After the election results in India, South Africa and Mexico, now a large part of the European electorate has delivered a shock to the governing agenda of Europe as well.
Minor correction on the explanation of the coloring of the German election result map. The black-blue shadowing of Bavaria is not at all related to the AfD closing in second. Instead, it's the color always used for CSU election results.
Thank you for a very good and detailed summary of the party positions, changes, and election results. The arc of the pendulum is pulled by the left and the right, somewhat self-correcting, but always too slowly for the extreme positions. A healthy economy for all appears to provide the funding and willingness to try new liberal ideas. A contracting real economy always focuses the electorate on immediate and basic concerns, translating into more conservative voting.
I consider that they have minimize the difficulty of the transition to clean energies and the costs ( not only financial). I am very skeptical of projections that say that an increase of 1.5 degrees are possible. I agree with the scientists that say temperature is going to
Increase at least 2.5. It is terrible!!! Poor people, animals and planta and the whole lige in the planet.
Typo: "right-wing anti-migrant-security agenda has a stronger dynamic than the right-wing migration-security team", presumably the second one should be green-climate team
"(...)That momentum survived the early phase of the war, but was then broken by the price spike and the botched legislative efforts of 2023. Meanwhile, the different political ecology of East Germany supports the extremist AfD and a revived left vote à la Wagenknecht.(...)"
I would suggest that the actions of organizations such as "Just Stop Oil" might have had a significant impact on the decline in the popularity of the Green Party in Germany and other EU countries. For example, in Germany, the Greens had an upward trend in the polls up until June 30, 2022. Exactly on June 30, the girls from JSO glued themselves to a van Gogh painting, and the Greens' upward trend broke, which is clearly visible in the graph presented above as well as on the Politico website (https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/). After a few more actions carried out by JSO, people began to withdraw their support from the Greens at a rapid pace.
Perhaps it was an unintended consequence of activism – that more people became convinced that all these activists and environmentalists are nuts, and that no party involved with them is to be trusted.
Unspoken is that the once inspiring dreams of EU are clearly dead now, and the Macron-Scholz generation of leadership stood by helplessly while the European project is torpedoed by the reckless and hypocritical machinations of the US.
I.e. the "Atlanticists" picking simultaneous fights with China, Russia, and the Islamic world. Which is unwinnable, and is already forcing the US to burn its allies one by one, to secure a strong #2 position for the future, as is now happening. Shock and denial among the professional class, still. Viciously f#cked, vaguely aware of what just happened, and too late to stop the consequent process now underway.
"In TV talk show panels [Wagenknecht ] likes to mock Germany’s politicians for sacrificing its advantage in the motor vehicle industry."
What does this even mean? We're clearly in a transition to electric vehicles, anything the German government did to put its thumb on the scale in favor of electrics would be HELPING the German auto industry. What's the alternative, Germany continues to be the King of High-Profit Gas-Guzzling Luxo-Barges? Yeah, worked real well for Detroit, didn't it?
This is the first I've heard of her, but this just sounds like the standard right-wing nonsense of promising a return to some glorious past without a single word about HOW that's going to happen. To be fair, the reason they don't tell you how is because it's impossible.
No one ever seems to talk about how the climate refugee-migrant problem has developed in part due to the religious/cultural attachment to patriarchal insistence on domination of women and large families, resulting in quickly increasing population pressure in many of the areas most impacted by climate disruption of traditional agriculture. When women have a chance to manage their own reproductive rates, they generally arrange spacing of children two or three years apart and limit the number of children they have. Evangelical and Catholic Christianity, and the more traditional Islamic sects, insistence that women should be submissive to men, and rejection of birth control results in huge families, inadequate or non-existent education for many of those children, and climate change related poverty and cultural disruption in a wide swath of Central and South America, Northern and Central Africa, the Middle East, and Southern and Central Asia.
To put it in the simplest and most general terms, war is an elite "answer" to the stress of collapse (both economic and ecological.) They are not genuinely separate issues and no road to a sustainable (for humans, the planet will survive) goes through their wars. To a first approximation, no one pro-war is green (even if they are Green.) And everyone anti-war can be worked with.
The post seems to reflect the general respectable opinion that Sahra Wagenknecht is both entirely unacceptably left to be admitted to governance in any way. The implication is that AfD may be called upon in the ensuing parliamentary maneuvering. Yet simultaneously Sahra Wagenknecht is deemed to be essentially AfD with good PR (pigeon vs. dove.) The inevitable conclusion is that she divides the right. However much both seem to be the consensus among those who opine, it seems to me that it can't be both simultaneously. Consulting the conventional wisdom here seems to be unwise?
Not sure what war you're referring to, but if it's the one in Ukraine, that didn't come out of a conclave of elites looking for an answer for the "stress of collapse." It came out of the mind of ONE particular elite named Vladimir Putin.
You do know this is the oldest trick in the imperialist playbook, right? Foment a civil war, then point to the civil war YOU started as justification for sending in military "advisors" or just all-out invading, It's exactly what the US did in Vietnam, and then it was the worst thing ever, but when the Russians do it it's AWESOME.
If any outsiders started the civil war in Ukraine, it was the US. And just as in Vietnam, it was indeed wrong. Putin instantly accepted the triumph of the wolfangel and sonnenraad in Kyiv. By the way, it is not at all clear you object to the US war on Vietnam. But defeat is an orphan...
A separatist insurgency that wants to break off from Ukraine to join Russia, using Russian-supplied weapons. WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK RUSSIA WAS INVOLVED?
Russia was involved in one sense, Putin immediately recognized the coup regime, which served to limit efforts to restore the elected government. It is not clear that the so-called separatists were actually separatists committing to fusion with the Russian Federation. Certainly the bombardment for years of ethnic Russians/Russian language speakers increased any such tendencies. Yet Putin refused to recognize any unity. Indeed, Minsk II openly committed the Donbas governments to Ukraine, albeit with autonomy and guarantees of rights you would deny them. But Minsk II was a fraud designed to buy time for further war.
It was the Kyiv regime which decided ethnic Russians/Russian speakers were not equal. An issue you have ignored, the right to national self determination, favors the Russians. Old boundaries cannot be sacred, especially given that imperialism freely ignores them when it wants to (Vietnam, Korea, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Sudan, the PRC, for glaring examples.)
You are not a consistent anti-imperialist, you are consistently pro-imperialist. Enough of this, no one else is paying attention anyhow.
How and why did the U.S., in 2014, start a civil war in Ukraine? Wikipedia says,”The war began in April 2014, when a commando unit headed by Russian citizen Igor Girkin seized Sloviansk in Donetsk oblast. The Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. The war continued until subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “
Ask Victoria Nuland how and why she was picking the new leaders of the coup government? For that matter, explain why the US-dominated IMF gave preferential treatment to Ukraine to effectively finance the war? And it would be honest of you to explain why the first act of the coup government was to attack the Russian language speakers with discriminatory language?
US figures openly boasted of their money being well spent on NGOs years before in supporting the coup for years before. The implicit claim that the Party of Regions was a Russian trojan horse is tendentious. Your implicit assumption that US policy is obviously driven by moral principle is merely conformity. I am not privy to the secret counsels of the imperialists though, so I am unashamed cannot reliably detail their true motives and operational goals.
Recognizing the right of nations to self-determination means accepting that Ukrainians may wish to have "their" own entirely separate country but by the very same principle that does not mean they have the right to majority ethnic Russian/Russian language speaking areas. Supporting he imperialist decision that this particular boundary is sacred, unlike others pro-imperialists like you support revising, forcibly if necessary, isn't moral, it's merely obedience.
Again the right of nations to self-determination means the right to national unity. It was Kyiv that decided Russians were not part of the new Ukraine. That raised the issue of which nation the majority ethnic Russian/Russian language speakers actually belonged to. The insistence they should be inferior citizens in Ukraine is effectively the insistence the Ukrainians have the right of conquest. The right of nations to self determination favors the Russians. Only a selective endorsement of existing boundaries stands in opposition...but that principle is opposed to the right of nations to self determination.
As it is, your claim is like saying the US Civil War started with the terrorist John Brown seizing Harper's Ferry. It didn't because the US military in the person of Robert E. Lee and his troops quickly defeated the liberators. If you were consistent you would dismiss Brown as a terrorist too. In Ukraine, the military split. The bulk of the Donetsk and Lugansk militias were from Ukraine., just as Brown wasn't just some random white guy imposing his Yankee will on hapless victims. Kharkov nearly went over as well, by the way. Odessa was kept "loyal" by an atrocity, the fascists setting fire to the trades union building, however much you may have enjoyed that. There was no mass invasion of the Donbas by Russian troops.
(The Russian forces who were massively engaged in saving Crimea from the coup were already in Crimea. Mounting an invasion of new territory does not happen quickly. Remember how long it took to prepare the Iraq invasion. There was no war in Crimea precisely because the Ukrainian forces there acceded. It is not even certain that was due to force majeure. There really was separatist feeling in Crimea, something which dated back to the very formation of independent Ukraine, as you should acknowledge.)
Girkin/Strelkov was not an agent of Putin, as evidenced by his later imprisonment by "Putin." He did not succeed by himself, but with the help of Ukrainians. Again, the fact that Putin scotched any later pleas for unification matters. For that matter, the protection of the property of Ukrainian oligarchs like Akhmetov shows a substantive commitment towards economic unity with Kyiv.
Last and least, relying on wikipedia on any controversial matter is risky, to say the least. Using it to apologize for fascism is in my opinion deplorable.
If there's a civil war in a neighboring country, that's a permission slip to invade? Good to know. Sorry Canada or Mexico didn't exercise the option when they had the chance.
Canada wasn't independent at that time. There most certainly were powerful forces in England advocating open intervention (the high point was the notorious Trent affair.) Given the eventual disparity in naval forces, the English recognition of Confederate belligerency ended up helping the Union.....but that was in no sense friendly.
Mexico was invaded by the French, English and Spanish at the period and in no position to intervene. But during the Mexican revolution, the US did intervene in many ways, including Pershing's military incursions.
Plainly I do not belong to this commentariat and have canceled my subscription so will not be tempted to reply to SOMETHING IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET when September comes.
There are multiple interconnected wars, preparations for expanding said wars, and blockades, as well as increasing use of things like cyberwarfare, lawfare, assassination, interference in internal affairs of other nations. In my judgment the world has already begun hybrid WWIII. It looks like neither WWI nor WWII, but then, why should it?
Also, the word answer was in scare quotes because of the fundamental irrationality of using war to pursue narrow short term interests regardless. In the end the answer isn't even an answer because in the end war won't work and will actively militate against other courses that might. The nonsense about a conclave is yours, seemingly an attempt to imply a conspiracy theory?
But a conspiracy of one is as irrational as most conspiracy theories. And it is still an elite "answer" in effect agreeing with me, unless you mean to imply that the personal wickedness of Putin is a world-historical force. The war began in 2014 with a coup against the legal government and proceeded with a civil war marked largely by Kyiv government shelling of civilian targets in the Donbas. The supposed author immediately acceded to the coup (which incidentally proves Putin really does have no more problem with Ukrainian fascists that you do) and did not intervene for eight years. The price for that is generally estimated at about 14 000 dead, also not a problem for you.
There was a coup in Iraq that installed Saddam Hussein in power, and many thousands of people died under his regime, but the US didn't invade until many years later, so it wasn't really an invasion plus George W Bush deserves credit for showing so much restraint.
Minor correction on the explanation of the coloring of the German election result map. The black-blue shadowing of Bavaria is not at all related to the AfD closing in second. Instead, it's the color always used for CSU election results.
Outstanding overview. Thank you.
Thank you for a very good and detailed summary of the party positions, changes, and election results. The arc of the pendulum is pulled by the left and the right, somewhat self-correcting, but always too slowly for the extreme positions. A healthy economy for all appears to provide the funding and willingness to try new liberal ideas. A contracting real economy always focuses the electorate on immediate and basic concerns, translating into more conservative voting.
The Green parties are in part responsible for the terrible reaction against the climate crisis.
How so?
I consider that they have minimize the difficulty of the transition to clean energies and the costs ( not only financial). I am very skeptical of projections that say that an increase of 1.5 degrees are possible. I agree with the scientists that say temperature is going to
Increase at least 2.5. It is terrible!!! Poor people, animals and planta and the whole lige in the planet.
Physics and chemistry aren't swayed by election results. The climate disaster is coming even if some voters would prefer to wish it away.
And not some voters but many. It is horrible and very sad.
Typo: "right-wing anti-migrant-security agenda has a stronger dynamic than the right-wing migration-security team", presumably the second one should be green-climate team
"(...)That momentum survived the early phase of the war, but was then broken by the price spike and the botched legislative efforts of 2023. Meanwhile, the different political ecology of East Germany supports the extremist AfD and a revived left vote à la Wagenknecht.(...)"
I would suggest that the actions of organizations such as "Just Stop Oil" might have had a significant impact on the decline in the popularity of the Green Party in Germany and other EU countries. For example, in Germany, the Greens had an upward trend in the polls up until June 30, 2022. Exactly on June 30, the girls from JSO glued themselves to a van Gogh painting, and the Greens' upward trend broke, which is clearly visible in the graph presented above as well as on the Politico website (https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/). After a few more actions carried out by JSO, people began to withdraw their support from the Greens at a rapid pace.
Perhaps it was an unintended consequence of activism – that more people became convinced that all these activists and environmentalists are nuts, and that no party involved with them is to be trusted.
Unspoken is that the once inspiring dreams of EU are clearly dead now, and the Macron-Scholz generation of leadership stood by helplessly while the European project is torpedoed by the reckless and hypocritical machinations of the US.
I.e. the "Atlanticists" picking simultaneous fights with China, Russia, and the Islamic world. Which is unwinnable, and is already forcing the US to burn its allies one by one, to secure a strong #2 position for the future, as is now happening. Shock and denial among the professional class, still. Viciously f#cked, vaguely aware of what just happened, and too late to stop the consequent process now underway.
and the shift is for the better
The clersy are falling
"In TV talk show panels [Wagenknecht ] likes to mock Germany’s politicians for sacrificing its advantage in the motor vehicle industry."
What does this even mean? We're clearly in a transition to electric vehicles, anything the German government did to put its thumb on the scale in favor of electrics would be HELPING the German auto industry. What's the alternative, Germany continues to be the King of High-Profit Gas-Guzzling Luxo-Barges? Yeah, worked real well for Detroit, didn't it?
This is the first I've heard of her, but this just sounds like the standard right-wing nonsense of promising a return to some glorious past without a single word about HOW that's going to happen. To be fair, the reason they don't tell you how is because it's impossible.
better alive than green?
It is truly a pleasure to watch the squirming of neoliberals as their political system is coming crashing down: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1801114239572328663.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
No one ever seems to talk about how the climate refugee-migrant problem has developed in part due to the religious/cultural attachment to patriarchal insistence on domination of women and large families, resulting in quickly increasing population pressure in many of the areas most impacted by climate disruption of traditional agriculture. When women have a chance to manage their own reproductive rates, they generally arrange spacing of children two or three years apart and limit the number of children they have. Evangelical and Catholic Christianity, and the more traditional Islamic sects, insistence that women should be submissive to men, and rejection of birth control results in huge families, inadequate or non-existent education for many of those children, and climate change related poverty and cultural disruption in a wide swath of Central and South America, Northern and Central Africa, the Middle East, and Southern and Central Asia.
To put it in the simplest and most general terms, war is an elite "answer" to the stress of collapse (both economic and ecological.) They are not genuinely separate issues and no road to a sustainable (for humans, the planet will survive) goes through their wars. To a first approximation, no one pro-war is green (even if they are Green.) And everyone anti-war can be worked with.
The post seems to reflect the general respectable opinion that Sahra Wagenknecht is both entirely unacceptably left to be admitted to governance in any way. The implication is that AfD may be called upon in the ensuing parliamentary maneuvering. Yet simultaneously Sahra Wagenknecht is deemed to be essentially AfD with good PR (pigeon vs. dove.) The inevitable conclusion is that she divides the right. However much both seem to be the consensus among those who opine, it seems to me that it can't be both simultaneously. Consulting the conventional wisdom here seems to be unwise?
Not sure what war you're referring to, but if it's the one in Ukraine, that didn't come out of a conclave of elites looking for an answer for the "stress of collapse." It came out of the mind of ONE particular elite named Vladimir Putin.
It's not clear to me how the civil war in the Donbas which began in 2014 came from the mind of Putin.
You do know this is the oldest trick in the imperialist playbook, right? Foment a civil war, then point to the civil war YOU started as justification for sending in military "advisors" or just all-out invading, It's exactly what the US did in Vietnam, and then it was the worst thing ever, but when the Russians do it it's AWESOME.
If any outsiders started the civil war in Ukraine, it was the US. And just as in Vietnam, it was indeed wrong. Putin instantly accepted the triumph of the wolfangel and sonnenraad in Kyiv. By the way, it is not at all clear you object to the US war on Vietnam. But defeat is an orphan...
A separatist insurgency that wants to break off from Ukraine to join Russia, using Russian-supplied weapons. WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK RUSSIA WAS INVOLVED?
Russia was involved in one sense, Putin immediately recognized the coup regime, which served to limit efforts to restore the elected government. It is not clear that the so-called separatists were actually separatists committing to fusion with the Russian Federation. Certainly the bombardment for years of ethnic Russians/Russian language speakers increased any such tendencies. Yet Putin refused to recognize any unity. Indeed, Minsk II openly committed the Donbas governments to Ukraine, albeit with autonomy and guarantees of rights you would deny them. But Minsk II was a fraud designed to buy time for further war.
It was the Kyiv regime which decided ethnic Russians/Russian speakers were not equal. An issue you have ignored, the right to national self determination, favors the Russians. Old boundaries cannot be sacred, especially given that imperialism freely ignores them when it wants to (Vietnam, Korea, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Sudan, the PRC, for glaring examples.)
You are not a consistent anti-imperialist, you are consistently pro-imperialist. Enough of this, no one else is paying attention anyhow.
How and why did the U.S., in 2014, start a civil war in Ukraine? Wikipedia says,”The war began in April 2014, when a commando unit headed by Russian citizen Igor Girkin seized Sloviansk in Donetsk oblast. The Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. The war continued until subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “
Ask Victoria Nuland how and why she was picking the new leaders of the coup government? For that matter, explain why the US-dominated IMF gave preferential treatment to Ukraine to effectively finance the war? And it would be honest of you to explain why the first act of the coup government was to attack the Russian language speakers with discriminatory language?
US figures openly boasted of their money being well spent on NGOs years before in supporting the coup for years before. The implicit claim that the Party of Regions was a Russian trojan horse is tendentious. Your implicit assumption that US policy is obviously driven by moral principle is merely conformity. I am not privy to the secret counsels of the imperialists though, so I am unashamed cannot reliably detail their true motives and operational goals.
Recognizing the right of nations to self-determination means accepting that Ukrainians may wish to have "their" own entirely separate country but by the very same principle that does not mean they have the right to majority ethnic Russian/Russian language speaking areas. Supporting he imperialist decision that this particular boundary is sacred, unlike others pro-imperialists like you support revising, forcibly if necessary, isn't moral, it's merely obedience.
Again the right of nations to self-determination means the right to national unity. It was Kyiv that decided Russians were not part of the new Ukraine. That raised the issue of which nation the majority ethnic Russian/Russian language speakers actually belonged to. The insistence they should be inferior citizens in Ukraine is effectively the insistence the Ukrainians have the right of conquest. The right of nations to self determination favors the Russians. Only a selective endorsement of existing boundaries stands in opposition...but that principle is opposed to the right of nations to self determination.
As it is, your claim is like saying the US Civil War started with the terrorist John Brown seizing Harper's Ferry. It didn't because the US military in the person of Robert E. Lee and his troops quickly defeated the liberators. If you were consistent you would dismiss Brown as a terrorist too. In Ukraine, the military split. The bulk of the Donetsk and Lugansk militias were from Ukraine., just as Brown wasn't just some random white guy imposing his Yankee will on hapless victims. Kharkov nearly went over as well, by the way. Odessa was kept "loyal" by an atrocity, the fascists setting fire to the trades union building, however much you may have enjoyed that. There was no mass invasion of the Donbas by Russian troops.
(The Russian forces who were massively engaged in saving Crimea from the coup were already in Crimea. Mounting an invasion of new territory does not happen quickly. Remember how long it took to prepare the Iraq invasion. There was no war in Crimea precisely because the Ukrainian forces there acceded. It is not even certain that was due to force majeure. There really was separatist feeling in Crimea, something which dated back to the very formation of independent Ukraine, as you should acknowledge.)
Girkin/Strelkov was not an agent of Putin, as evidenced by his later imprisonment by "Putin." He did not succeed by himself, but with the help of Ukrainians. Again, the fact that Putin scotched any later pleas for unification matters. For that matter, the protection of the property of Ukrainian oligarchs like Akhmetov shows a substantive commitment towards economic unity with Kyiv.
Last and least, relying on wikipedia on any controversial matter is risky, to say the least. Using it to apologize for fascism is in my opinion deplorable.
Yes, unlike you, I'm a consistent anti-imperialist. I'm against it whether it's being done by Americans or Russians.
If there's a civil war in a neighboring country, that's a permission slip to invade? Good to know. Sorry Canada or Mexico didn't exercise the option when they had the chance.
Canada wasn't independent at that time. There most certainly were powerful forces in England advocating open intervention (the high point was the notorious Trent affair.) Given the eventual disparity in naval forces, the English recognition of Confederate belligerency ended up helping the Union.....but that was in no sense friendly.
Mexico was invaded by the French, English and Spanish at the period and in no position to intervene. But during the Mexican revolution, the US did intervene in many ways, including Pershing's military incursions.
Plainly I do not belong to this commentariat and have canceled my subscription so will not be tempted to reply to SOMETHING IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET when September comes.
Why not leave right now? Take your pixels and go home.
There are multiple interconnected wars, preparations for expanding said wars, and blockades, as well as increasing use of things like cyberwarfare, lawfare, assassination, interference in internal affairs of other nations. In my judgment the world has already begun hybrid WWIII. It looks like neither WWI nor WWII, but then, why should it?
Also, the word answer was in scare quotes because of the fundamental irrationality of using war to pursue narrow short term interests regardless. In the end the answer isn't even an answer because in the end war won't work and will actively militate against other courses that might. The nonsense about a conclave is yours, seemingly an attempt to imply a conspiracy theory?
But a conspiracy of one is as irrational as most conspiracy theories. And it is still an elite "answer" in effect agreeing with me, unless you mean to imply that the personal wickedness of Putin is a world-historical force. The war began in 2014 with a coup against the legal government and proceeded with a civil war marked largely by Kyiv government shelling of civilian targets in the Donbas. The supposed author immediately acceded to the coup (which incidentally proves Putin really does have no more problem with Ukrainian fascists that you do) and did not intervene for eight years. The price for that is generally estimated at about 14 000 dead, also not a problem for you.
There was a coup in Iraq that installed Saddam Hussein in power, and many thousands of people died under his regime, but the US didn't invade until many years later, so it wasn't really an invasion plus George W Bush deserves credit for showing so much restraint.
Given the long support for Hussein during that period, this is a red herring. But that's a misnomer, given how brown, rightist this nonsense is.
Putin's not to blame for a war he started because he started it later rather than sooner?
The war was already ongoing, therefore Putin didn't *start* one in 2022 either.