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^^

I think it's more than disturbing. It's horrifying. World War II isn't that far away, there are still people around who lived through it, and still this is happening.

Here in Sweden the nazis have, inexplicably, been granted permission to have a demonstration in Gothenburg. They will march right past a synagogue, and all this will take place on Yom Kippur! I mean, seriously?!  The person who authorized this should be ashamed of himself/herself.

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Yes. If anything it feels closer to me than it has in a long time.  I was born in the 70's and it felt close back then too. I remember seeing the black and white films of the atrocities.  It had to be early 80's by then, my mother didn't police my TV watching.   I still have a hard time accepting that people are allowing these extremists to gain footing again, both in the U.S. and in Europe.  I guess the bright side is that Germany reelected AM.

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I saw some "Merkel let a million migrants into Germany and got re-elected" type congratulatory tweets and it just reminded me again of how of touch many of us are as we see it as just her winning and losing, because so much of Germany's image to the world and the media is now wrapped up in her. Merkel herself knows it's far more complex than this, which is likely why she had such a sober reaction to the reality of all this - that her party and the party she had worked with in her last government took heavy losses, and that an extreme party many said had fizzled out are getting a foothold in power.

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For what it's worth, Merkel always has a pretty sober expression on her face.  I think the U.S. news media is out of touch because the news is fairly USA-Centric but if you watch news shows like PBS' Newshour, you're likely to get a much broader (yet far more focused, nuanced), more global perspective.

 

I have only sporadically kept up with German politics lately (I know that the media was focused on inhibiting the spread of "fake news" by Russian propaganda machine-sponsored bots) but I used to watch a news program called Deutche Welle when I once had satellite TV.  Like France 24, I do think they have a livestream for news.

Edited by DramatistDreamer
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This is a bit terrifying. I never believed the movement was dead but with the recent Labour wins over the Tories in the UK, the Austrian, Dutch, and French Elections, and the extreme right in France in turmoil, I was not expecting this particularly in Germany. I suspect the arrival of so many refugees had to be a major factor. Germany was not prepared for that and it's been handled badly. But frankly Germany is the last place I expected this.

 

And Macron has decided to pattern himself after Merkel . I'm not sure gutting labor laws is what he should be doing at this point.

Edited by JaneAusten
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The AfD was only founded 4 years ago.

 

Everyone in Germany expected the AfD to gain enough votes to get into the Bundestag, so it's not that surprising.

They basically gained votes thanks to fueling fear and hate among the public.

 

In some parts of the former East Germany, mainly in rural parts, they were even the strongest party. That's so ironic considering that in these areas the percentage of immigrants has always been the lowest. The people there have never experienced multicultural life and are full of prejudices. They mostly get their (fake) news from Facebook and other social media.

 

In turn, in the big cities most people who voted for the AfD live in suburbs that have had a lot of immigrants for decades. I live in the fourth-largest city of the country, Cologne, and in the poorer suburbs the AfD always got between 10 and 16 % of the votes. In the richer suburbs, it was always less than 5 %.

 

In Berlin, most people who were originally born in Berlin, voted for CDU. In the suburbs with the most immigrants, the Lefts were the big winners.
Purple: Left
Blue: AfD
Red: SPD
Black: CDU

Green: Greens
Yellow: FDP

 

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Results of the AfD by State:

 

 

Saxony: 27.% (strongest party) (former East Germany)

Thuringia: 22.6% (former East Germany)
Brandenburg: 20.2% (former East Germany)

Saxony-Anhalt: 19.6% (former East Germany)
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: 18.6% (former East Germany)
Baden-Württemberg: 12.2%
Bavaria: 12.4%

Berlin: 12.0% (partly former East Germany)

Rhineland-Palatinate: 11.2%
Bremen: 10%

Hesse: 11.9%

Saarland: 10.1%

North Rhine-Westphalia: 9.4%

Lower Saxony: 9.1%

Schleswig-Holstein: 8.2%
Hamburg: 7.8%

 

I personally think that the AfD will fall apart very quickly.

 

Frauke Petry, one of the party's figureheads before the election and co-party leader, has just announced that she will not be among the party's representatives in the Bundestag because she doesn't agree with the direction the party is heading to anymore. Instead she will join the Bundestag as an independent representative. That must be a real slap in the face for everyone who voted for her and the AfD.

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/25/europe/german-election-result-afd-walkout/index.html

 

I'm sure Petry won't be the only one to leave the party. She's been one of the more moderate members of the party and has always distanced herself from the radical wing.

 

CDU will most probably form the majority in the Bundestag in a coalition with the Greens and FDP.

Edited by Huntress
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For those who may not be familiar with politics in Germany and want more information on the split in Germany's far right party that @Huntress (thanks for that very informative breakdown of regions and districts!) mentioned in the above post, here's an article that discusses that.  That was quite the dramatic exit though.

 

Split emerges in German far right as co-leader storms out of news conference

 

 

 

Edited by DramatistDreamer
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Thanks so much @Huntress a lot of its very similar to this country in terms of anti immigrant  bias and the areas it's most prominent in.

 

I dont know know how factual, maybe you can fill in the blanks, but I read, and now can't remember where the article was, that the eastern part of  Germany specifically was targeted by Russian propaganda and that that segment of the county in particular has been heavily resistant to any refugee resettlement.

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Well, even though Germany was reunited 27 years ago, life in the 5 (or 6, if count East Berlin) states that formerly composed the former German Democratic Republic is still different than in the rest of the country.

 

 

The unployment rate in the East is almost twice as big as in the West, and the total income per household is also drastically different. In addition, before reunification there were hardly any foreigners in the former East, while in the West, many immigrants from Southern Europe arrived as early as the 1960s.

 

Nowadays over 20% of the population was either born abroad or comes from a non-German background. However, ~ 9 million of these "foreigners" live in the West, while only 500.000 of them live in the East. The people in the East, who have felt neglected since reunification, fear that the influx of refugees will lessen their chances to become equal with the West even more. Same goes for the people in the poorer regions in the West. It's basically just jealousy that somebody might get something you think you're entitled to have.

 

Of course there have been many (criminal) incidents involving immigrants and refugees. But people always act as if these problems have only arisen in the last 2 years, and they tend to forget that native Germans commit horrible crimes as well. But these type of crimes of course don't create as much buzz in the media as anything involving immigrants.

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So many similarities and it's terrifying the exploitation of these fears. In the US in many ways we are still litigating The Civil War and that happened 150 plus years ago. And of course here the "blacks are free" but we just come up with ways to continue forms of enslavement to this day, Jim Crow, private prisons, the war on drugs . Couple that with our own anti immigrant fervor, and that's how someone like Trump happens.

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I meant the international reaction. Most of the coverage I'd seen from outside Germany framed it as being a walk for Merkel (which I suppose it still was) and that the AfD was broken/cracked/missed their moment entirely.

Edited by DRW50
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I think it was Betty Wright who said, "Girls can't do what the guys can do, and still be called a lady."  But what gets ME are the many women, such as Susan Sarandon, who went after Hill on this and other non-issues.  The men hyped the [!@#$%^&*] out of it, and the women swallowed the hype.  And these same women want to be taken seriously as feminists?  Really?

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Yesterday, there was an obituary on a playwright who at one time had been dubbed a "feminist playwright".  What truly caught my eye was in later interviews this playwright talked about her eventual disillusionment with feminism and how she got attacked equally by the women because of her lack of "establishment success". 

 

I knew someone who knew someone who used to work as Sarandon's assistant who claimed that she was one of the most self-centered person they'd even encountered!  

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