This is the most positive spin I’ve heard regarding the election results. I’d love to hear the thoughts of our German comrades on this one.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I’ll see if I can listen later today.
On first thought, this is proof of US influence. Sure the currently governing US capitalist faction (tech billionaires) likely won’t see their party of choice (AfD) in government, but the traditional Wall Street and MIC establishment will be very happy to see a hawkish Chancellor from Blackrock in Berlin.
But of course this result was made possible by older people voting CDU as they always have, regardless of the candidates, contemporary policies, and conditions. Younger people tended to vote for non-centrist alternatives, whether reactionary or nominally leftist.
I think that in the broad strokes his analysis is mostly correct. He gives a fairly accurate description of what the current situation looks like, so in that sense this is a pretty good if basic overview. But i think he’s being overly optimistic about the capability and more importantly the willingness of parties like Die Linke and AfD to be a real opposition to the neoliberal centrists.
Yes the center will keep collapsing, but neither the fake-populist right nor the socdem left (which is what Die Linke ultimately are) offer an actual alternative. The AfD, when you put aside their nativist, nationalist rhetoric, is ultimately just another neolib, pro-corporate party that wants to cut welfare spending and taxes on the rich. Their alternative is not an alternative at all, and when push comes to shove they will bend the knee to the Euro-Atlanticist dominion just like their counterparts in Italy have.
Die Linke wants to preserve and increase social spending and to tax the rich and corporations more, but still doing so within the framework of the current system that was built up by the old parties. They don’t have the courage to oppose either the EU system that is increasingly siphoning away sovereignty (economically, politically and of course monetarily) from the member states to Brussels and keeps member states locked into neo-liberal economics, nor the false narratives about Russia-Ukraine that the warmongers rely on to justify increasing military spending (which goes hand in hand with cutting social spending), or even the basic decency to call what is happening in occupied Palestine what it is: a genocide.
A party that is too scared to challenge the increasingly unpopular EU, too scared to be called “Putin agents” and so has to virtue signal about how much they too hate Russia, and that is petrified at the prospect of calling out Zionist lies about the Resistance and allows suppression of pro-Palestinian voices to occur unchallenged is not going to dare to break with the current failing system.
The threat of the AfD is going to be used as a cudgel with which to keep the left in line, even as the CDU (and inevitably the SPD) end up adopting pretty much exactly the AfD’s position on immigration thinking that this will win back AfD voters.
That’s exactly what we’ve already seen over the last ten years of the AfD getting ever stronger, and especially the last year or so after the Correctiv exposé on what the AfD says in private. The AfD even bragged that this is what’s happening and it’s what they want, but nobody paid attention to that part.
Thanks for the insight. It seems no matter where in the world you are, succdems 'gon succ. Our social democrats just spend the last 9 years propping up the centre-right’s regime and now they’re headed to into complete irrelevancy with the right probable to take power.
