It is a phenomenon that economists and psychologists can hardly explain when almost 50 million people in a country invest their time and thought to influence ‘the election result’ with their votes by as much as 0.000002 percentage points. And some moral philosophers are perplexed by the conclusion that all these voters probably think that they can, on the grounds of their legitimization of the state’s compulsory monopoly, tamper in the daily life of their neighbours, and also be allowed to plunder them by means of taxes and dues, as well as to command and surveil them. This hubris can only be explained in religious categories and thus by the modern belief of the masses in the ‘holy’ state and God of democracy, the ‘God that failed.’
Instead of voting for political thimbleriggers, the heretical author of these lines preferred to use the time to prepare the following article and to analyze what 50 million Germans have on September 24th once again perpetrated with their aggregated ballot markings.
It’s finally over. At last. For many voters this unique election campaign was, in the end, not really bearable any longer. On the one hand, it was less exciting than ever before – we have all known for many months that Angela Merkel would remain Chancellor and that she would be able to choose one or more smaller coalition partners from the bloc parties SPD, FDP and Greens allied with the state party CDU-CSU. In another way, however, this election campaign has also been more exciting than ever before – due to a new, up-and-coming, only real opposition party, the AfD. This party has for many months been treated so unfairly by the establishment in media, politics, culture, churches, trade unions and other associations as well as by the affiliated antifa storm troopers on the street, that only ignorant people without a heart could still choose the party bloc that is engaged in these incitements against dissenters. And now we know it – about 73.1 percent of voters in Germany (who voted for the CDU-CSU-SPD-FDP-Green Unity Front) apparently have neither heart nor mind. In western Germany, it is estimated that this figure is as much as ten percent higher, and in the new federal states with more experience of socialism, it is 15 to 20 percent lower. We will have to wait for the exact figures.
Voter turnout in 2009 had reached an historical low point at 70.8 percent and, contrary to expectations, did not rise. People are more politicized than they have been for a long time. And also polarized: the Bundestag elections show that Germany – like the US and many other western countries – is deeply divided. Between West and East. Between urban and rural environments. Between establishment and alternatives. Let’s look at the results in detail.
The two former ‘people’s parties’ CDU/CSU and SPD, as well as their politically overcorrect little twin, the Greens, are the big losers of the election. The two partners in government lost a total of almost 15 percentage points of votes – a landslide vote of no confidence of this kind is unique in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
In this election, a small, a medium and a large winner are standing on the podium. The bronze medal is awarded to the Left party, which is half oppositional due to its foreign policy, while silver goes to the supposedly at least most incorrect of the bloc parties, the FDP. And gold goes to the only really oppositional force, the AfD, which gained a sensationally good result against all the odds that were brought up against it as the – even in the literal sense – whipping boy of the nation. Gold or rather: Money. Lots of money. An entire ‘right-wing populist’ milieu is now being put on the state’s feeding tube with approximately 100 seats and hundreds, perhaps a total of 1,000 new employees. Will that do them any good? Let’s take a closer look.
CDU/CSU: 32.9 percent. 2013: 41.5 percent. A drop of 8.6 percentage points. The worst result of the former people’s party since 1949.
At the tail end of the Merkel era, the Union is a lifeless shell without any core. Angela the vampire has literally sucked them out by adopting all the important green and social democratic positions, from EU centralism and currency socialism, the centrally planned energy turnaround to finally the state’s blessing for same sex marriage. The party which has shaped German history like no other since 1949, has been deprived of the powers to bind its old middle class classical liberal and Christian-conservative voters. The result is devastating and has taken the functionary caste, which lives far from reality, by surprise and struck them like a bolt of lightning. Wasn’t everyone recently still talking about the ‘Chancellor bonus?’ And now what?
Merkel’s final game begins. She is now what Americans call a lame duck. She is being given the count. She will soon be counted out. Whether the CDU will finally collapse after her resignation or can be once more reanimated – but by whom? – the future will show. In less than four years. Her Bavarian sister party CSU has also put all its money on Merkel’s card – and thus also gambled away its once-independent identity.
SPD: 20.5 percent. 2013: 25.7 percent. A drop of 5.2 percentage points. The worst result of the former People’s Party after World War II.
The SPD’s worst result so far after the Second World War was 23.0 in 2009, while the historically lowest figure since the First World War was only 18.3 percent in March 1933 under the terrible conditions of Hitler’s newly launched government. However, 18.3 percent were won at that time by real men against greatest adversities. Today, the old aunt SPD is nothing but the caricature of such a past.
The full extent of the collapse of this once proud party becomes clear when considering that its leading candidate, Martin Schulz, is the prototype of an unscrupulously enriched EU-big shot and Eurocrat from the Brussels swamp. He is the first and only party leader in the history of the post-war SPD who was elected to this tradition-steeped position at the party convention with 100 percent and without a single vote against.
Perhaps nowhere else has the unrealistic and proverbial depravity of the entire political class become so evident as in this election of the SPD party leader in March of this year. The youth organization of the SPD at the time – on the evening of the general election it seems centuries ago – seriously declared its new party leader a ‘God Chancellor’; him, who personifies the betrayal of the roots of the former workers’ party like no other. And, by the way: All politicians are populists and can’t help it. But have we ever seen a more brazen populist beyond Schulz’ home town Würselen?
In this respect, the voters demonstrated far more intuition for contradictions than the court journalists had before. For the mainstream media had also played a part in the great Schulz hype this spring, hoping to jazz up the technocrat Schulz of all people, and the Chancellor’s faithful coalition partner SPD, instead of the Alternative für Deutschland as a new alternative to Merkel. The party that has been co-governing as an unappreciated ‘opposition’ for 15 of the past 19 years – this melody of voter deception also faded away in the most embarrassing way on the evening of 24 September.
Schulz is embarrassed to the roots of his beard. The last Chancellor of the party, Gerhard Schröder, was also the last of its leaders who radiated something of the worker or people’s milieu – ‘Get me a bottle of beer’ is one of his well remembered utterances. In a rare bright moment, the editor-in-chief of ‘Die Welt,’ Ulf Poschardt, wrote that in the past the ‘Social Democrats were courageous men, oppositionists in the best sense of the word.’ Today, trade union officers ‘clump together in the functionary’s position professors for social history and other idealists, who prefer to deal with the desirable rather than the feasible.’ The SPD had ‘slipped into the captivity of those milieus which are now supporting them. The Workers’ Party has become an association of white collar employees,’ and these employee milieus have no culture of upward mobility. They are doing all right, they don’t like the people who earn more than them, and they like redistribution because that punishes those who are more ambitious than themselves.’ Instead of the roof battens, “boob socialism” and “family and all that hoopla” there are now gender starlets, pc-language and crouched rhetoric towards the media. Nobody gets a bottle of beer anymore. The party has arrived in suburban, aseptic narrowness.’
What will become of CDU and SPD? Two zombies that can hardly be reanimated any more, no matter whether they together form the government again or one of them pretends to be something like ‘opposition’ from now on. Angela Merkel leaves her CDU behind as a shell without a body: a party that stands for nothing but what happens to be in the Chancellor’s mind. And about the SPD we will at last hold our peace now, after three final questions: Can things get any worse after this election? Will the next party leader get 101 percent approval, celebrated by the officials as the Trinity in one person? Who cares about all this anymore?
However: The biggest election loser is neither CDU nor SPD; it’s the mainstream media. While their one-sided and uniform indictment for years was confined to the presidents of distant countries, first against Vladimir Putin and later against Donald Trump, it has now focused on politics closer to home. Even more readers and viewers than before perceived the disproportionate and blatant unfairness of reporting on an opposition party, which apparently received special treatment. Those who then went to the trouble of attending a event of that party in order to get some first-hand information, experienced brutal outbreaks of violence by ‘counter-demonstrators,’ but then read in his newspaper and saw on his TV channel nothing about it, or worse, the victims were blamed for the foul deeds. In what was perhaps the dirtiest of all election campaigns, the ‘fake news’ have confirmed their already extremely shoddy reputation. It can be assumed that the loss of confidence and thus of circulation and viewer numbers in the last four years is higher than the loss of voters of the SPD and CDU. There are millions of people who have now in Germany too moved to alternative media and who have been permanently lost to the tricksters and deceivers in the mainstream – not only to the established parties.
Should we thank them for that? In any case, the election results show that it does not matter what the former mass media as vassals of the former people’s parties now write about the AfD. They can mock their members as Nazis, insane, sick or all of this combined – with 12.6 percent of voters, and rising, all of this is received as an echo only, if at all, in alternative forums and media furnished with a fitting label. Foreign Secretary Sigmar Gabriel recently defended a discussion with an alternative medium (RT Deutsch): ‘We do not reach many people any more if we only rely on established media.’
AfD: 12.6 percent. 2013: 4.7 percent. Growth of 7.9 percentage points. The greatest winner of the election – against all odds, against systematic slander and sometimes even against man-hunting.
FDP: 10.7 percent. 2013: 4.8 percent. Growth of 5.9 percentage points. After a roller coaster ride and the best result in history in 2009 (14.6 percent) and the subsequent worst result of all time in 2013 (4.8 percent), the party arrived at its own average. In every way.
Let’s take a closer look. In 2013, the AfD and FDP were on a par – both of them missed their entry into the Bundestag. It was the first time the AfD stood for election for the German federal parliament and failed – just – at the 5 percent threshold, while the old FDP did not enter the German parliament for the first time after the Second World War, after it had achieved a record result and proceeded, while in government, with an unprecedented betrayal of voters.
The publicist Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once explained that all parties must be more or less left-wing parties. On the very far left, as nationalists, socialists and mass murderers, are the gentlemen Stalin, Hitler and Mao with their sister parties and fratricidal wars. Fortunately, Christian Lindner (FDP) and Alexander Gauland (AfD) do not go that far. But they too, for example, support the minimum wage and all sorts of other collectivist nonsense. Nevertheless, the two comparatively less left-wing parties ended up in the extra-parliamentary opposition four years ago, while the two parties that are currently furthest to the left, the Left and Green parties, formed the nominal ‘opposition’ with approximately eight and a half percent each in the Bundestag.
Four years later, the least left-wing parties AfD and FDP rank ahead of the two small left-wingers. The voters apparently attribute the migration crisis that dominated this election to the left-wing Zeitgeist – which, after all, also speaks for some voters’ foresight, probably after once googeling the word ‘Joggerin’ (female jogger) to see how Germany has changed in recent years. On the other hand, the ‘Trump disenchantment’ is still awaiting the German voters euphoric about the fight for or against the AfD.
After the celebrating the election success on September 24th, the AfD has to make decisions that have been postponed for a long time. Above all, we can expect struggles for leadership positions, that is how the political game and the scramble at the feeding troughs works. An almost certain consequence will be splits.
For the time being, the internal future of the AfD is more exciting than that of all other parties. Let’s have the popcorn ready.
On the other hand: real improvements, i. e. less state compulsory monopoly, more free market, private property and contracts, cannot be expected even with the AfD as it is now, young and wild, even if they formed the government. Certainly not of an AfD of the future, its corners and edges ground off where they still exist. The party has already decided not to really challenge the status quo. Voluntary private education at independent schools and universities? Not with the AfD (and certainly not with all other left-wing parties). Privatisation of compulsory monopolistic money? Not with the AfD (and certainly not with all other left-wing parties). Privatisation of migration and its costs, social security and public spaces? Not with the AfD (and certainly not with all other left-wing parties).
People are different, their goals are different. Anyone who wants to solve problems through uniform solutions for all by means of a state enforced monopoly, systematically incites citizens against each other with these ‘political means’ (Franz Oppenheimer). All the way to war or civil war as a typical final stage of this strategy. A real alternative for Germany would be to apply ‘economic means’ according to Franz Oppenheimer, and thus to allow market choices. Anyone who wants to bring millions of ‘refugees’ into the country could do so – but at their own expense. He could provide them with housing and jobs – on his own account. If you want to study gender studies instead of engineering, go ahead, but pay for it yourself. Whoever wants to marry his rabbit may go and look for a pseudo-religious provider to give his blessing. If you want to use money created out of nothing, you should be able to do this and leave others alone who prefer real money. The increasingly fierce culture wars of our day could be quickly called off if suppliers offered their products and services on the market to voluntary consumers and governments with their majority would stop raping the minority and making them pay for it at gunpoint.
Seen this way, the AfD is nothing but a pseudo alternative. Polarization and politicisation obscures that the AfD is already the sixth or seventh emergency tyre on the statist bureaucratic wheeled trolley rolling on the intervention spiral, where it doesn’t matter whether its tread is deeper on the right or on the left. Hardly any of them has a clue about the machinery of freedom – and why should they, as they too now collect our tax money for their ‘work’ while their new politicians’ grinning faces don’t even blush.
And the others, the Left and the Greens? Let’s make it short.
The Left party: 9.2 percent. 2013: 8.6 percent. A growth of 0.6 percentage points. 5th place for the semi-oppositional successors of the party of the murderers at the Iron Curtain, whose majority wing is now fighting for ‘open borders’. On the other hand, it is a reward for their independent foreign policy approach.
Greens: 8.9 percent. 2013: 8.4 percent. A growth of 0.5 percentage points. Contrary to the expectations of many, the party of smarty-pants, quota chicks and gender aunts was not punished, and definitely not pushed in a socially just way below the five percent hurdle.
Other parties: 5.2 percent. 2013: 6.3 percent. A drop of 1.1 percentage points. The Alternative für Deutschland this time outshone all other alternatives. This could be quite different in four years’ time. For an alternative party landscape could still be emerging, corresponding to the contradictory and colorful rising alternative media. The AfD would then only be the first harbinger, neighbouring countries of Germany with often two or three new alternative parties are showing the way. An independent party split from the AfD would not necessarily end up with less than five percent.
In all important issues, from enthusiasm for the EU to ‘Refugees Welcome’, the Greens were both an informal government partner and ideological whipper-in for the Grand Coalition. The Left, on the other hand, are deeply divided and half of them are as critical of NATO and the EU as the Greens once were and AfD today still is. A marginal parallelism: As in the cases of FDP and AfD, within the Greens and the Left too a sham opposition and a (semi) genuine opposition were fighting for the same electoral groups. In the West, many people still prefer to vote for the glittering illusion, but thanks to the East German voters, the real opposition members of the left and semi left landed in front of the deception troops this time.
So now six parliamentary groups share the allowances and a new record number of seats in the Bundestag, as many as there have not been since 1953 – the electoral law, which has not been changed despite a request, is an additional form of self-enrichment, as the media reported. The show will be more varied and better, thanks to Lindner (FDP) and Gauland (AfD), and also thanks to some promising new speakers from the second row of the AfD. Their faction is quite impressive, at least it has better personnel than the benches of the emaciated and ossified old parties. That is something, at least.
But are we, since 6 pm on this 24th September, suddenly living in a ‘different country,’ as some fear and others hope? Who or what is supposed to bring ‘creeping socialism’ (Roland Baader) off course? A better and more colourful performance? It might just make it more ‘irresistible.’
Since the vast majority of people still believe that the problems caused by politics and bureaucracy, such as the migration crisis, the debt and euro crisis, surveillance, paternalism and redistribution state can be solved with the help of politics and bureaucracy, they must face the music now and in the next four years, which will certainly not be any easier for citizens than the last four years. If you put a fox in charge of a henhouse, you shouldn’t be surprised about the mess afterwards.
