Hacker News Reader

Comment by eclecticfrank | Hacker News Reader

AFD is not the only opposition party in Germany.

The opposition in the German Bundestag is quite large. Of a total 736 seats there are 319 opposition seats. 78 of those are occupied by AFD politicians. The largest oppostion party is in fact the CDU/CSU with 197 members.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundestag

View on HN

Yet curiously, all those parties share the same politics in the relevant topics, and all work together to prevent the afd to take part in any (federal or local) government. Even where they have massive votes. That is not how the party system is supposed to work.

Outcry of an affected one? Democracy has the achilles heel of aborting itself, not only once that happened. That is why of course parties that want to keep that system need to fight parties that want to abolish it - and til there nothing is wrong in the party system, but it a starts when such a party comes to real constitution changing power.

Just for the books, neither the demos (nor myself) were directly for forbidding the AfD (sure, a lot of people are), because that is not the solution to the underlying problems.

But the exact opposite is happening. By sabotaging the popular vote via cross-party alliances, democracy is already effectively abandoned in Germany. And those who did it make up false statements of that very party being anti-democratic. It's frightening, it's scary. I'm very scared for the future

Not letting an extremist party with 20% or unfortunately even a tad more into power is not sabotaging the popular vote? Each party is free to form a coalition or not, by their conditions and principals. The party has clearly shown and expressed that its anti-democratic. I mean, come on, you know you are too much Nazi if even Le Pen doesn't want to continue coalition with you [1], lol. Funny btw also how the NSDAP cried ANTI-DEMOCRATIC before they did what they did.. rest is history.

Besides that, stop dreaming on, we have too many far rights, but the 20% you call popular vote is still at least half protest votes, barely supporting most points of that party, but so frustrated with the other politics.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/france-s-...

The afd is not anti democratic. Otherwise they would be banned.

Even the parties in power hardly share the same politics on most topics.

I don't think that's true, at least if you look at the topics that Germans think are most important. Which are also the topics of the opposition. There we have statements of parties which are quite different. But effectively when they are part of the government, they all collapse to the same politics. In particular, the FDP and CDU are guilty of this. The others are completely interchangeable anyways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com