The Federal Republic has boarded an express train to green socialist purgatory. There is no other way to describe what is happening here.
First, we had the shocking debt brake overhaul, via which the CDU and the SPD signalled their bizarre wish to reprise the hated politics of the traffic light, only in more extreme form. Among other things, this overhaul involved amending the constitution to include the goal of ‘climate neutrality’ by 2045. Leading greens are now hoping this amendment will open the way for litigious environmentalists to compel the further deindustrialisation of Germany over the coming two decades.
Then, as if to confirm the ongoing DDRification of the Federal Republic, the alleged Stasi collaborator and former leader of the Socialist Unity Party Gregor Grysi delivered the inaugural address to the 21st Bundestag.
Now the preliminary results of the coalition negotiations between the CDU, the Bavarian CSU and the Social Democrats are making their way into the press, and they are really a thing to behold.
In the run-up to the elections, all kinds of people told me that the CDU would take charge and we’d see a correction to the Right. The worst abuses of the traffic light would be put to bed, green politics would go on the back burner and the Government would begin to emphasise economic policy and migration restriction. It wouldn’t be totally satisfying, these people told me, but things would get better.
It is now safe to say that these people were retards and that they were totally and laughably wrong. What awaits us is not a political correction but rather the traffic light on speed. We are going to get an absolute witch’s brew of tax hikes, deficit spending, industrial subsidies and political repression. If even half of these plans are realised, the coming Government is going to make its predecessor look like a beacon of liberal freedom and fiscal responsibility. Here I can only provide a selection of all the proposals, as every five minutes a journalist stumbles upon another steaming turd.
To begin with, the various negotiating subcommittees are already aspiring to spend half a trillion Euros – the total value of the ‘special infrastructure fund’ established by the debt brake overhaul last week. The grave political differences between the CDU and the SPD are to be papered over with vast quantities of money. It makes sense, then, that the SPD should be gearing up to push very hard to raise taxes on ‘the rich’ – a group of people that in Social Democracy Land includes a great part of the middle class. The SPD wants to raise the top tax rate from 42% to 47% and the capital gains tax from 25% to 30%. It wants to introduce a confiscatory wealth tax and it wants to broaden real-estate taxes. The Union parties will probably have to give in on a great part of this programme, because, while German politics has shifted Right, it is the Left that is in charge.
Both the SPD and the CDU have agreed that “we must invest more in defensive democracy”, and therefore they plan to continue funnelling nearly €200 million into the jungle of NGOs presently perverting German civic discourse. Among other things, the CDU and the SPD hope to steer some of these funds into the National Action Plan Against Racism, specifically to “fight against structural and institutional racism” – concepts adopted from the increasingly defunct Anglosphere discourse surrounding Critical Race Theory.
As always, the SPD has even more insane plans. It wants to use state funds to promote “trustworthy media”, which is its term for politically aligned broadcasters and print publications. Germany already has one of the most elaborate and expensive public media systems in the world, but that is not enough for the Social Democrats, who hope to use state funds to co-opt private media as well. There are constitutional hurdles to the SPD vision on this front, and the CDU has so far opposed their aspirations, but given the Social Democrat dominance of negotiations this could well end up on the agenda of the coming Government.
Meanwhile, both parties have agreed that “the deliberate dissemination of false factual claims is not covered by freedom of expression”, and they hope to expand the prerogatives of media supervisory authorities so that these may “take action against information manipulation as well as hate and incitement”. They also want to increase regulatory scrutiny of “online platforms” and ensure that the Digital Services Act is “stringently implemented and further developed”.
Perhaps worst of all, the future coalition partners have agreed on a nefarious plan to deprive anyone with more than one conviction for the speech crime of ‘incitement’ (‘Volksverhetzung‘) of the right to stand for election to public office. The German criminal statute on incitement has been widely abused in the present wave of political repression, and state prosecutors will surely use this new mechanism to criminalise the opposition by systematically bringing incitement prosecutions against AfD politicians.
In summary: we are going to get more heavy-handed interventions in the economy, the state is going to take more of our money and Government enforcers are going redouble their efforts to prevent us from complaining about any of this.
What is happening ought to have been foreseeable. I didn’t quite foresee it, but I should have. The firewall against Alternative für Deutschland is confusing the feedback received by the German political establishment. The more the voting public demands a correction to the Right, the more our politicians will double-down on crazy Leftist policies. This cycle will continue until something breaks.
The mechanism is twofold:
1) As Right-leaning voters and party members take their support elsewhere, the traditional parties find themselves sitting on smaller but more Left-leaning constituencies. This phenomenon applies primarily to the CDU and the Bavarian CSU, but secondarily also to the SPD.
2) Ordinarily, we would expect these parties to chase after departing supporters, but in Germany the firewall skews incentives in a bizarre way. As the political mood moves Rightwards and voters take their support to the wrong side of the firewall, they disappear from the arena of political acceptability. The remaining feedback available to the establishment actually points Left. The resulting insanity then further increases voter defections to AfD, and establishment politics dive further Leftwards.
Since 2017, when the AfD first entered the Bundestag, the strict terms of the firewall have created two parallel legislative entities. Back then, AfD won 94 of 709 seats, but the firewall prohibited any of the cartel parties from voting with the newcomers. Thus you could say that the formal parliament alone had 709 seats; the de facto ‘cartel parliament’ – the formal parliament minus the AfD contingent – was smaller, having a mere 615 seats. Of course, the cartel parties could not ignore the formal parliament entirely. To pass laws, they still required a formal majority of 355 votes, which translates to a cartel supermajority of 58% of the seats. This was not a problem for Angela Merkel, who formed a government with the SPD in a typical ‘grand coalition’ that commanded about 65% of the cartel parliament.
During the next elections in 2021, the CDU did poorly and the AfD also took a hit, winning only 83 of 733 seats. The cartel parliament thus grew from 615 to 650 members, the cartel supermajority necessary to pass legislation declined to a mere 56% of the cartel parliament, and Germany received the traffic light coalition – an absolute clown car of a government that oversaw a series of disasters and setbacks from which we have yet to recover.
Voters punished the parties of the traffic light accordingly and they made the AfD stronger than ever, awarding them 152 of 630 seats. You might think that would chasten the cartel parties, but the firewall has nearly reversed the voters’ message. In the cartel parliament of this new Bundestag, SPD, Greens and Die Linke have 56% of the seats. That is to say, they are collectively just as strong as they were in the cartel parliament of 2021! Meanwhile, the CDU and CSU control 44% of the seats in this shrunken cartel parliament, a position which explains the early arrogance of Friedrich Merz, who initially appeared unconcerned with the difficulties of coalition-building. In an establishment discourse that entirely ignores the AfD and treats the cartel parliament as if it were the real, formal parliament, it becomes easy to forget that niggling detail of the cartel supermajority necessary to pass legislation, which now stands at a staggering 66%.
We have before us the phenomenon that will sooner or later destroy the firewall. The latest YouGov poll has the CDU in collapse, with only 26% support, and the AfD in ascendancy, reaching a record high of 24%. It’s conceivable that in the coming weeks the AfD becomes the strongest-polling party in Germany and that the next elections land it at 30% or higher. Of course the establishment may well try to ban Germany’s only alternative. In the unlikely event it succeeds, we would finally see that promised correction to the Right, as some voters would return to the cartel parties, effectively destroying this system of perverse feedback.
Until then, it will be nothing but a forced march to DDR 2.0.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Remember Covid Jab Deaths – latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, your new MP, your local vicar, online media and friends online.
Start a local campaign. We have over 200 leaflet ideas on the link on the leaflet.
Farmers want to be ‘militant’ in response to IHT raid, NFU warns
You want more bangs for your butter? Then you gotta invade your neighbour…..in our case, that would be France, you know, the one that is sending us everyone that they don’t want. Sounds like a plan?
This is what butter activism really looks like:
‘In the 19th century, a quarter of the world’s butter was produced in Siberia, and the income from its export exceeded the income from gold mining.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Siberian butter brought Russia more income than all the gold mines combined.
The butter fever in the Russian Empire began with the commissioning of the Great Siberian Route and ended with the outbreak of World War I. Russia became the second largest butter exporter in the world (after Denmark). Vologda, Yaroslavl and Kostroma butter went to the domestic market, and Siberian butter went abroad. Moreover, half of it went through the Omsk commodity exchange.
In 1911, the Governor-General of the Steppe Region, Yevgeny Schmidt, reported to Tsar Nicholas II: “Siberian butter production produces twice as much gold as the entire gold industry.”
All this was because Siberian butter was considered to be of higher quality due to its high fat content and stable taste.
Not a trace remains of its former glory. Now in Russia, as once in the USSR, a shortage of not only Vologda butter, but any butter in principle is brewing.
Before the Russians had time to recover from the winter “egg fights,” supermarkets and retailers have prepared a new surprise for them. Butter, one of the basic products in the standard consumer basket, has disappeared from the shelves.’
‘Butter packs are being stolen. Prosperity is evident. We need to try to seize something else to spread this advanced lifestyle across the planet.’
‘Patrushev (who runs agriculture in Russia) ordered a halt to the rise in food prices within two weeks.
There are different ways to act here: you can go shopping, hug packs of butter, persuade:
“What are you doing, silly butter? Why are you getting more expensive? Don’t get more expensive.”
Or you can do the opposite – swear and stamp your feet.
Ah, under Stalin, when there was order, they would have simply shot a dozen of the most impudent cucumbers, and the rest would have understood everything themselves and become cheaper.
But now there is no political will. There is little manhood in people.’
Handy hint for our famously first female robot chancellor ever, ever:
The trouble with butter activism is that it exports butter production.
‘Russia has started importing butter from the UAE. The average Arab cow produces about 42 liters of milk per day. In Russia, depending on the region and technological equipment, such figures are almost never met, the average figure is about 20-25 liters. At the same time, farms in the UAE can keep up to 100 thousand cows at a time. Considering that there are not very many pastures in the desert, almost all farms rely on feed, and they cope.
The dairy industry was supplied to the Arabs by Icelanders, feed is purchased in Australia, the main problem for Arab farmers is the fight against heat stress in animals, therefore, high-tech climate control systems with fogging and ventilation. The only thing that is used from local resources is sand, which is used for cows instead of bedding, but it is also processed in a continuous mode, cleaning it from impurities and secretions, so that the cows always lie practically on the beach sand. In essence, it is a seaside resort, how can it not produce record milk yields?’
‘At the end of the year, Putin personally visited both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where he declared the UAE as Russia’s main trading partner in the Arab world. Reportedly, topics of discussion during these meetings included trade in advanced technology.
Russian supplies of weaponry became constrained by sanctions, export controls, Russia’s prohibition from using the SWIFT payment system’
Guns for butter.
‘Spain removed 133 Dams last year because of the EU. Make of that what you will.’
Well, well, well.
Very quiet here today – is everybody glued to the US election instead?
Quite possibly a lack of interest in paywalled articles.