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Soriek  9mo ago (text post)   1604 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 26

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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You mean the governing SPD, surely?

Laziness on my part - I even read a piece recently on the CDU victories in state elections describing them as the opposition party. I looked up the German government but saw they were the largest party, pattern matched that to Scholz having high profile roles in Merkel's governments, and assumed away the rest. All I can say in my defense is apparently our resident German was as surprised as I am!

Surprised by how easily I missed it! I won't have it said that I didn't know which parties formed the current government - their election and their actions were of significant impact on my life through pandemic measures and housing market, and I have spent many hours facepalming over their misdeeds.

Has their rule policy-wise just not been very different from the previous governments?

Not much, no, they were both middle-of-the road establishment governments, both with SPD involvement, only one with the conservative CDU and the other with the Greens and liberal FDP on board. So naturally the previous government was a bit slower overall, whereas the current one accelerated the timetable for various progressive doodads like trans rights and climate projects, until they suddenly found out that the FDP isn't there just for show and that little yellow party is currently telling everyone else to stop wasting taxpayer money. Fun to watch. But really, in the end nobody's rocking the boat, and the boat of Germany is big and bureaucratically overloaded and sits low in the water and is slow to turn. There's nothing revolutionary to expect.

Interesting, thanks for the expanded detail.

How did I miss that? I guess we had such a long stretch of CDU governance under Mutti Merkel, it just became second nature to assume that they're always in charge and whatever interlude is happening at present isn't a real government.

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