Germany Looks to Stop the Far Right From Assuming Power
Mainstream parties are changing laws to protect government institutions. Critics say the changes risk undermining democracy.
In reality, far from stopping the far right, Germany is implementing a far right agenda. Increase police authority? Check. Scapegoat immigrants and other marginalized groups? Check. Build up the military? Check. Suppress protests and dissenters? Check. Impose austerity, providing the fertile ground for fascists? Check.
By the time the AfD comes to power, they won't have to do anything. The liberals (including socdems and greens) will already have created a fascist society.
The same is happening to France. As you said, they'll have a field day when (at this point it's not if, it's when) they get to power.
Gotta love neoliberalism...
The Netherlands will very likely have a right wing government and will be heading down the same path. Same with Italy, Sweden, Denmark.
With the next European election this year the right wing parties in the European Parliament will gain a lot of traction.
We could be heading down the American path and lose a lot or the progress we made over the last 2 decades.
I will be a father in a couple or hours. Between the right taking to power and accelerating climate change i am just so fucking worried in what kind of world my kids will grow up.
Are you living in a different Germany than me? There are sadly things going on to make immigration harder. But other than that, things are okay.
Make immigration harder??? Nice euphemism for this fascist shit. They're throwing human rights out of the window. They're literally putting migrants into concentration camps, if they're don't drown first thanks to Frontex pushbacks. Greens defended this so-called compromise to their base while fascist Meloni was giving victory speeches.
"Endlich im großen Stil abschieben" (Scholz). I can't tell the difference an NPD slogan and the SPD chancellor.
And for the other shit, there's some extra police authority or surveillance law proposed every other month or so. Pro-palestine protests are criminalized and they're threatening Muslims with deportation for not being loyal enough to Israel. All the parties are discussing what sort of services they can cut so they have more money for the military. Real wages are shrinking. You can't open a newspaper without reading about how Germany needs to prepare for war. Things are not okay.
These are a lot of statements without sources. Also most people would disagree with the statement that a government that includes social democrats and greens is implementing a "far right agenda".
Fucking Scholz said he wanted to "finally deport in a big way" ("endlich im großen Stil abschieben"). This is (well used to be) a far right agenda. They're sending weapons to Israeli fascists while they commit genocide, and defend them at every opportunity. These people support fascists and fascist policies.
What exactly do you even dispute is untrue about what I said?
Sorry, statement rejected - no source provided (hypocrite)
Build up the military?
Any source on that? We do not have a military right now. Wouldn't be bad if we wanted to defend ourselves against Putin.
defend ourselves against Putin
Putin is going to come and finish the job for Stalin any day now. Just wait and see, tomorrow the Bolchevik hordes might be flooding into Germany, to eat your Dachshunds and turning the Oktoberfest into a vodka and balalaika festival.
Why would Putin do that? Simply because he is evil.
The only sensible response is to cut every social program to fund the construction of a German death star.
jesus christ liberals are insufferable
Death to America
My guy, have you heard phrases like “100 Mrd. € Sondervermögen für die Bundeswehr”, “Wiedereinführung der Wehrpflicht” , shit like this? Or have you heard anything people like Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann have said in the past two years? Also, hasn’t the Russian army been struggling to overpower Ukraine for the past two years now? The poorest country in Europe with basically no functioning infrastructure to begin with that also is decidedly not a member of NATO? Wouldn’t the Russian Army have to cross the Baltic states and Poland to even reach Germany, triggering a response from all of NATO? Could it be they all the rhetoric about the Russkys expanding westwards is full of shit and nothing more but a fig leaf to sell austerity and a military buildup to the German populace?
Yeah yeah, I remember all that shit from back in the day. Die Russen kommen! Die Russen kommen! Oldest trick in the book.
Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land. -- Hermann Göring
Also, I love that you want a source for something that was a top news story for months. You somehow heard, dass die Russen kommen!!! but not the Sondervermögen? You're just fucking with me, aren't you?
Do liberals have a theory for why fascism is sprouting up around the world?
Because Marxists are like
Liberals believe all ideologies other than basic western liberalism are based on confusion or ignorance at a personal level. And that's the entirety of where ideology comes from. They don't believe it's rooted in history, conditions, wealth, anything. They see fascism as a complicated misunderstanding that could potentially be cured through a big speech or exposing fascists to the musical Hamilton. They think ideology is pathogen that spreads more easily through who they regard as ignorant and malleable. They believe racism is simply a matter of confusion over human biology that can be instructed away.
They're very similar to conservatives like that. They both think societies are built by IQ scores and being "civilized." Liberals may dress up their goofy theories in fancy academic language, but ultimately they believe the following: "Stupid people are more prone to fascism simply because they're stupid and didn't read enough Margaret Atwood books like me. People are more stupid now because of Tiktok." And that's how liberals would explain why fascism is on the rise again
And to elaborate on what you said, liberals believe that the "stupid" people are the proles. The uncultured, unwashed and financially unsuccessful masses who deserve every punch the invisible hand of the market throws at them. Liberals simply can't conceive of someone with a fancy education, an expensive suit and good table manners being a fascist.
It's tough to be critical of "liberalism" when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify "economic liberalism".
Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Slavery did end under liberalism, but then again liberalism started it.
Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery . . .
Liberalism is also associated with the invention and virtually entire existence of chattel slavery along with the exporting of the criminalization of queer people to cultures that did not feature such things.
Liberalism is associated with those things because it allowed them to happen to avoid a negative effect to property rights (revolution, riots) once more radical people pushed for them. Liberalism is reactionary and regressive, but some liberals are easier to convince of specific rights extensions than others. You've been lied to a lot if you think liberals did these things
Yeah you're the one being pedantic here. Liberalism has exactly two definitions that get used 99% of the time. Someone might say liberal to mean "socially liberal," which means open-mindedness in regards to progressive movements such as feminism, promotion of gay rights, acceptance of trans people, and all that stuff. This is usually the only definition used in the USA.
Or they mean liberalism as the broad ideological foundation of capitalism, with a belief in the promotion of free enterprise, distribution, public-private separation, and the primacy of individual rights. This definition is almost never used in the USA except by socialists, but outside of the USA this is understood as the primary definition of the term whereas "socially liberal" is regarded as a secondary definition.
And it's very easy to determine which one a person is talking about if you look at the context clues. The only other context I can think of where liberal is used is the academic term "liberal arts," but that refers to scholarly topics that would have been taught to people who weren't slaves.
honestly there seems to be some confusion/distinction only in the US.
i think most people elsewhere mean mostly "neoliberal capitalism" when they say "liberal".
At this dark hour, the SPD turns to President von Hindeburg as a trusted ally
the correct answer (which germany will never land on) is to shoot the nazis. it has always been the only solution to a nazi infestation but germany has always found that difficult to swallow.
Shoot the nazis, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, establish capital controls and develop the productive forces so the material conditions that lead to fascism don't come back.
If they're not executing nazis in the streets they're not stopping them from assuming power.
which way western man, bullets or ballots?
stalin shouldn't have stopped at berlin
Stalin’s march to the sea
What...
Stalin should have kept going and made the entirety of Europe socialist. The USSR should have rounded up and executed every former Nazi officer, like the ones recruited in operation paperclip. Did @wombat@hexbear.net stutter?
Let's see if any Lemmy users are able to correctly identify why this is happening. Bonus points for American-Style ignorance
Love to climb up on my high chair with my sippy cup. Looking down on everyone while pretending at intellectual superiority and yet making no actual statement at all.
Hitler 2: Facist Bugaloo?
What year is it?
1930 something.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Germans have already had a front-row seat to the rise of so-called illiberal democrats in Poland and Hungary who used their power to stack courts with pliant judges and silence independent media.
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD.
But every remedy holds its own dangers, leaving German politicians threading a course between safeguarding their democracy and the possibility of unwittingly providing the AfD with tools it could someday use to hobble it.
Hesse’s rival mainstream parties came together to pass a “democracy package,” rewriting several parliamentary rules, including one that effectively blocked the AfD from the intelligence committee.
In the eastern state of Thuringia, mainstream lawmakers also wanted to block the AfD from their intelligence committee, and initially agreed to put their differences aside and vote for each other’s candidates.
Some measures under discussion would give law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies more latitude, never an easy step in a country that experienced both Fascism and Communism in the last century.
The original article contains 1,301 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Stopping the rise of the far right is trivially easy, and government holds the levers. Just do two things:
Seems they would rather lose to nazis than do those two things.
Edit: seems more than a few of you are rushing to lose to Nazis too
Taxing the rich is what the current government wants. The right wing does not want that.
The first one isn't necessary. Just need to tax the wealthy and ensure that companies cannot exploit immigrant labor to increase profits. Immigration isn't the problem, the companies are.
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD. Some have even launched a campaign to ban the AfD altogether.
You see, democracy is when...
Are you surprised that the country that ushered the Nazis into power is more vigilant about making sure they never head remotely in that direction again?
Even the party’s leader resigned in 2022 because he saw that the party was becoming more totalitarian and incompatible with German democracy.
Op sounds less surprised more disappointed.
Banning fascist organizations is not only democratic, it's one of the bare minimum tasks a democratic society should perform in order to protect itself. Personally I think their solution is a little weak. Fascists will always wiggle around courts and laws, then use those very same laws to their advantage. It's what they do. They fill in the gaps that liberal societies are always going to have, yet endlessly try to repair.
The best option is to shoot fascists in the head, without hesitation. That's not a metaphor for anything, I mean literally line them up against a brick wall and shoot them with guns. Then announce you'll do the same to any further fascists you discover. Drive all potential fascists into hiding, make them cower in fear and remain powerless. That's the only thing that has ever worked.
YMMV on the CDU vis a vis being fascists but I'd argue you can look back at Adenauers "Radikalenerlass" ("Radical Decree" or something) that purported to stop extremists from both sides from holding certain important jobs and somehow managed to find 1000 left wing extremists for every right winger in '70s germany.
Democracy is (in part) when you tell the fascists to eat shit, yes.
L take. AES countries which are actual democracies do the same thing.
Though of course, banning it isn't gonna go anywhere for Germany unless they tackle the root cause of capitalism.
I think they're saying that liberal "democracies", as soon as they need to, will use the exact same censorship that they claim "autocracies" use, and which not using is the entire source of their supposed moral superiority.
You see, we call it Wehrhafte Demokratie. According to Wikipedia this can be translated as battlesome democracy, though I find that clunky.
The entire idea of our constitution is to keep a democracy, we even have a constitutional right to disobedience, if democracy is threatened.
The constitution is deliberately very open, but there's one thing that's non-negotiable: FDGO, liberal-democratic basic order. If you're operating outside of that, you're not supposed to be part of the political landscape.