A far-right party has won a state election for the first time in post-World War II Germany in the country’s east, while it looks set to finish a very close second to mainstream conservatives in a second vote.
The problem is we didn't kill them all. The ones who collaborated, the ones who changed their names to escape, the ones we imported because they were scientists. The collaborators and sympathizers back home.
I'm being hyperbolic, I know this line of fascist thinking will always rear it's head due to greed and narcissism. But I still posit we weren't thorough and harsh enough the first time. Thanks, Von Braun for the rockets, but time to meet the hangman.
The electorate has been systematically driven into the arms of of those people by both the political establishment and the media for decades.
The political establishment has contended itself with turning austerity into some kind of state religion and administrating the resulting shortages. Whenever this has lead to discontent, they were happy enough to jump on the far right's bandwagon and adopted their talking points because they deluded themselves that they could get back lost votes this way, rather than admitting that they had caused the problems themselves and even trying to rectify them. The media have happily been helping this process along by rarely questioning the never ending austerity at the expense of the middle and lower classes, while parroting every single far right talking point. Now we're reaping what has been sowed in the past decades.
That the far right makes disproportional gains in the East is no surprise, as the East, especially its rural regions, has been systematically sold out and run down even further than under the GDR since reunification.
I think there have been studies that showed people vote for the AfD because they are racists and fascists and not because they're somehow left behind or don't feel included. However, I do think racism is driven up by our current capitalist society where we have to fight for the scraps the billionaire class deems sufficient for us. This makes it much easier to hate every foreign person, because you feel there will be even less scraps left for you.
People vote for Nazis but the democratic parties and the media are to blame... Of course. It's never the Nazis who vote, it's always the others who made them do it who are at fault.
To be fair, at least in Saxony, the ruling CDU has fostered a complacent, uninvolved but ultimately unhappy populace for 30 years, because they thought that would keep them in their seats forever.
Its ok we had bigass demonstrations a couple months ago against this shit. Olaf scholz even appeared at one. Everyone got a pat on the back by everyone else too, really fun time all around.
After winning, the Germans were celebrating loudly in the streets screaming things like, “Ja! Ve fucks you up, Lebowski!” and, ”Gives us the money you has on you, and ve calls it even…”