Bulletins and News Discussion from February 24th to March 2nd, 2025 - Fascists? In Germany?! - COTW: Germany

Image is a map of the German election results made by Andolu Agency.

The results are in from the German elections, and the outcome is pretty unsurprising for those who have been paying attention to the German socioeconomic situation, and prove our predictions from years ago correct. The conservatives (CDU/CSU) won the plurality of votes (28%), representing a slight gain from 2021. Meanwhile, Scholz's party, the SPD, collapsed from first place in 2021 to third place this year, almost halving their number of seats; the Greens had a less dramatic collapse but still lost many votes. The coalition of CDU/CSU + SPD seems like the most likely end result of this election; something something nothing ever happens but everything keeps getting worse.

Outside the main coalition, there's three important takeaways IMO.

First is that AfD - the far-right Euroskeptic party - has skyrocketed into second place, achieving a full 20% of the vote. This is definitely very concerning and does not exactly bode well for the future, but it isn't necessarily immediately disastrous, because the CDU/CSU (as well as the SDP and Greens) has vowed that they will not form a coalition with the AfD.

Second is that Die Linke - the pro-NATO, pro-Israel socdem party - has mostly reversed its awful performance in 2021, increasing its vote share from 4.9% to 8.8%. What this suggests is that while Germans are fleeing from the center, a very significant minority are going leftwards (though still aren't particularly anti-imperialist).

Third is that the BSW under Wagenknect, who split off from the Die Linke (absolute classic), appears to have barely fallen short of the 5% vote share needed to get seats in the Bundestag. The BSW has some good foreign policies (peace with Russia, for instance) but pretty awful domestic policies; quite patsoccy.

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All the libs I know have brought their Ukraine flags out of storage.
- The response from libs in my life to this has been similar; you have no idea how hard it is to keep from smiling or laughing when they talk about how disgraceful it is or whatever
  Luckily for the sake of ending this horrific war, libs are a group of people with a massive degree of learned helplessness, so everything they do to keep the slaughter of their own allies going will be performative and pointless, even if it is annoying. Though it would be hilarious (read: very bad) if, to keep the meat grinders running and not for anything good, they finally learned how to grow a spine and meaningfully challenge Trump, whatever that would imply in the current American political system.

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