Things are getting serious here, and I don’t think people are as concerned as they should be, people trust the system will hold.
From the outside looking in, it does feel like Germany and France are ignoring a lot of the warning signs that other countries have fallen into with regards to rising fascist movements.
Germany’s always seemed like this semi-utopic heart of Europe that learned all the right lessons from its history and miraculously emerged free and strong despite everything. But I’m worried there’s been more laurel-resting than progress as of late, and the seeds of discontent are taking root.
Civilization is never more than two missed meals away from collapse. In a more general sense, existential threats (or the perception thereof) erode civility and make people susceptible to tribal thinking.
We (Germany) have a number of such threats:
- Several immigration and refugee waves.
- A flagging economy due to the impeding loss of several once-reliable markets. (China lost its appetite for German cars and the States have been increasingly volatile in recent years.) The German economy is very export-oriented.
- Rising food costs due to the Ukraine war.
- COVID-19.
- The housing crisis.
- Climate change.
- The whole woke/anti-woke thing.
- An increasing perception of all established political parties as useless or even actively detrimental.
- The botched reunification. The Eastern federal countries have been disappointed by the mainstream parties so severely and continually that populists like the AfD can easily find an audience.
- A (now defunct) government coalition where one of the parties had no interest in actually cooperating with the others, the second one has a recent-ish reputation for having no idea what they’re doing, and the third one is the target of a sustained attack meme campaign. Oh, and the chancellor had a corruption scandal.
Add to that the massive online presence of the hard right and you get a lot of people who stop caring about civility and start caring about simple solutions to complex problems.
Although the immigration and refugee waves have only become an issue due to the right wing narrative of a great replacement that got fueled by mainstream media and what were formerly centrist politicians. It was never actually as much of an issue as the other things you mentioned are.
We’ve had nothing but politicians working with americanism and populism for the last 25 years, people have become stupid and lazy. I remember the last time a right-wing populist party had 30% votes, the day before the election it came to light that they planned to work with extremist/nazis. They dropped below 5% over night.
Today the same situation just led to even more people voting for that party.
Only 40 years apart.
I was watching Where’s Wanda and was stunned to see a minor side character who was the German equivalent of a MAGA prepper, and who name dropped the Reich. I remember my German German teacher in high school talking about how society had collectively purged that stuff and anyone who talked like that would be completely ostracized.
From my understanding their the German SovCits.
They are, and they get about as much respect from the rest of us.
Media reports linked one of the suspects to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) - which commands as much as 18% support in national polls, behind only the centre-right opposition - although the party itself insisted it had nothing to do with such a group.
Cool cool cool
