Why the Blob is falling to the AfD in Germany. By Srdja Trifovic.
The AfD’s biggest gains came not from the CDU [the Christian Democratic Union, the German Chancellor’s party], but from the ranks of disaffected voters who had sat out previous elections: a net total of around 170,000 votes.
People who had once stopped believing their vote made a difference, because politics was deliberately defined as something apolitical and the realm of experts, now voted for the party that promised a fundamentally different setup. This is the result of decades of frustration with a political class that answers every concrete question with a procedural description.
The CDU is the biggest culprit and the biggest loser, deservedly so. It garnered a mere 17.2 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt — a truly historic defeat.
To explain the disaster, however, its leading figures resorted to yet more painful platitudes. This phenomenon deserves to be presented in some detail since it revealed with remarkable clarity the party’s — and the establishment’s — intellectual and moral bankruptcy. …
Why did the blob do so badly? It’s born-to-rule politicians are so dishonest:
Wiebke Winter, a young CDU parliamentary group leader in the northern city of Bremen … the young rising star of the CDU, replied that “the results need to be examined closely.”…
Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery Philipp Amthor, recited almost didactically on the ARD network a slightly different set of platitudes. “Democracy means rule by the majority,” he declared. “I believe all one-dimensional explanations for this shift in the party system fall short, all one-dimensional descriptions are inadequate.” …
Winter and Amthor, both in their thirties, share a common biography: Junge Union (CDU youth wing), party scholarship, early mandate, and office. Amthor was in the Bundestag at the age of 24; Winter, who is also considered a prominent advocate of an expansive climate policy within the Union, already leads a parliamentary group at 30.
What the blob filters for:
Winter and Amthor represent political high-flyers who learned at a young age that, in German politics, those who say something substantial are not rewarded, but those who say nothing wrong certainly are:
A dying generation of politicians of the Christian Democratic persuasion have built their entire careers on avoiding to address any issues of substance. They got away with it brilliantly — until the day came when an answer is demanded. Then they stand there and say that one has to “look into it.” …
This type of politician, omnipresent in the CDU/CSU alliance, is a legacy of Angela Merkel’s (CDU) 16-year chancellorship.
Merkel perfected the art of using many words to say nothing and of not answering questions but rather evading them until interest fades. She staged her political maneuvers as the administration of the inevitable. For 16 years, hers was the most successful technique in the country, and an entire generation was socialized by it.
Such power tactics could be employed in a sedated, affluent Germany of a decade ago. They have long since become useless for Merkel’s successors, however. Today’s Germany is a different country.
The political shifts are deep and the political, economic, social, and cultural crises are either present or expected. With the AfD the strongest party in the polls month after month, Merkelesque platitudes are a de facto declaration of bankruptcy.
The language used by Winter, Amthor, and Hoppermann is symptomatic of a political style that for years has reliably produced disaffected citizens who don’t bother voting. …
So Germany now needs the AfD:
The Alternative for Germany is demonized as “neo-Nazi” for wanting to close the borders, deport (“remigrate”) unassimilable aliens, stop appeasing immigrant criminals, support the traditional family and German values, and actively work on normalizing relations with Russia.
All that is just common sense, practicing politics (domestic and foreign) as the art of the possible, and therefore by no means “extreme.” …
After last Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has fortified it image among a huge segment of Germany’s electorate as the only hope for the country’s salvation.
Give it another year or two.
hat-tip Stephen Neil