Comment by nicce
5 days ago
Other parties in many countries don’t seem to understand that if they try to solve the immigration issues more seriously - many right-wing parties would disappear as they have nothing else.
5 days ago
Other parties in many countries don’t seem to understand that if they try to solve the immigration issues more seriously - many right-wing parties would disappear as they have nothing else.
It’s not about immigration. If it was, then mainstream parties WOULD fix immigration.
It’s about national identity, “us and them”. If it wasn’t about immigrants it would be about “experts”. If it wasn’t about experts it would be about “the gays”.
This kind of thing doesn’t go away with appeasement: orgs like AfD just point their weapons at somebody else. It has always been the way with facists.
No, it IS about illegal immigrants. Claiming everyone supporting center/right/conservative values is automatically anti-gay is just wrong and toxic.
You just shifted from "immigration" to "illegal immigration".
Dual citizenship is as legal as you can get, the AfD opposed it until they realised it meant they could get away with later stripping undesirable people of German citizenship.
Germany decided to accept a million *perfectly legal* asylum seekers in the Syrian crisis, and another million from Ukraine. The AfD opposes it, even as they accept the suffering of Ukranians is real.
Germany is also in the EU, so has, totally lawful, free movement of people from every country they share a border with. The AfD opposes it.
1 reply →
It is about immigration. The mainstream parties can't fix migration because Germany's political system makes it almost impossible to form majority governments. Coalition politics and the cordon sanitaire force the CDU to work with the left and seemingly the left's only consistent political position is opposition to migration reform.
The AfD aren't fascists and the attempts to win elections by just screaming slurs until they lose all meaning has stopped working. People have realised that calling everything "racist" or "fascist" or "Nazi" or whatever doesn't mean it actually is, and the left's entire political strategy is just labelling things it doesn't like with bad words.
And yes part of the issue with immigration is national identity. Germany is a nation-state and always has been, just like France and Poland and Italy and Spain and Portugal and Czechia and Hungary and Ireland and Greece are. There are still some non-national states in Europe like the UK (which contains multiple nations: England, Scotland and Wales, arguably part of Ireland (although some claim Northern Ireland has been separate long enough to have its own national identity) and arguably Cornwall if you listen to Cornish nationalists which you probably shouldn't).
Economic migrants, falsely claiming to be refugees, from Somalia and Syria, aren't German. Or French. Or Italian. Or Greek. They are Somalian, or Syrian. To pretend migration policy debates don't raise issues of national identity is fucking insane.
"Germany is a nation-state and always has been"
Do you think the systematic repression of Polish people during the German Empire, which was seen as necessary to achieve the 19th century ideal of a nation-state, was appropriate?
Because you make it sound like Germanisation was a good thing, as otherwise it wouldn't have been a nation-state.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation_of_Poles_during_...
> Within Bismarck's Kulturkampf policy, the Poles were purposefully presented as "foes of the empire" (German: Reichsfeinde).[7] Bismarck himself privately believed that the only solution to Polish Question was the extermination of Poles.[8] As the Prussian authorities suppressed Catholic services in Polish by Polish priests, the Poles had to rely on German Catholic priests. Later, in 1885, the Prussian Settlement Commission was set up from the national government's funds with a mission to buy land from Polish owners and distribute it among German colonists.
If that's what needed for a nation-state, I reject it as a worthy goal to achieve or use as a basis for identity, just like I reject my country's racist and expansionist history of exploiting African slaves and Native Americans as being something to re-attain.
(Apropos: "Frederick the Great ... likened the newly conquered West Prussia to a Prussian Canada and its inhabitants (which were German and Polish) to the Iroquois, who he saw as equally uncivilised.")
2 replies →
The CDU/CSU understands perfectly. That is why its immigration policy has turned around completely. It is now basically the same as AfD's, in the hopes of drawing its old voters back. But the voters aren't stupid. Because of the cordon sanitaire, the CDU/CSU can't implement its migration policy without violating the most sacred "rule" of German politics: you cannot work with the AfD. If you do, the establishment media and the left (SPD/Greens) will be very upset with you. And we can't have that! Look at all the howling there was over the CDU even considering using AfD votes to pass migration reform recently.