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German federal elections taking place


The Caspian Hare

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-election-podcast-what-you-need-to-know-about-sunday-s-vote-a-1168535.html

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This Sunday, Germans will head to the polls to elect the next Bundestag, the country's national parliament, a vote that will also determine whether Angela Merkel will land a fourth term as the country's chancellor. It's an election that began with an air of excitement as Martin Schulz, Merkel's Social Democratic (SPD) challenger, returned from Brussels, where he had been the president of the European Parliament. Initially, it looked as though his candidacy could upend politics in Berlin, which has slumbered through four years of a Grand Coalition, pairing Merkel's conservatives with the center-left SPD that Schulz now leads.

After seeing his political fortunes soar early in the polls, Schulz lost traction following a series of losses for his party in state elections and a failure to score political points with his message of greater equality in Germany. It now appears that Merkel will easily cruise past the finish line and lead the next government

 

 

https://www.thelocal.de/20170922/major-parties-face-heavy-losses-in-election-as-germany-****s-to-the-right

 
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A poll published by public broadcaster ZDF on Friday shows that both the major parties are likely to suffer major losses, while the small right-wing parties are on the rise.

The ZDF Politikbarometer poll shows Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) on 36 percent support, with the Social Democrats (SPD) on a miserable 21.5 percent.

Germany’s two largest parties have been united in a “grand coalition” since 2013, a fact which appears to have led to an erosion in support for both of them.

If the ZDF figures are accurate, Merkel’s party will suffer a 5.5 percent drop in the vote. The SPD meanwhile will lose 4 percent of the vote share they held in 2013 and would suffer the worst result in their history.

 

 

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If Germans return her to power, I think the die of their future is irrevocably cast.

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3 hours ago, The Russian Hare said:

Looks like Merkel retain job and Afd gains seats in parliament, Social democrats lose some

https://www.thelocal.de/20170924/live-turnout-high-as-germany-elections-new-national-parliament

Yep she can continue her disastrous policies which allowed the far right to gain a foothold in parliament.

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How long will it now take to form a Government?

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No telling, since nobody want to work with Afd the only choice may be a unlikely "Jamaica" coalition (based on the party colors)

https://www.thelocal.de/20170925/merkel-faces-tricky-coalition-talks-after-nightmare-election-victory

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This will likely force Merkel to team up with two smaller, and very different, parties to form a lineup dubbed the "Jamaica coalition" because the three parties' colours match those of the Caribbean country's flag.

One is the pro-business and liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which scored a 10.7-percent comeback after crashing out of parliament four years ago.

The other is the left-leaning, ecologist Greens party, a pioneer of Germany's anti-nuclear movement which won 8.9 percent on campaign pledges to drive forward the country's clean energy shift and fight climate change.

The far-left Die Linke, traditionally an opposition party, took 9.2 percent of votes.

 

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5 hours ago, stevewinn said:

How long will it now take to form a Government?

There is no fixed time frame or deadline to determine a new Government. As per Germany parliament laws, the former Government will govern until it will be taken over by the new one and this can take some month. I expect it by December/January.

Edited by toast
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19 hours ago, toast said:

There is no fixed time frame or deadline to determine a new Government. As per Germany parliament laws, the former Government will govern until it will be taken over by the new one and this can take some month. I expect it by December/January.

Does this period of time - forming a government does it have a paralysing effect on the Government? im thinking here not on the day to day running but in areas of legislation and policy.

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7 hours ago, stevewinn said:

Does this period of time - forming a government does it have a paralysing effect on the Government? im thinking here not on the day to day running but in areas of legislation and policy.

No, I would not say that the Bundestag/parliament is paralysed during that time period until the coalition negotiations have been finished and the CDU, which has the majority of votes itself, has agreed on a coalition with other parties. By law, the first parliamentary session after the election must take place 30 days after the election which means on OCT24. Until then, nothing big, like legislation negotiations, will happen in the Bundestag.

 

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It was the Russkies again! What was? The relative success of AfD, of course. Naturally. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/26/the-rise-of-the-new-mccarthyism/

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There is a claim by the virulently anti-Russian Atlantic Council that some “anonymous troll accounts” promoted some AfD complaint about possible voter fraud and that it was picked up by “a Russian-language bot-net.” 

“Mr. Putin would like nothing better than to generate doubts, fog, cracks and uncertainty around the German pillar of Europe,” the Post editorial said. “He relishes infiltrating chaos and mischief into open societies. In this case, supporting the far-right AfD is extraordinarily cynical, given how many millions of Russians died to defeat the fascists seven decades ago.”

 

:yes:

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2 hours ago, Manfred von Dreidecker said:

It was the Russkies again! What was? The relative success of AfD, of course. Naturally. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/26/the-rise-of-the-new-mccarthyism/

:yes:

On the AfD the media here in the UK, especially the BBC keep referring to them as the "far right" i thought far right parties where banned in German politics. If they are banned then the AfD cannot be far right, or is it because they are against immigration that allows the BBC ect..to use "far right" and get away with it without correction.

Edited by stevewinn
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For a start, they're against increasing tension and conflict with Russia, something that was quite high on the agenda of the original NSDAP, as I recall. 

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On 27.9.2017 at 11:22 AM, stevewinn said:

On the AfD the media here in the UK, especially the BBC keep referring to them as the "far right" i thought far right parties where banned in German politics. If they are banned then the AfD cannot be far right, or is it because they are against immigration that allows the BBC ect..to use "far right" and get away with it without correction.

The German Federal Constitutional Court does not take paraphrases like far-right or far-left as assessments to judge about the constitutional conformity of a party but constitutional conformity is doing the trick here, means, parties that are not constitutional conform will not get an authorisation to act. We still have the NPD here but they dont play a role and got only 1,3% at the elections last Sunday. But yes, the AfD is a far-right party but it seems that they are in the process to eliminate themselfs within the next years due to splitting into various far-right parties.

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13 hours ago, toast said:

The German Federal Constitutional Court does not take paraphrases like far-right or far-left as assessments to judge about the constitutional conformity of a party but constitutional conformity is doing the trick here, means, parties that are not constitutional conform will not get an authorisation to act. We still have the NPD here but they dont play a role and got only 1,3% at the elections last Sunday. But yes, the AfD is a far-right party but it seems that they are in the process to eliminate themselfs within the next years due to splitting into various far-right parties.

I've just read on the BBC News website "Who are the AfD?" The party seems to centre around. immigration. anti-EU.

It seems from that the AfD's election campaign focused on Merkels millions, IE, mass immigration #allwelcome.

Islam does not belong to Germany. would ban foreign funding of mosques in Germany, ban the burka (full-body veil) and the Muslim call to prayer, and put all imams through a state vetting procedure.

on the EU, promises to abandon the euro and reintroduce the Deutschmark.

AfD says, opposing all "centralising" moves in the EU, and anything that smacks of Euro-federalism.

If the EU fails to reform and continues centralising, AfD says, the party will seek to pull Germany out of the EU.

Do those policies make them far right? or is the BBC failing to mention other policies, because if the above is as bad as it gets I wouldn't call them far right myself, 

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30 minutes ago, stevewinn said:

Do those policies make them far right? or is the BBC failing to mention other policies, because if the above is as bad as it gets I wouldn't call them far right myself, 

Well, if a top head of a political party say that we (Germans) should be proud about "our" WW2 soldiers, there is no room for doubts anymore to think about if they are nazis/far-right or not:

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AfD co-founder says Germans should be proud of its second world war soldiers. Alexander Gauland says Germans ‘have the right’ to be proud of the achievements of nation’s soldiers in two world wars. Germans should be proud of what their soldiers achieved during the first and second world wars, the top candidate of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has said in the run-up to elections on 24 September at which the party is expected to enter parliament.

The Guardian

Furthermore, the public prosecutor's office of Mülhausen introduced investigation proceedings this month against Gauland due to the suspicion of incitement of the people. During a public election rally G. stated that she (Aydan Saliha Özoğuz, a female member of the Bundestag) "should be disposed in Anatolia". Thats 1A Goebbels rethoric. 

Another top-head of the AfD is Björn Höcke:

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AfD politician says Germany should stop atoning for Nazi crimes Björn Höcke sparks fury by calling for tradition to end and labelling Holocaust memorial a ‘monument of shame’

A politician from the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has broken with the country’s postwar political consensus by calling for a “180-degree turn” from the tradition of remembering and atoning for the Nazi era.

In a speech in a beer hall in Dresden, Björn Höcke, who leads the party in the eastern state of Thuringia, railed against Germany’s decade-long tradition of acknowledging the crimes of the National Socialist era, describing the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame”.

The Guardian

 

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@toast and with all that said they finished 3rd with 12.6% of the vote? Remarkable for a party that's three or four years old? the mood in Germany must be changing.

 

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7 hours ago, stevewinn said:

@toast and with all that said they finished 3rd with 12.6% of the vote? Remarkable for a party that's three or four years old? the mood in Germany must be changing.

The success of the AfD was mainly boosted by the votes in the states of Sachsen (27%), Sachsen-Anhalt (19,6%), Brandenburg (20,2%) and Thüringen (22,7%). Interesting fact is, that all these states are located on the soil of the former German Democratic Republic, which was a communist dictatorship. The PEGIDA movement started in Dresden (Sachsen) and its my theory that a lot of ppl there are very vulnerable for populism as a result of decades of political oppression by a dictatorial regime. With the fall of the wall, everyone there had the new option to think/speak free and to choose a political party out of a lot but a lot of these ppl had/have the tendency to do a political U-turn by reflex, means to switch from far-far-left to far-far-right. That was very well known by the founders of the AfD and PEGIDA as well and they managed successful to unite the squallers to the benefit of that political stream. But even the AfD is in the Bundestag now, and as 3rd, I do not see that Germany is in trouble now. On the contrary, because the more these morons are public, which they are now because of their public presence in the Bundestag and their right to speak there, the earlier more and more ppl will recognize that these champagne-nazis have no real message in their populist insanity.

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14 hours ago, toast said:

The success of the AfD was mainly boosted by the votes in the states of Sachsen (27%), Sachsen-Anhalt (19,6%), Brandenburg (20,2%) and Thüringen (22,7%). Interesting fact is, that all these states are located on the soil of the former German Democratic Republic, which was a communist dictatorship. The PEGIDA movement started in Dresden (Sachsen) and its my theory that a lot of ppl there are very vulnerable for populism as a result of decades of political oppression by a dictatorial regime. With the fall of the wall, everyone there had the new option to think/speak free and to choose a political party out of a lot but a lot of these ppl had/have the tendency to do a political U-turn by reflex, means to switch from far-far-left to far-far-right. That was very well known by the founders of the AfD and PEGIDA as well and they managed successful to unite the squallers to the benefit of that political stream. But even the AfD is in the Bundestag now, and as 3rd, I do not see that Germany is in trouble now. On the contrary, because the more these morons are public, which they are now because of their public presence in the Bundestag and their right to speak there, the earlier more and more ppl will recognize that these champagne-nazis have no real message in their populist insanity.

But equally the fear must be if these AfD members succeed in not making a fool of themselves in the Bundestag it might give the party a legitimacy and give traction to possible future electoral gains.

I see you like many in the political media have used the words populist or populism to explain or describe who voted for this party. - but the definition of populist or populism is: "a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people". the question i'd like to ask Merkel, and all the other leaders who explain the vote going against them as populist or populism why are they not representing the ordinary people? if the Far right parties are populist representing the interest of the ordinary people then who the heck are the likes of Merkel representing? 

Edited by stevewinn
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21 hours ago, stevewinn said:

 the question i'd like to ask Merkel, and all the other leaders who explain the vote going against them as populist or populism why are they not representing the ordinary people? if the Far right parties are populist representing the interest of the ordinary people then who the heck are the likes of Merkel representing? 

This is the core of the problem. I always thought that in the a democracy the elected polticians have nothing to do but to carry out the wishes of those who voted for them. But Merkel and her followers continue to live in their utopia, in a fully globalized world and the EU a mega-multicultural super-power. Ordinary people can be held at bay when all parties are on the same main-course. This plan worked for decades. And at least here in West-Germany it is the anger about this that drove many people to the AFD (in my state 12,2 %). But now there is real opposition and it will change a lot.

I know quite a lot of people who voted for the AFD, including family members. "Now you need to deliver a protest-vote," is what they said. I didn't because I find it irresponsible.

I agree with Toast that there are many questionable people in this party, and a lot of them presumably tight neo-nazis. I also agree with Toast that the nazi-problem is mainly located in former East-Germany. I was always against a quick 're-unification' without referendum.

It looks like the discontent among ordinary people will continue to grow with this 'Jamaica-coalition'. Merkel will suck the FDP and the Green party like she did with the SPD, CSU and her own CDU. She is hungry like a vampire and I am afraid it will be easy for the AFD to grab even more votes in future.
The problem with Merkel is that she thinks she is right and she has obviously incompetent advisors (yes men).
My advise for her would be to step down before the 4th Reich stands up.

 

Edited by Katzenking
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3 hours ago, Katzenking said:

This is the core of the problem. I always thought that in the a democracy the elected polticians have nothing to do but to carry out the wishes of those who voted for them. But Merkel and her followers continue to live in their utopia, in a fully globalized world and the EU a mega-multicultural super-power. Ordinary people can be held at bay when all parties are on the same main-course. This plan worked for decades. And at least here in West-Germany it is the anger about this that drove many people to the AFD (in my state 12,2 %). But now there is real opposition and it will change a lot.

I know quite a lot of people who voted for the AFD, including family members. "Now you need to deliver a protest-vote," is what they said. I didn't because I find it irresponsible.

I agree with Toast that there are many questionable people in this party, and a lot of them presumably tight neo-nazis. I also agree with Toast that the nazi-problem is mainly located in former East-Germany. I was always against a quick 're-unification' without referendum.

It looks like the discontent among ordinary people will continue to grow with this 'Jamaica-coalition'. Merkel will suck the FDP and the Green party like she did with the SPD, CSU and her own CDU. She is hungry like a vampire and I am afraid it will be easy for the AFD to grab even more votes in future.
The problem with Merkel is that she thinks she is right and she has obviously incompetent advisors (yes men).
My advise for her would be to step down before the 4th Reich stands up.

 

With the AfD having come 3rd in the election they might change their style to appeal to more voters in the future by starting to weed out the members who hold questionable views. Trouble for the AfD like with every young party they suffer with some in their ranks who need to be de-selected because of their views. Its the same over here with UKIP, but even the well established parties in the UK, Labour, the Conservatives have members in its ranks who get convicted for actual crimes but it never makes the main stream news. 

 

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On 30.9.2017 at 0:43 PM, stevewinn said:

But equally the fear must be if these AfD members succeed in not making a fool of themselves in the Bundestag it might give the party a legitimacy and give traction to possible future electoral gains.

I see you like many in the political media have used the words populist or populism to explain or describe who voted for this party. - but the definition of populist or populism is: "a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people". the question i'd like to ask Merkel, and all the other leaders who explain the vote going against them as populist or populism why are they not representing the ordinary people? if the Far right parties are populist representing the interest of the ordinary people then who the heck are the likes of Merkel representing? 

My interpretation of populism is different to yours. What I call populism is when a political party is pointing the finger up "to the people above" and claiming that these "people above" are responsible for the problems of "us people here at the base". You call these ppl ordinary people and I would like to ask you what does that mean exactly. If you mean ppl with a low income, please note that the minimum wage here in Germany has been established under Merkel`s government in 2015, for example. Ok, the minimum wage of 8,84€ is too low in my opinion but thats another story.

Edited by toast
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47 minutes ago, toast said:

My interpretation of populism is different to yours. What I call populism is when a political party is pointing the finger up "to the people above" and claiming that these "people above" are responsible for the problems of "us people here at the base". You call these ppl ordinary people and I would like to ask you what does that mean exactly. If you mean ppl with a low income, please note that the minimum wage here in Germany has been established under Merkel`s government in 2015, for example. Ok, the minimum wage of 8,84€ is too low in my opinion but thats another story.

Ordinary people = the average or what is common in any given society given the whole population.

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18 hours ago, stevewinn said:

With the AfD having come 3rd in the election they might change their style to appeal to more voters in the future by starting to weed out the members who hold questionable views. Trouble for the AfD like with every young party they suffer with some in their ranks who need to be de-selected because of their views. Its the same over here with UKIP, but even the well established parties in the UK, Labour, the Conservatives have members in its ranks who get convicted for actual crimes but it never makes the main stream news. 

 

We will see. But for now the more radical members stay and the more pragmatic people leave. Including the party-founder Bernd_Lucke  (his new party ALFA was not even on the ballot) and recently Frauke_Petry and her husband who obviously seek to found a new party as well.
And it tells a lot when even she considers the AFD too radical.
But I think the people will continue to vote the original and the nazi-etiquette is exactly what many like because it guarantees a maximum of anger and embarrassment in the establishment and (what many hope) ultimately forces the big parties to solve the migration issue once and for all and to become much more EU-sceptic.

Edited by Katzenking
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