German General election ends in 4 hours

[Pat Mustard]

They are. They force the politicians to actually do something and negotiate legislation. I get this is an alien concept to an USian.

To be fair, it's weak in the sense that such negotiations can draw out response times to emergencies.

In settled times, that weakness is a strength. In tough times, it is a weakness.

And generalizing about Americans is really kinda horseshit ... but hey, do what you got to do to feel good.

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A big part of their success this election is that voters in Europe are sick of the orthodoxy, i.e. corporatist neoliberalism, yet the big party with the best chance of actually capitalising on this, the SDP (the heirs to the Socialists), are still wedded to the Bliarite "Third Way", which is essentially pursue Thatherite (in the US Raygunite) policies while tinkering with a few social policies on the edge to retain the pretence of a human face.

From my distance I may well be more ignorant than you'd like, but it reads to me as not so much protest against economic approaches but rather a shade a xenophobia. The AiD seems to have baked their cake on the issue of immigration, no?

If I'm wrong, please correct me. I'm working to understand the significance of today's election results and am not wedded to my precursory views. I'm particularly interested in German views given that it's a German election, but no doubt you being closer to the scene you probably have more insight than I do.

I had a longer response to this but managed to drop my phone and lose it.

Yes xenophobia is involved, but a large part of the surge is not due to that in the main. The surge in European far right parties has been largely fuelled by the traditional left's abandonment of left wing economics (and Keynesianism), where the far right has stepped in and adopted a lot of that (even Trump did it to an extent, interestingly the exception is in England where the Kippers have stayed to the right of the Tories in every area). Now the odds of Le Pen or Petry pushing their economic rhetoric if they got into power is as likely as Hitler was to take heed of the "Socialist" in his party's name,, just like in the late 20s there is a good pool of low information voters taken in by the rhetoric.

Now if the SPD had heeded the lesson of Corbyn and countries like Portugal where the left started tacking left, a good chunk of the surge would likely have bled back.