme to me. Especially if one wants the working populace to provide for the elderly (pensions).
For the last part they're definitely right, IMO, and german politics must find a way to solve the housing problem in big cities. The government must find a way to break the "migrants take away part of your cake" narrative, and this is only possible by increasing the size of the cake.
In this case, we need to aggressively build (and incentivize to build) more housing. We're doing the opposite at the moment, if the german construction industry is to be believed, which is very very bad. Building a house became insanly expensive in the last 20 years, especially in the areas where it is needed most. Redistribution by moving senior tenants in big cities to suburban or rural areas will not solve the shortage, neither will "just go to rural east germany, there's enough housing".
We have to solve these problems and prevent the formation of zero-sum games where migrants are seen as (external) competitors, stat - it'll be an existential social question and a threat to the country (and the long-term perspective of migrants) if we do not, IMO.
This is caused by too many people coming in from vastly different cultures. And so there is nothing wrong with being in favour of vastly reduced immigration numbers.
Your take is to accept high immigration numbers as an unavoidable fact and therefore to only look at how to deal with them, and still only in terms of economics.
- The big one is Islam. Islam seems to be the only religion in modern times that is actually religious. The only religion that can muster up people to actually get really angry about defending it. It's also the only religion the locals are actually scared of in any meaningful way.
- Color. If you have a bunch of local-looking kids meeting up at the mall, nobody thinks anything of it. Get a bunch of brown kids, and people get scared. Walk around as a typical Polish person, nobody will think anything of it. Walk around while brown and people are alerted to the presence of someone who needs to explain themselves. This isn't always mean-spirited and aggressive, but if you're not white you will constantly be asked by curious people how on earth you ended up walking around Copenhagen. "Where are you really from?".
Put these together and many people constantly see that there's a pernicious foreign influence on their society. They feel it's visible, even though probably a lot of the brown folks aren't even religious.
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2021-02/mietpreise-deutschlan... claims that the lowest rents in 2021 were in Elsterberg in Saxony.
https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/bundestagswahl-2021-k... shows the AfD getting 25.7% of the vote in Elsterberg during the 2021 federal election, ahead of all other parties.
You may worry about the cost of housing in big cities, but I doubt the typical AfD voter does.
The AfD is also strong in Baden-Würtemberg which is traditionally a place with a high population of... well... luddites(?).
These groups might not have the same goals or the same issues they are facing, but what unites them is the feeling that the AfD represents a true opposition to the mainstream political scene.
But people still see the drastic change within a single generation and don't like it. And you can't blame them, if you started settling white people in some African country by the million a year you can very much expect the same from the people who already live there. They'd call it colonialism. And they'd be right, and if they were facing a fertility rate crisis like the west is they'd be screwing themselves over, but you still wouldn't be able to convince them that they have to do it.
But it most certainly doesn't balance out. Either a population grows or it shrinks, when a population grows it can produce more but there are more to feed, when it shrinks it ages, at first you have prosperity from that but eventually you wind up poor and old.
Or we have a society and an economic system designed to push women into the workforce and makes having children an expensive luxury good? That is a policy decision that can be changed. If it were economically beneficial for a woman to have two to four kids instead of grinding 40-50 hour weeks in the office, a lot of women would reevaluate their choices.
And it's much better for us to figure out a sustainable solution now than to wait a generation or two for the world to have a general fertility crisis. Right now it is localized to first-world countries, so we have some time to figure out a solution before things get really dire.
There might not be a sustainable solution, besides a brave new world, but I personally would like to preserve human dignity. It appears that steady state population sizes are a rarity in the natural world and that almost all populations are chaotic and fluctuate. https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
Theyre really never going to live that one up
But Germany’s far right immigration policy demands would be pretty left in the US, not far left, just left
"In addition to a base of far-right wing support, which makes up 15 percent of the population, the AfD is attracting a protest vote that takes it to slightly more than 20 percent support. This is driven by dissatisfaction with migration policy and a general fear of societal crisis."
If you're not cognizant of money flows, think tanks, and dark influence patterns continuously whirling and flowing around us, then ... congratulations, I guess. That must be a lovely place to be.
Name me one example for such that drives right-wing thought,
and I'll name you 10 that pull the opposite way.
This is ridiculous, all key power positions, NGOs, and think-thanks are overwhelmingly left-biased.
People tend to forget that one of the SPD members and former board member of the German Bundesbank wrote a book falsely interpreting data that was pretty racist and became a best seller. And judging from what I have seen it is by far not an outlier case.
Or the fact that the leader of the CSU appealed to the population to report people that suspicious languages in public like Arabic along with countless other extremely racist statements and policies.
The current Green foreign minister of Germany proudly talked about her Grandfather fighting in 1945 at the atlantic council[1].
Germany is as racist as it gets. That's why it has record emigration amongst the most educated population. Germany is one of the least attractive places for expats[2].
For people that like to respond, but Germany took "X" many immigrants. It's a policy that a) wouldn't have been necessary had Europe pushed against interventionism rather than support it, b) has created extremely unsafe environments even for previous Muslim immigrants, and c) was even advised against by the German Islamic council or whatever it's official name is in english as something unreconcilable in society at that pace.
As a result of the incompetence of leadership in the Healthcare sector for example and their outdated tech, they were forced to slip those millions of people into a special status that actually allows for bigger payouts for doctors when treating those people rather than a German retiree that has worked for 40 years(I know this first hand, because I spent time in both policy making and trying to modernize that broken system). Because most people don't know what happens behind the scenes their hatred is not directed towards the incompetent policy makers, but just plainly towards the recipients of the broken system, something that is by the way, entirely human.
It's just sad that the AfD has no coherent strategy of their own. They have no concept beyond keep the old nuclear power plants running; i.e. no concept to fund and develop nuclear energy. They support interventionism while at the same time being anti immigrant. Something other populist leaders like Le Pen have opposed for at least a decade given the strong correlation between the two.
It's also sad that while Germany's election system allows for a plurality of opinions in the parliament, 90% of them are basically an economic uniparty. Something which in theory could have been orders of magnitude better than in the US.
[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/transcripts/annalena-ba...
[2] https://www.exberliner.com/english-news-berlin/germany-slips...
Berlin is a case in point. e.g. the story of someone's friend, a single mum, whose huge corporate landlord decided to renovate the apartment in order to double the rent and then force her out of her own neighborhood. Tough luck, people say, that is the price of progress and it is a free market. Well, people are pissed off, and justifiably.
Not even close to true. Most countries in the world are more racist than Germany.
I think you misunderstand Mrs. Baerbock.
She speaks confused and seems a bit stupid, but she does not want to defend the German armies in WW2.
Because nobody likes accountability for themselves or for their favourite political establishment.
And because fixing mistakes involves admitting them first, and that’s not something “the establishment” is ever keen on doing.
East Germany!
East Germany is the stronghold for AfD because the median income and wealth are still far behind West Germany. East Germans are fare less likely to support higher costs for fighting climate change. That is also why the Green party is so weak in East Germany. The Green Party should ask themselves why they are so weak in East Germany and explain their politics better there. Also they should make sure that the costs in the fight against climate change are not making the poor people in East Germany even poorer. Unfortunately they do the opposite and the „Klimageld“ for the lower class is not going to be implemented despite being promised:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/klimageld-100....
But people in East Germany are not stupid. They know exactly when they are left behind and will vote for AfD until their problems are noticed and taken care of by the German government.
No matter how bad Africans and Syrians have it, you can't fail to admit that mixing people from incompatible cultures will lead to friction, and when that friction isn't addressed, eventually, extremism.
Or, have you asked yourself why it's often young African and Middle-eastern migrants raping and tearing up European cities at the slightest provocation? Yes, I say that as an African.
If European progressives don't take a hard stance on immigration and immigrant crime, I believe we might see a Hitler in Europe again, promising to bring order (like they always do).
Even in South Africa, millions of the locals (Xhosa, Zulus, Khoisan, etc.) still want to expel or murder the Boers who have lived there for centuries now. So, if you have millions of migrants in Europe, living off welfare, making society unsafe, and forcing their religion on others, better don't act surprised when the locals start fighting back by voting in law-and-order politicians to clean the mess.
I am Eastern European and I have exactly same opinion about this issue. The leftist governments are pushing their heads into the sand, labeling people who wants to tackle immigration or pointing at problem which unrestricted immigration does as xenophobes or nazis or even trying to go one step further and attempt to ban parties like AfD who are pointing at the issue, even though they don't have coherent plan.
And at the same time progressive parties are surprised that AfD is polling at 22% in Germany.
In my town when you got money from the bank mashine you'd get robbed by the local eastern European gang.
Many post deliverers didn't speak any german.
I'm left wing but I understand why ppl want things to change. When I told someone that I don't feel safe and they proceeded to call me right wing and nazi.
Also got cancelled by my friends when I said that someone fleeing their country wouldn't throw away their passports, it's right wing propaganda.
The few refugees I knew where always kind and friendly. But the kids couldn't even draw a square correctly.
I buy in a Syrian supermarket and a Turkish shop and I vote left wing. All the propaganda tries to paint it black/white. That's the issue...
Basically that's because there are no squares or other spaces where they CAN hang out.
I had a similar experience in sweden. In the end they are just meeting their friends. It feels weird I think because whites don't really meet their friends like that. At most they go into a cafè/bar, but you need money for that. And in sweden cafè are really expensive, and pubs… well require you to drink alcohol, so there really aren't many around migrant areas.
In places where kids could hang out there were kickers or you could paint or work with clay. That's all gone, so now lots of them do crime or dumb things when hanging out.
Stuff like healthcare and education regardless of income.
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This is frankly very concerning. As an EU-foreigner, with a non-German name, living in Germany for 13 years now, this is for example one of the main reasons I'm not buying a house or making bigger investments here, not because I don't like it but because there are certain risks associated with being non-German which German people won't ever understand. It wasn't easy before, but Afd leading will be an existential risk despite the naive attempts to rationalize it.
I've discussed this development with some acquaintances who believe the Afd will be their salvation and suddenly fix the country but most of the rhetoric turns around getting rid of foreigners and feeling safer - as the article illustrates. They tell me "Don't worry" or "but you're almost German! You speak German, you're one of the good _ones_ yada yada", well tough luck, I don't look German and that's what they might not want to admit is an issue.
Why this matters? Take all the online/offline posts from that party and its supporters and run them through a classifier (an LLM if you're so inclined) and you'll see a few bad trends pop up, especially in the narrative they are pushing and who this is catering to. Very violent videos, images made with stable diffusion aimed to cater to and mislead a very specific demographic, crafted with an industrial & methodical approach. Topics like "light" nazism support become "salonfähig" again, meaning it is acceptable in group discussions... Now imagine a party like that, supported by the full weight of the military, police, financial sector. The classifier the Afd and their supporters will use to separate foreigner from non-foreigner will be much, much simpler though and will in essence give anyone a license and justification to chase the foreigners, because they won so they must be right, right?
There are not that many foreigners in Germany, it's just that they might be younger, thus more visible and any actions towards them will be visible: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula..., take those numbers and calculate some correlations like "how much 1 single non EU foreigner (let's be clear, those are who they call foreigners) contributes to the rise in the polls" and you'll see what I mean.
It is also no surprise also, that the "east" is siding with the far-right here, and many supporters/commenters/believers, when not German, have a couple of things in common. In this context, voting far-right doesn't strike me as complaining about the current government but rather looking for scapegoats, someone else to make accountable for the common failures.
The country was never really "safe" in the sense that you could do whatever and be risk-free, it's an illusion biased by the fact that looking back is always better (that image with plan and the red dots should illustrate my point), people who claim that "it was safer in the past" were quite certainly living a sheltered and utopic life and are more and more confronted and aware of the workings of the real world. There were always bandits, thugs, thieves, troublemakers. Perhaps the real issues are an aging population & the economical downturn/contractions we're currently experiencing aka: "the beer gets more expensive"-index to which there isn't really a concrete solution from none of the parties or that nobody really wants to address.
Germany is an amazing country, which is no surprise why many people want to live here compared to other countries in the EU or in the world. The future will show if a far-right party will make it better. Whatever happens and whoever leads, I think we now have the tools to keep anyone forever accountable for their words and actions which will directly contribute to our common future. No more 'we didn't know'. My main hope here is that this doesn't escalate into something extremely ugly, either way, I won't hang around to find out if things materialize.
Jetzt geht's um die Wurst!
I think Brexit has been a shambles personally but certainly from the context of this thread you could think getting out was a good thing.
What can you do?
I was born in Germany in 1987. When I went to a middle class-y school in the late 90s and early 2000s, there already were big groups of migrants with a background in muslim countries. When going home alone, there was a constant fear of being targeted. A friend of mine got it bad, went home alone from school, ended up in the hostpital. I was spat on and had to come to school through a wooded area and backdoor for a few weeks because I pushed back and called them names. Fear of violence and sometimes violence itself was an everyday reality. This is a shared experience of many of my adult-life friends.
Today, there are areas of big German cities where ambulances refuse to go like Duisburg-Marxloh where the state has essentially given up. My elderly mother was subject of a gesture by a young muslim man suggesting that her head will be cut off when she was in Dortmund. In the city next to my home village, 2 people were shot by muslim youth last year and this year. Something like that was totally unheard of. Trash on the street and other reckless behavior has increased significantly. Gang violence is on the rise. The son of a friend of mine experienced a knife attack. In elementary school. Another friend of mine became a teacher, and young muslim migrants at his school took one of their fellow students, hold him down while another one landed a kick on his knee, completely destroying it. Public open air baths have become hunting grounds for testosterone driven primates. And it's not just violence by itself, it's open disdain for the state and the native population by significant parts especially of young muslim men. This is way, way, way beyond isolated incidents.
Almost all of these problems are completely nonexistent with Asian or other migrant groups.
OF COURSE not all muslim immigrants are that way. I had multiple personal friends or coworkers from Turkey or Syria. Good, kind folks. Often hard working. My company even pleaded with the government to keep them from deporting one of the Syrians back to wherever. He was learning the language fast and was a good guy. But of course they didn't care. And that's while know migrant street thugs and gang bosses who are on the state's deportation list roam freely. I suspect it's because the "good guy" has an official address registered with the authorities and tries to follow the rules, easy prey for lazy public servants.
It gets even worse: you can't complain about all of this loudly, especially the first part, without getting painted into a corner as a neo-nazi and racist. And while all of this is going on, the public debate, led by state media and career politicians, tries to downplay or ignore the issue. For example, they tried to blame the public baths thing on hot weather. Or write feelgood articles about the local zoo. Or debate about stuff that's completely detached from the needs and worries of the everyday people on the street, like gender-neutrality in munitions procurement for the army. And I haven't even started talking about economical issues like energy prices.
I don't have any sympathy for the AfD or other right-wing idiots. But career politicians will need to touch base with the common German again very quickly, or things will get out of hand.