Alternative for Germany has joined France’s National Rally and Reform U.K. in becoming the most popular party in its country, according to polls.
A poll Tuesday showed Alternative for Germany — which is under surveillance by the country’s intelligence services over suspected extremism — is now the most favored by voters. The survey by broadcaster RTL put the AfD at 26%, ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats at 24%.
This is a high watermark for the European far right, a once fringe movement whose virulently anti-immigration, anti-Islam and culture-war politics were shunned by the mainstream just a decade ago.
Today, these parties have developed deep ties with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, who openly cite nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as inspirations on policy and tactics.
See, that’s some more excuses.
Turns out that a) back when the centrist liberals were quite close with those billionaires and didn’t want to rock the boat the far right still managed to sway both the billionaires themselves and politics overall rightward straight from the fringes, which the left hasn’t been able to mirror then or now.
But, more importantly, b) why is your app so shitty? I mean, sure, the other guys were able to cozy up to money, create, fund or buy platforms and pull poltiical strings. So we were what? Developing open source communication protocols that didn’t manage to get people to stick around even when the nazi billionaire had multiple public breakdowns?
See, the problem with that is the “if you don’t like it fix it yourself” attitude works about as well in politics as it does in open source software. Which is to say, not at all. It’s… actually kinda scary how well those two things map together. Nobody is in charge, nobody is getting paid, nobody wants to do anything and if enough people get together to actually try without corporate sponsorship you end up with a bunch of identical forks, none of which work particulary well.
But hey, by all means, enjoy your artisanal socialism and lose with dignity. I’m sure the moral pangs will make the well organized fascists really regret steamrolling the loose smattering of well informed cadres in union halls.
I don’t have it “figured out”, but I can certainly tell you that small scale zero budget grassroots action splintered across a multitude of factions delineated by random purity tests is not going to do much. That’s also why I have zero interest in starting yet another useless splinter of any kind.
There is an opportunity to rally anger around an alternative and yes, it will take unification, a charismatic leader and plenty of top down authority to get it going. The left is dropping the ball massively on all of those fronts. Get me that and I won’t care if it aligns with my particular brand of leftism, I’ll vote for it and support it publicly.
I mean, I already do, I live in a country with a left-leaning government, at least for now, and I will continue to vote for leftist parties here regardless of what happens or what they do for the foreseeable future. But… you know, in places where they don’t have a functional left wing apparatus.