The far-right AfD party won the state elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia with 30.5% of the vote on Sunday (1 September), according to exit polls, marking the party's first win in a state election.
I'd go even further. The AfD threatens the current (democratic) system. Most AfD voters vote for them for this exact reason. They want to "enact revenge" on a system they feel left behind by IMO.
I'm really worried that the Verfassungsschutz talks and talks about the dangers the AfD poses, but they seemingly won't actually do anything and I suspect by now it's too late to prohibit them.
And AFD won't "send migrants back" because that would remove their favorite Boogeyman. Expect don't symbolic tinkering and not that much more, otherwise they have to start all over again with another minority to blame. It won't improve these people's economic situation. EU exit and austerity is back on the menu with AFD.
Issue is, they just change a few bits around to fool the people that are uneducated about the subject. I'm from Hungary, and one history teacher of mine taught me that Nazis did things for the sake of being evil, one other said "it was a punishment for the Jews killing Jesus". Once you associate bigotry with being evil, any dumb rationale can make it look not evil in the eyes of these people.
This is peak logic. Glorify Jesus becasue "he died for our sins" but demonize Jews for killing him... Bitch, if they didn't kill him you lack key aspect of your religion!
It doesn't help at all that history is rewritten all the time and is provably inaccurate at least in detail in a lot of cases.
I'm not a holocaust denier or saying the Nazis are any better than what history shows them, but I also can't in good faith say that history is written in stone while southern US states are banning books right and left and making taboo teaching subjects. I've seen pushes in some areas that try to eliminate slavery and push the indentured servant narrative wide enough to cover all slavery.
They probably aren’t literally Hitler. But there is a lot of damage and awful shit they can do in between reasonable and Hitler. And they are much further towards the latter than anyone should be comfortable with.
Hicks exist in every country. They don't always exist in the form of a "bring back the policies that destroyed our country the last time around" political party though.
The long term strategy is to destabilise the CDU by forcing them into unfavorable coalitions. Which they have probably achieved this time. If the CDU looks bad enough in 5 years the AfD might get enough votes so that no government can be built without them
With how absolutely entrenched the CDU is in our political system, this is about as bad as you could reasonably expect it to be. The CDU is an overall incredibly dominant party and the others are often competing for second place, which the AFD has gotten now. Them actually competing on that level is frankly terrifying.
Is this projection only from exit polls or the actual count?
Also how does the whole 'two votes' thing work - from what I understand you have one vote that's basically a singe transferable vote type and another for your local electorate that's proportional representation (but I'm not sure what counting system is used)
It's projected from the actual (then still unfinished) count but I think it uses some data from the exit polls to fill in the gap. So both?
We now have a preliminary official result. You can see it here: Saxony, Thuringia
@barsoap@lemm.ee has explained the basics of our electoral system pretty well: The first vote (Erststimme) is towards a candidate in a FPTP system to represent an electoral district and the second vote (Zweitstimme) for a party in a closed list proportional representative system. A party nominates a bunch of candidates and ranks them on a list. If they get enough votes to get a certain number of seats then those get filled first with candidates elected by Erststimme and then with candidates from the list starting at the top.
A party needs to win at least 5% of the Zweitstimme or win at least 3 seats using the Erststimme to be awarded any seats. This was done as a lesson from Weimar Germany where too many small parties made coalition building impossible which helped Hitlers rise to power.
But what if a party gets more seats via Erststimme than they should have? In that case we just start adding seats until the proportionality is maintained (those seats are referred to as Überhangs- und Ausgleichsmandate). That has lead to ballooning parliaments with our national parliament the Bundestag (small pronunciation guide: Bundes-tag not Bunde-stag - compound words can be tricky) being one of the biggest, right behind China. Recent reforms should curb that. We'll see next year how well they work.
I don't know exactly how their electoral system works but the baseline in Germany is mixed member proportional. That is, you have a FPTP vote for a district seat, and also a proportional vote. If parties get less district seats than their proportional result, members are added to parliament from party lists until the proportions work out.
I don't think STV is used anywhere, the FPTP portion is kept in check by the proportional thing anyway. When things are more complicated than baseline mixed member proportional it generally has to do with voters being able to re-arrange people on the party lists.
Nothing will change except more people feeling emboldened by the results. This isn't going to change much for non-whites in the state. If they were treated badly before, they'll continue to be treated badly now. That isn't going to change.
But I bet this party won't achieve much in the next 4 years. Germany is a federation, Thuringia is a state. There's not much AfD can do at that level that wouldn't be rejected at national level, maybe even already by the state court. They can't change the constitution, they can't "ban immigrants" from their state, in short they can't implement their "program".
It'll be a constant fight to get anything through and after 4 years, I bet they'll have very little to show for it. All they'll do is blame the other party for not cooperating.
I think, you misunderstand... They will probably not be part of the government(s). The other parties made that pretty clear. This is Germany. You need 50% of the seets. Does not matter who has the most votes.
And no, it wouldn't be fun for lots of minorities.
Lol, sure. Look at the parties will form a coalition there. Wikipedia says CDU is center right (23%), Linke is far left (12% --> 35%)), SPD is supposedly social democratic and progressive (6% --> 41%), and BSW is all over the spectrum (15% -->56%).
The only thing they have in common is that they are political parties.
I wouldn't be surprised by AfD + CDU + BSW, honestly. They are politically much closer together than the other possible coalition.