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Notes -
German elections
The German parliament snap election is coming up, and for the first time I actually managed to get my postal voting documents on time and am in a realistic position to send them in before the deadline. That being said, I am really at a loss regarding who to vote for, as I find the Wahl-o-Mat style matching to each party's stated views to be useless due to the gap between what they say and what they wind up doing. I would therefore like to take the opportunity to give a short account of the German party landscape as seen through my distant eyes, and solicit both corrections (especially from our German posters) to these perceptions and advice (from everyone) on how you think I should vote given my own values and weights. (It would probably be a waste of time to try to convince me to change those values and weights so that I vote for the party you would prefer in this setting.)
@mods, let me know if I should just hold it and repost it in the next Transnational Thursday instead.
In descending order of latest polling,
CDU (the Christian Democratic Union), around 30%. The right-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Famously the party of Merkel. Now running Friedrich Merz, an old fox who has been hovering around the candidacy since prehistoric times but was never allowed near it because of his negative levels of charisma. Their primary terminal value is the preservation of the post-war societal order of Germany, with the US representing the Lord God in his heaven, a CDU chancellor as the Pope, a college of cardinals consisting of assorted old-school industrial magnates, publishing house elites and wealthy widows, and the middle and lower classes staying quiet and attending catechism (TV and tabloids). They are pretty agnostic as to how to achieve this, but the chaos of the '00s (Pirate Parties, protests against transatlanticists ventures (Iraq, trade pacts...) that actually worked, people gluing themselves to tracks to sabotage nuclear waste transports...) scared them and so they are firmly convinced that they need to (1) control the lawless element that is internet culture and (2) break the back of grassroots leftist~anarchist civil society orgs.
(I think that half of the reason for Merkel's opening of the refugee tap is in this list: it was openly a hail-mary to improve the increasingly bad bargaining position of their industrial magnate base relative to their workers, and Merkel's political instincts told her that it would drive a wedge right into the contradictions of the civil-society orgs. The other half was EU political checkers downstream from the 2009 debt crisis.)
AfD (the Alternative for Germany), around 21%. Everyone's favourite alt-right populist boogeyman. Formed as a somewhat Frankensteinian merger of various groups, including a "dark enlightment"ish dissident intellectual wing that sublimated out of the old block parties, the rubble of various predominantly East German neonazi parties that had close brushes with being banned and grassroots identitarian anti-Islam movements like PEGIDA. Their terminal values are obtaining respect for a broad coalition of "deplorables" (blue-collar workers, the East German poor, low-openness rural dwellers), reducing the number of visible foreigners, and defending masculine-coded aspects of German culture (cars, engineering, firework, beer). Other parties, with the encouragement of the media, have agreed upon a "firewall" which says that the political system should produce outcomes as if they did not exist. Defecting e.g. by proposing laws that would not pass but for their votes is punished harshly.
SPD (the Social-Democratic Party of Germany), around 16%. The left-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Lost their status as a possible solo governing party irretrievably, after entering a coalition with Merkel's party in 2005. (Just imagine if, in Trump's first term, Bernie ran on an independent ticket, no single party wound up getting a majority, and the Democrats agreed to give their EC votes to Jeb in return for some cabinet positions.) The current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is running again (he was carried by a coalition with the Greens and the FDP which fell apart), but barring some complete upheaval he is understood to stand no chance. Traditionally, they were the party of blue-collar workers and socialists, but by the early 2000s had become culturally alienated from their base and earned resentment for a severely pursestring-tightening reform of social programmes. It's hard to discern what their terminal values really are now - my sense is that they just pine for the old political arrangement, and think that if socialism must be wound down, it should be them doing it, since they will do with gentle sadness rather than hatred (think the Goebbels family poisoning its children).
Bündnis 90/die Grünen (the Greens), around 14%. A counterculture party that gradually worked itself into being the culture party as its members grew up and got white-collar jobs through the '90s. They are sort of like the medieval church, in that everyone within the mainstream must profess that they are the arbiters of morality, and just disagrees about the piety-practicality tradeoff. Accordingly, every major party can form a coalition with them, though their relationship with the FDP is strained. They had an interesting character development arc that started when the foreign minister who led Germany to join the American crusade in Afghanistan in 2002 was from their party, and resulted in them gradually turning from a virulently anti-American hippie party into the most pro-American party in the German landscape. They are the party of the young, well-educated, and urban women of all ages. Their terminal values are to destroy the masculine-coded aspects of German culture, US-style SJ, environmentalism, and to instantiate a decisive struggle of good against evil, with themselves as the vanguard of Good. The "grown-up" wing of the party believes that the principal battleground of this struggle will be the USA, and the proper role of the Greens and Europe more generally is to be the angelic mentor figure that guides the protagonist (US progressives) on his quest and orients his moral compass to save him from his human flaws (attachment to idiosyncrasies like free speech, unregulated business and self-sufficiency), but this sometimes creates tension with an unruly youth wing that takes America's performative self-loathing too literally (which results in clashes over Israel, Facebook etc.), as well as remnant elements from before they fell to American memes (e.g. anti-vaxxers, anti-globalists, pacifists).
Die Linke (The Left), >5%. A party that came to be as a merger of West German hard left, some SPD evaporates and the remnants of East Germany's communist uniparty. Actual communism is thoroughly discredited in Germany, which left them in an ideological vacuum that was filled by an incompatible combination of Greens-but-anti-bourgeois and East German cultural identity (\setminus the neonazis) plus more socialism. This resulted in the party finally fracturing into two a few years ago, with most of the sitting parliamentarians joining the BSW listed just below. This party got the "anti-bourgeois Green" component, and for a while it looked like they would just sink into irrelevance, but they are experiencing an eleventh-hour comeback. I can't get a good read of their terminal values, but I guess it is some patchwork of "more socialism" and instantiating the same decisive struggle of good against evil as above, but with the USA and Israel shoved into "Evil" coalition. It is conceivable that they could get into power as part of a coalition with SPD and Greens under certain circumstances.
BSW (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), <5%. The "East German identity" splinter of the above, and the newest party on the map. Uncharacteristically for Germany, they are completely centered around the eponymous founder, a rhetorical firebrand East German communist cadre with a microeconomics PhD. Their terminal values amount to "Sahra Wagenknecht should have a say in German politics", more socialism, and a "respect for masculine East German culture" package that is quite similar to that of the AfD; flowing from that, they advocate for keeping out refugees, reindustrialisation and rapprochement with Russia, but those details seem to be negotiable. They seem to vote and speak against the CDU's police state agenda, but this might just be because they expect to find themselves at the business end of it. They inherited many parliamentary seats from the Linke and initially looked to be pushing 10% as they absorbed anti-system sentiment from people that for one reason or another could not palate the AfD, but teething problems/drama (such as a whole state chapter going rogue against the federal party) and a deeply unsympathetic press has now driven them below their other half and the 5% threshold that generally needs to be cleared to enter parliament.
FDP (the Liberal Democratic Party), 4%. The third member of the shattered governing coalition. A party that has been part of the post-war German fabric from the very start and has been through some extreme highs and lows, being the "kingmaker" quite similar to the British Lib Dems for a while. They are ostensibly a civil rights/libertarian party, but in practice their national incarnation has been a "business bro" party for as long as I can remember. (The Europarl offshoot is a different story.) Their only terminal value is to lower taxes and hurdles for their upper-middle-class freelancer and independent white-collar business owner clientele, though they think that if this clientele could also have lower obstacles to do whatever pastimes they enjoy (sex, drugs, rock and roll, cars) this would be a nice plus. Because of this, for the longest time, their preferred partner was the authoritarian-leaning CDU, as they found that the CDU is not particularly opposed to business bros as long as they don't threaten the true elites (Bertelsmanns and Albrechts) and can be effectively nudged by the threat of remembering the civil rights component of the party platform. The media has been dragging them through the mud continuously since they were seen to have backstabbed the coalition (in a way that is particularly damaging to the cause of the Greens, who are unsurprisingly overwhelmingly supported by the newsrooms), with the result that they will almost certainly not make it past the 5% threshold. There is also a element of most everyone being fed up with their shit, since the 4% represent approximately all the people that actually care for tax breaks for freelancers/independents and they have time and time again proven to be a terrible political ally (as they don't care about anything else, but are willing to theatrically pretend to have other pieces of agenda just to have bargaining mass to trade for them).
Now, I am really unsure who I should vote for here. My own preferences are, in loosely descending order of weight,
As I see it,
Voting FDP would weakly signal a theoretical vote for civil rights, but in reality it would only be a vote for economic freedom (far down on my list) and I'd have to watch my actual top preference being made a mockery of. They will also almost certainly not get in.
Voting AfD might seem natural considering the dot product, but apart from a personal distaste for the neonazi component that lives on in them, I don't think it would actually be tactically correct. They also lean pro-surveillance/police state, being authoritarians. They are well outnumbered by people who categorically consider them to be the devil, and empowering them further has a pretty strong effect of also strengthening Green ideology by toxoplasmosis. It's needless to say that every subvariant of the Greens is my political nemesis, but the limit of letting the AfD-Green toxoplasma spread in Germany in my expectation looks like maybe 65% Green to 35% AfD, which would be much worse than the current situation. Alternatively the system could just ban them if they get too close to power, which would demoralise and create precedent for banning any out-of-window opposition.
Voting BSW is my current teeth-gritting top choice, insofar as they are a neat non-toxoplasmic "against the system" option that actually has a chance to get in and I agree with them on a lot of points (Russia, industry, anti-Green, anti-refugees, anti-surveillance). However, they are now more likely to not get in, I find their focus on the person at the helm silly and politically a doomed meme in the German landscape, and I'm not actually on board with a lot of their tankie DNA.
Voting the Linke might be an interesting "preemptive compromise" signal like "if it has to be something Green, this is the most palatable form of Green politics to me", and also signals opposition to the system as the CDU-SPD block tried and only recently failed to uphold an AfD-like "firewall" against them. However, my volume of object-level agreement with them is fairly low.
The SPD, to the extent they have an identity of their own, are being something like a party of moderation (note e.g. Scholz's resistance to maximalist support for Ukraine). However, they are now weakened even further, which almost guarantees that if they get into power they will just be a canvas for whatever other parties are in the coalition to paint on. If they do not make it into government, a vote for them is at most a weak signal that Scholz's politics of moderation was not so bad, because they really don't stand for much.
I have taken to shocking my normie friends by saying that if they actually go through with the fireworks ban I will snap and vote AfD (since that is just going too far with the sadistic culture defacement, and I'm a card-carrying pyromaniac), but so far this is just meant as bluster.
I'm not considering the other two parties because for both of them negating every single vote they cast in parliament would have gotten closer to my preferences than what they did. Minor party voting in Germany is a non-starter at the moment (and the Pirate Party got converted into a Green Party Youth Wing without the lame adults watching). What should I do?
I think the firewall around the AFD will break, one way or another. If it doesnt happen this time, their votes just keep growing. Weve had this experience two-and-a-half times now with our Austrian right-populists, and frankly I hope the right-right coalition talks work out. Im sympathetic to the FPÖ, but Kickl has in many ways set himself up to fail to govern, and itll only get worse if he gets a better bargaining position. I dont know how the details here play out with the AfD, but this is the sort of thing Id be thinking about.
The other thing is coalitions. From those polling numbers it looks like CDU+AfD or CDU+medium+small are possible, but all within the margin of error. So I would think about which of those coalitions you want to be possible, and who will best balance out the CDU once they compromise.
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You should cut the highly impractical gordian knot of wanting your terminal values supported, wanting it in a politically likely-to-succeed package, and wanting to not provoke any political resistance. Maybe by becoming a single-issue voter.
It worked for me.
t. low-openness rural dweller
Well, if I become single-issue for anything it would make sense for it to be my top entry (civil rights), which however has the distinction of presenting a dilemma all by itself - the only apparent civil rights party on paper (FDP) turns out to actually more often function as an, uh, Steigbügelhalter (handmaiden?) for the most anti-civil-rights party (CDU).
If you want civil rights in Germany, you just plain lost already. As you note, the FDP is the only party still on anyone's RADAR that even remotely supports them on principle, and your analysis on the practicalities is correct. And this really is just democracy working as intended. Everyone wants more government that does more things they want done; whom do you hear calling for less government involvement in issue A who does then then turn around and demand more government involvement in the rest of the Alphabet? I maintain that Germans hate the freedom of others more than they love their own. Tell me it isn't so.
Well, but it wasn't always so, was it? I still have memories of a different Germany, where children and their parents would throw Polish firecrackers at the other kids and families who pissed them off for catharsis, where a bunch of 9 year olds could walk into the local OBI, buy a hammer and nails and go build a treehouse in the woods from trash collected in the local gravel pit, of looking for a flatshare in Berlin for a summer job and finding that the place I contacted was actually a ruined squatter house, of taking a ride from a ride-sharing side and the driver turning out to be a construction worker driving a decrepit Opel station wagon at 210km/h the whole way to Munich. Some generations back, I hear, kids would still collect discarded car motors and build human-sized soap-box cars to race each other in.
Germany is the country that begot the CCC and actually saw its foreign policy being made to yield to popular protest time and time again. German is the language that has words for something like the natural sovereignty of an adult individual (Mündigkeit), with attendant rights and responsibilities, and the taking away of it (Bevormundung), which don't even translate into any other language I know. I don't think this aspect of the culture would have shriveled as it did without enemy action; but to see culture as a static inevitability when the enemy sees it as a target is just surrender. What can I do if I want to bring back these things?
I have no idea. I wish I did. If you ever find out, please let me know.
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Ordnung muss sein.
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