In Soviet Germany, the Government protests YOU.
Alas, Government-organised and state media-promoted protests are a great expense and they cannot go on forever. Yesterday Der Spiegel could still write that “tens of thousands are protesting against the AfD”, but even the inflated numbers it provided – 17,000 in Darmstadt! 5,000 in Heilbronn! 4,000 in Rottenburg! 2,500 in Schwerin! 1,500 in Greifswald! – were notably smaller than the massive actions reported days earlier in places like Hamburg and Munich. And today all is quiet, thanks in no small part to the rail strike, which makes it hard to pack the streets by shipping in extras from out of town.
The media want us to believe that all of this has really hurt the opposition, but the numbers belie the headlines. An INSA survey published on Monday has the AfD polling at 21.5% Germany-wide, which Welt hails as “the biggest decline in almost two years”. That is not really true (an earlier Forsa survey, conducted mostly before the massive protests, had AfD at 22%, so strictly speaking we’re talking about a decline of 0.5 percentage points), and anyway the AfD was polling even lower in November 2023, before the whole false Correctiv controversy ever began. It is a similar story with the latest Forsa survey published yesterday, which has AfD down two points to where it was in October. The press can wildly inflate ridiculously dishonest stories, the Government and its affiliates can call for nationwide demonstrations against “the Right”, and they can mobilise hundreds of thousands of their supporters, but all they get for their trouble are a few measly percentage points hardly beyond the error margin.
One way our establishment schoolmarms probably could hurt the AfD is if they stopped delivering us tiresome lectures about the wrongness of our political preferences. Nothing makes me want to put the opposition in power more than reading the deluge of commentary about why it is a grave sin to want the Scholz Clown Car out of Government. You could not devise a better pro-AfD guerilla publicity campaign if you tried.
Last weekend Spiegel journalist Susanne Beyer posted one of the most absolutely grating pieces in this genre. “Germany is actually well-governed”, it declares to the 82% of citizens who take a different view:
Praising and defending the Government is not really what you’re supposed to do in my job. But I’m going to do it anyway.
Firstly, because this is a free-form column… And secondly, because although critical distance is the basis of my profession, that also entails scrutinising widespread views.
These days, you hear almost nothing but criticism of the Government. On the streets it’s very loud. There are strikes, protests. Last weekend, the Federal President criticised the coalition in an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, while the Federal Chancellor criticised himself in a video message that same weekend.
This winter will be remembered as a ‘winter of rage’. One particular image will also be remembered: the gallows held up at demonstrations. The gallows are intended for politicians of the coalition.
Here is one of the gallows Beyer is talking about:
The traffic light is of course a symbol for the Government, and the media have had the vapours about displays like this for weeks now. In fact such gallows are not very widespread, but they are also a metaphor. I cannot believe I have to explain this. The people who set up these displays are not literally demanding that Scholz, Habeck and Lindner be hanged. They want them to resign.
Beyer writes that she first became “uneasy” when CDU chief Friedrich Merz and BILD called for new elections in December. This is because Beyer knows that new elections would most likely bring the CDU into Government and Beyer does not like the CDU. That a great many people disagree with her doesn’t matter; Beyer’s opinion is more important than yours, because she is a Spiegel journalist. Also, new elections would be good for the AfD, and the very thought of this makes Beyer angry:
What really outrages me about the calls for new elections is the flippancy with which they are being made in view of the AfD’s high poll ratings. New elections now? For what purpose? To wilfully dismantle democracy?
Yes, nothing portends “dismantling democracy” as much as holding free and democratic elections at a moment when too many people have the wrong opinions. What we should probably do is suspend elections until everybody comes around to Beyer’s way of thinking. That will surely happen sooner or later.
Because our columnist probably last went outside in 2019, she can’t imagine why the Scholz Government is so unpopular:
According to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the coalition Government has either already implemented (38%) or started to implement (26%) almost two-thirds… of what it calls its “ambitious coalition agreement”.
Yet only a small proportion of Germans know this. “The public fighting within the coalition has led to an underestimation of the Government’s true performance and its commitment to implementing [its programme],” the Foundation says.
This means… that the poor public mood has less to do with facts than with perception that has been clouded partly by the coalition and their squabbles.
Contrary to the contentions of Beyer’s favourite globaloid NGO, people are not mad at the coalition because of its in-fighting. They are mad at it because the economy is on life support, their heating and energy bills are outrageous, and every day they have to hear empty-headed head girls like Beyer tell them how great all this is.
And then there is this: social democrats and Greens do not appeal to voters with their precise policies, but rather because their slogans sound good. Their supporters think they’re voting to do things like save the planet and give poor people more money. The problem arises when the Greens and the social democrats actually follow through on their promises and the electorate faces nothing but economic stagnation and rising tax burdens as far as the eye can see. The coalition would be polling far better if it’d ignored its “ambitious coalition agreement” and done as little as possible.
Beyer continues to catalogue the successes of the Scholz circus troupe. They “coped well with the energy crisis” by allowing our allies to blow up Nord Stream with nary a complaint and investing in wildly expensive American liquid natural gas and turning off our last nuclear plants only to import even more nuclear power from France. Also they have “expanded renewables” and they’ve raised the minimum wage; “what’s wrong with that?” Finally, our paragon of political wisdom gets to the heating ordinances. These “continue to infuriate many voters”, but “banning oil and gas heating systems in new buildings is the right thing to do”. That is only part of what the heating ordinances prescribe, but okay.
Beyer concludes her magisterial defence of the unprecedented losers who lead us with odd philosophical musings that “the state is not just a Government”. Rather it is “a multi-layered structure” with “a great many institutions and people”. When things go wrong (but I thought everything was going great?) it’s not right to lay it at the feet of politicians because it’s probably somebody else’s fault:
This brings us back to journalism. We journalists like to visualise abstract processes with the help of concrete figures. … We have to be careful that this specific focus on individuals and their conflicts and other negative things doesn’t create a reality that we’ll then have to criticise.
We just need to stop writing negative stories about how bad things are! We need to write happy stories about our politicians and everything will be fine! Then we’ll “create a reality” that won’t require negative commentary and all will be fine!
Our entire establishment appears actually to believe this; it is why the coalition and its supporters are constantly insisting that their failures amount to mere problems with ‘communication’. As long as they remain committed to their blindness, the AfD will continue to gather support, however many people Scholz calls to the streets to denounce “the Right”. Once again: if the Government doesn’t like being universally reviled and it wants its political opponents to be less popular, perhaps it should govern better.
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Zee plebs vil do as zey are told!
Or maybe not…
We could write a similar critique of the MSM here in the UK.
Now why is the incumbent German government performing so grotesquely badly?
Just like Fishy’s mob.
The midget Micron
Turdeau
The Polish fella.
There seems to be a trend here. I wonder what is causing this?
It’s not as if these countries aren’t suffering from self- inflicted misery that could easily be resolved is it?
Now why is the incumbent German government performing so grotesquely badly?
I realize the question is rethorical but I’m going to answer it nevertheless: Because it’s signed up to the same US/UN loot and pillage agenda as the other governments of US satellite states. My optimistic self tends to think that this has gone that much overboard recently because these people realize that their times are drawing to a close. This means for them, it’s Now or never! They need to grab whatever they can while they still can. That’s why the mock emergencies get ever emergencier and the hysteric cacophony of voices shouting extremly dire warnings is doing a deafening crescendo. The play is over and the curtain about to fall. And all kinds of a dime for a dozen policy actors or rather, policy distractors, are performing a great hullabaloo on stage in the hope to delay this for somewhat more time.
“Because it’s signed up to the same US/UN loot and pillage agenda as the other governments of US satellite states.”
Yes my question was rhetorical and if I may be so bold, your answer is correct.
Not US Satellite States. ———The UN and EU drives the Social Justice and pretend to save the planet Eco Socialism. Trump may well be the next President taking the US out of the Paris Agreement crap once more. They don’t like you choosing because you might not choose them which is why they would not want an election now in the hope the anti establishment outrage dies down a bit. —-I want to see every leftist government overthrown and replaced by right of centre “people first” parties that tear up Climate Treaties and once again give us affordable reliable energy so we prosper as we did before this climate garbage. It is the price of energy that is directly linked to prosperity, and Germany has taken that away with their 40,000 turbines and removing Nuclear plants.
Trump is still the guy who set the mRNA train in motion and who was either generally supportive of all other Corona-crap or at least either unwilling to or incapable of stopping it. As leader of the free world or at least of the free USA, he was a complete failure. Apart from that, it’s quite telling that you first deny the existence of US satellite states and then articulate a US domestic politics position as if anyone outside of the USA had a reason to care for that. If you aren’t American, something I don’t know, your mind has certainly been colonized by America.
He didn’t get enough time at the top to show if he might be a good leader or not. He was immediately under siege and undermined by the hysterical liberal Left and engineered out of power at the first opportunity. He actually followed through on more of his election promises than any other president, but his political naivety, his inability to stop fibbing and his narcissism did him no favours. I also read again and again that he subverted democracy in a variety of ways; without examining those ways here, isn’t it clear by now that the alternative – the great Joke Biden, or his puppet masters at any rate – is a far greater player on that particular stage than anyone else?
He didn’t get enough time at the top to show if he might be a good leader or not. He was immediately under siege and undermined by the hysterical liberal Left and engineered out of power at the first opportunity.
Well, yes. That’s how stuff works in a so-called democracy: There’s always a large part of the population which didn’t vote for the current leader and which is actually opposed to him being leader, to the point – not very rational but very much human – that they’d rather go against their own political ideas if the guy who puts them in practice is the wrong guy. Should Trump get a second term in office, we’ll see what he does then. Until this has happened, his middle name is Corona.
“Colonised by America”???? You forget that without America we would all have a signed photo of the Fuhrer on our Living Room wall. The United States is still the best hope for freedom in the increasingly eco socialist and Islamophied world.———Without them Europe and the UK would be over run by the barbarian hordes and our daughters would be going to school wearing headscarves. ———Making mistakes about covid was the least of our problems and guess what? All governments made a hash of it except possibly the Swedes.
Without America and its eleventh hour intervention in the first world-war in order to protect its huge investments in the Entente cause and to ensure that Germany would end up paying everything, we’d never have had a Führer. But if you prefer your children (or grandchildren) to be physically castrated to humour some US weirdo who likes to claim that he’s a woman, that’s obviously your call.
That last point you made Frank Furedi made on Neil Oliver’s show earlier.
Farmers block motorway near Paris in wave of nati…: https://youtu.be/GsNdLgMXSZw
Look at this. And from The Groan.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/27/farmers-streets-europe-net-zero-protests/
The protests are becoming cross border.
“Tractors are or have been on the march in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, and, crucially, the Netherlands.
Would tractor protests have become so ubiquitous were it not for the Dutch farmers, whose fight captured the attention of the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk?”
And this report is in The Torygraph.
Yes the Dutch farmers were supporting the German farmers and the Poles were out demonstrating solidarity too. I like the French farmers as they do their own version of ‘muck-spreading’ and they just make barricades and start fires. Great footage online.
And this is very tragic news from the French farmers’ protest a few days back. But would you believe who was driving? Clue: they weren’t native French;
”Two people including a teenage girl have died and one person is seriously injured after a car driven by an Armenian migrant drove through a farmers’ road blockade and hit protesters in Ariège, France, on Tuesday morning.
The incident occurred at approximately 5:30 a.m. on RD 119 when a vehicle with three occupants crashed into a haystack barricade constructed by agricultural campaigners, leading to the death of 37-year-old Alexandra Sonac and the hospitalization of her husband and teenage daughter — the latter of which sadly died later in hospital.
“A car with three occupants on board crossed a roadblock to gain access to the national road 20. The vehicle came from Toulouse and was traveling in the direction of Andorra. It hit the system put in place by the farmers,” local police confirmed to France 3 Occitanie.
“They passed at breakneck speed, on the shoulders, avoiding the roadblocks,” said Sébastien Durand, vice-president of the Fdsea of Ariège, the local agricultural union.
Emergency responders, including 35 firefighters and 13 police officers, were swiftly dispatched to the scene.
An investigation is underway to ascertain the nature of the incident, although Foix public prosecutor’s office announced it was exploring a charge of involuntary manslaughter.”
https://rmx.news/france/two-farmers-dead-after-car-hit-roadblock-at-breakneck-speed-in-france/
Bloody hell Mogs that’s tragic. Damned immigrants.
Reading a fair bit of this forecast recently, so this is good to know. Is change for the better finally afoot?
”The European parliamentary elections to be held in June could be the most explosive yet, with new polling suggesting a considerable shift in its composition to right-wing populist parties.
According to research conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the EU legislature will become more fragmented than ever before, with the “old guard” center-left liberal coalition struggling to retain the majority that currently enables it to dominate the agenda.
“The main winners in the elections will be the populist right. The major winner will be the radical right Identity and Democracy (ID) group, which we expect to gain 40 seats and, with almost 100 MEPs, to emerge as the third largest group in the new parliament,” the Berlin-based think-tank forecasts.
The ID group is predicted to dominate in France, in particular. The group, to which Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National is affiliated, would receive the most votes, amassing 30 seats from the available 81. The group would be the most popular choice in the Netherlands also, taking 10 seats from the 31 on offer and continuing the success of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), which recently won the Dutch election.
The European Council on Foreign Relations wrote that its report should serve as a “wake-up call” for “European policymakers about what is at stake in the 2024 European Parliament elections,” warning that a dramatic change in the legislature’s composition could see the next phase of Brussels’ Green Deal blocked and would have implications for the EU’s approach toward immigration, future enlargement of the bloc, and its currently unwavering support for Ukraine.”
https://rmx.news/european-union/populist-right-wing-parties-will-dominate-in-european-elections-new-polling-forecasts/
I hope this gives room for some optimism.
“Establishment Campaigns…. Have Failed to … Solve Germany’s Problems”
I don’t believe the establishment in Germany or in the UK is much interested in solving problems, other than how to stay in power and keep the plebs down.
To deep and too coralled for decades. Excellence in some fields of industry and technology and complete absence in others. Do you think this was an accident. This is a textbook illustration of what happens when you go along to get along. Maybe they didn’t have much choice in the late 1940s and they lived high on the hog for a while so were happy to turn a blind eye. Can’t do it anymore. As Carl Sagan said of Johannes Kepler, he preferred the harshest of realities over the dearest of illusions.
And I would like to know who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. They were sabotaged on 26th September 2022 so international investigators have had sufficient time to determine who the culprits were.
Two stories have been floated around: (1) it was USA and (2) it was a group of Ukrainians. In either case, someone should explain the logic as to why Germany supports both these countries in their aggression against Russia.
And Chancellor Scholz should explain why he made no objection to President Biden promising the Nord Stream project would not go ahead during their joint press conference on 7th February 2022 – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8. It gives the impression that the answer to the question above was (1) and that Scholz had been informed of this by Biden and approved of the step. But I cannot for a moment believe that a German Chancellor would knowingly accept the destruction of infrastructure providing cheap and reliable energy to his country!
A completely unrelated question: what is the superlative of ‘High treason’?
“But I cannot for a moment believe that a German Chancellor would knowingly accept the destruction of infrastructure providing cheap and reliable energy to his country!”
This is happening across all Western nations. The nominal leaders, and they are only nominal, have been given their scripts, and their orders and are simply doing as instructed.
These people are working flat out to cripple their countries and their citizens. They don’t give a shit about the damage that people must be made to suffer. It’s absolutely blatant.
Iam baffled that you cannot see what is going on.
The Russo-German alliance will come back with a vengeance. You will see two centres of power in the time to come, one in Brazil and one in Russia. Very different from the Anglo-Americans. This has been discussed in the mystery schools for the last 150 years.
“if the Government doesn’t like being universally reviled and it wants its political opponents to be less popular, perhaps it should govern better.”
If they are able to govern better that should also mean governing less.
You would think that if Germans are not happy to just follow orders Ms Beyer would see that as a good thing?
Forgive me, but why is Eugyppius given such a consistent and central position from which to talk about Germany? I don’t doubt his expertise and the truth of what he says – but is it simply because he lives in that country that his views are so prominent in the Daily Sceptic? Or do I take it that Germany, being at the heart of so much that affects us all, is a special case, requiring special attention? I ask out of curiosity and mild surprise, I assure you – not objection or outrage, or any kind of bias; I find his investigations very interesting, but as he ‘screws down’ into the detail, I become less involved – I suppose because I’m not German! That said, expert reporting on a different country each week would be fascinating – but obviously dependent on availability of qualified commentators. Again, I’m just curious, and I recognise the excellent quality and importance of everything Eugyppius brings to the table. Just asking…
Perhaps because Germany largely funds the EU, which is where much of the economic destruction blighting Europe originates. Destroy the German Greens and the edifice they have built in Brussels may crumble.
A fair point. Good post.
What does “In Soviet Germany, the Government protests YOU” mean?
That simple first sentence lost me completely and I eventually didn’t bother to read the article. It doesn’t seem to have any meaning or correct form.