During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton famously described roughly half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”. But if you think that was demeaning, consider that Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, one of the leading representatives of Germany’s ostensibly ‘liberal’ Free Democratic Party (FDP) has now compared supporters of the rival Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to “flies on a pile of shit”.
According to the latest polls, the AfD is now Germany’s second largest party in terms of potential electoral support, with 24% of respondents in a recent YouGov survey saying they would vote for the AfD. Only the Christian Democrats of former Chancellor Angela Merkel are polling better. By contrast, Strack-Zimmerman’s FDP, which is part of the ruling coalition of present Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is polling at just 6% – just one-quarter of the support enjoyed by the AfD.
Strack-Zimmerman is the chair of the Armed Services Committee (Verteidigungsausschuss) of the German parliament or Bundestag. She is slated to be the lead candidate of the FDP in the upcoming European Parliament elections.
Strack-Zimmerman is reported to have made her remarks while discussing the AfD and other allegedly extremist parties in a speech to an FDP party gathering in Dusseldorf. Far from denying the report in the German tabloid Bild, in a post on X, Strack-Zimmerman confirmed it, writing, “In a speech today I warned about the AfD and [other] extremes. Summarising (!), I said: “The bigger the pile of shit, the more flies are on it!”
In a second post in her thread, Strack-Zimmerman added that she was referring, however, to the “generally dangerous political situation”, noting that she did not “directly mention anyone or anything”. This is “a small but important distinction”, she concluded.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
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The original story was that she described the AfD as a pile of shit.
Her clarification made it even worse, essentially describing a quarter of German voters as flies circling a pile of shit.
This was also widely shared and absorbed as such.
Forget the rest.
How to lose friends and alienate people. Call them flies on a pile of shit. Great work Marie-Agnes.
It’s hardly likely to persuade these ‘flies’ to vote for her. Such utter disdain for the voting public. They deserve to lose.
Communists always behave like this. The German government is essentially a closet communist cabal made up of ex east German commies and younger, new commies. Hitler was a socialist so Germany’s post war trajectory as a socialist hell hole is unsurprising to me. Since Bismarck started state pensions to buy off the socialists in the Parliament, Germany has slowly but certainly headed toward more and more Marxist madness.
I think one of the main reasons the AfD are becoming so popular is because people are completely fed up with the impact of uncontrolled immigration over the years. It’s the regular citizens who feel it and have to live with the effects, after all. Not the ‘elites’ who sit in their ivory towers and never have to experience every day life, rubbing shoulders with the imported riff raff or being victims of migrant crime. I think this article describes the above horrible woman well. These leftards will never acknowledge the evidence which contradicts their delusions;
”There is a camp of those who are clever and cosmopolitan, who to a certain extent embody the higher moral consciousness of society and formulate a socially palatable view on immigration. For example, it claims that only immigration will secure the prosperity of our nation, increase its benefits, ward off harm, and so on. All sorts of magical figures are used to prove all this clearly and objectively.
On the other side is the camp of the ignorant people who do not want to see this. Those who do not have this higher moral consciousness and who are therefore not so insightful in the eyes of the sanctimonious elite. Instead, they ignore the “facts”, oppose progress with hatred and agitation, and are therefore quite rightly politically excluded and marginalized. No one needs to deal with their arguments because they have none.
Beyond the dream world of the former camp, everyone knows what to make of their collective view. The medical assistant in the doctor’s surgery who settles the horrendous sums with the health insurance companies; the employee in the social welfare office who lets his gaze wander over the waiting area; the policeman on the street who tackles the devastation caused by immigration — they all know about the grotesque nonsense that Germany is profiting from immigration.
Pro-immigration advocates dismiss their anecdotal evidence as subjective impressions that are not corroborated by statistics. However, with the new study “Honorable State? Focus migration on the fiscal balance of immigration” by Bernd Raffelhüschen, this is now changing.”
https://rmx.news/economy/migration-does-not-create-prosperity-quite-the-opposite/
Well this is definitely a case of projection.
Is the pile she refers to the German State, its political class or what. Insulting people you want to support you instead of someone else is not a great plan.
Other German politicians have literally called AfD-voters Untermenschen (sub-humans, the supposed Nazi-term for those parts of the population which aren’t really worth having) in the past. Insofar the established German parties go, AfD-supporters have gone over to the dark side and are henceforth enemies to be fought tooth-and-nail. Statements like this are partially meant to emotionalize supporters of these parties in order to motivate them to go voting and partially supposed to prevent losing more of them to the AfD by stigmatizing those already lost in the strongest terms possibly. Lastly, this is also simply a call for vigilante violence against AfD politicians and supporters by the inofficial death squads of the political establishment (this is not a joke — incidences of serious violence against these keep occuring and the establishment politicians not so covertly calling for them know that this is happening and support it, sometimes even openly).
Getting the people to vote for her is possibly not the final solution she has in mind.
At a guess, and looking at the picture I presume she is of the alphabet persuasion.
An honest politician eh? At least she has come clean with her views on her constituents
Either that or she got the memo to come as ‘Geert Wilders’!
Rocking the vampire (Geert Wilders) look.
The FDP stands no chance of winning a mandate in a constituency. FDP-MPs are thus exclusively proportional representation list candidates.
In other words – also rans.
Not really. They usually have between 5% and 10% of the list votes, sometimes falling below 5% and disappearing for a while (parties which get less than 5% of the list vote are legally excluded from parliament) which means they often provide the missing percents to enable someone to form a coalition government. It’s just that they don’t have constituents, not even in the weak German sense. They have an anonymous crowd of supporters distributed all over Germany which often enables them to play a leading role.
Afterthought: This party PR system is really feudal. There’s a small set of political grandees which command huge numbers of individually anonymous and voiceless retainers and the number of retainers is used to rank the grandees who get to make all real political decisions.
These are the same sort of people who warn us that one of the biggest dangers facing us is societal polarisation.
Their lack of self awareness is both amusing and frightening. Frightening because this just isn’t going to end well. Not when it reaches this point.
Their favourite saying is hate won’t win!
The problem with this is that they mean We will castrate your mentally disturbed children. That you hate the idea won’t stop us.
Neo communist spouts insults because it had no solid arguments against AFD.
And the neo-comm is possibly an ex east German communist who pines for the old days, comrades. Wistfully remembering the surveillance, the cancellation and imprisonment of those who did not comply, the kids being brainwashed into dobbing in their parents, the crushing of dissent. Ah the glory days!
What she considers is a “small but important distinction” will be irrelevant to those who support the AfD. She’s just called them flies on a pile of shit.
I think she’s right about “The bigger the pile of shit, the more flies are on it! and she and her “free democratic ” party are the pile of odure that other parties are trying to get rid of.
Deplorables!