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Hot on the heels of One Nation’s stunning showing in the South Australian election – coming from almost nothing to the second-largest vote count of all the parties – Germany’s AfD party has similarly surged in a state election. While, like One Nation, the AfD didn’t win, it’s putting the fear of God into the left-establishment.
So, it’s time to play that ol’ drinking game: how many legacy media ‘reports’ will peddle the opinion/slur ‘far-right’?
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party more than doubled its share of the vote in a state election in the west of the country, underscoring its national popularity outside its eastern heartlands.
Drink!
The significance of the result in Germany’s west needs to be understood in terms of its enduring post-reunification social divisions. The ‘Wessi’, the Westerners, have been the wealthy ones who could afford to vote for ‘progressive’ policies like open borders, welfare-for-all and Climate Cultism. On the other hand, as a ‘Wessi’ once sneered to me, Ossi nicht geld: “Easterners have no money”. The East Germans, impoverished by half a century of communism, couldn’t afford the luxury of progressive politics. So, ‘far-right’ parties like the AfD were the peculiarity of the Ossi.
Not any more.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’ ruling conservatives, the Christian Democratic Union, won the ballot in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate with 30 per cent of the vote, dislodging the centre-left Social Democrats party, which received 26 per cent of the votes.
The SD (an ominous enough set of initials in Germany) had held the seat for 35 years. The CDU are ‘conservative’ in name only: Angela Merkel was a CDU ‘conservative’, after all. The real story, as in SA (another set of ominous initials in German parlance!) is the rise of a real centre-right party to shake the establishment duopoly in yet another nation.
AfD came third with 19.5 per cent of the vote, more than double the result it received at the last state election five years ago when it got 8.3 per cent.
But the far-right party is consistently tracking strong support in national polls, often vying for first with Merz’ conservative party.
Drink!
This latest strong showing comes after the AfD came third in a state election in Baden-Wurttemberg earlier March showing that it is making progress in the western part of the country.
The ballot in Rhineland-Palatinate was the second of five state races this year in what is considered a litmus test of the national sentiment as the AfD seeks to overtake Merz’s conservatives in national polls.
The AfD’s jump of more than 11 points is significant given the losses of the three governing parties (SPD, Greens, and FDP) – and the CDU and Left Party only making marginal gains.
As a measure of how ‘conservative’ the CDU really is, recall that the Social Democrat Party are its federal coalition partners.
The SPD’s defeat at the hands of its coalition partner could plunge it deeper into crisis nationally and destabilize the government in Berlin as the party seeks to retrench and appeal to what’s left of its left-leaning base.
The SPD’s vote share collapsed by around 10 percentage points to 25.9 per cent. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), meanwhile, came first with 31 per cent of the vote, taking control of the state premiership from the SPD after 35 years in opposition.
The AfD are in no doubt as to the implications of its result in the left-leaning West of the country.
“We have achieved record results,” Alice Weidel, one of the AfD’s national leaders, said on Sunday. “Voters appreciate the work we’ve done as opposition party, and we will continue on this path so that we can join the government in the next election.”
But, of course, the establishment has stacked the odds in its own favour.
To do so, the party would need to tear down Germany’s so-called firewall, which has been in place since the end of World War II and has prevented the far right from governing in a coalition with mainstream parties at both the state and national level.
Drink!
In two states in the former East Germany where elections are set for September, the AfD is so far ahead in polls that its leaders hope to secure an absolute majority in at least one of the contests, a result that would bring the party to real governing power for the first time since its founding in 2013.
“While you go on and on about world politics, German industry is collapsing,” Weidel, the AfD leader, told Merz in the Bundestag earlier this week. “The exodus is in full swing.”
As it is across much of the world, from One Nation in Australia, to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, to the right-ward shift in Latin America spearheaded by Javier Milei.
We’ve had half a century of the globalist ‘New World Order’ and we’re fed up.
