It’s bad, but you could see it coming for a couple of years. It’s only a matter of time until they manage to win a state. I guess it’s going to be Saxony and/or Thuringia.
In my opinion there are two rules of thumb regarding voting population and politics in Germany and probably western countries in general:
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A third of every population consists of morons who are easily deceived by right wing populists who manage to present themselves as the rebellious underdog. UK, France, USA, Sweden etc., you can see that everywhere. These people, for some reason I still fail to fully understand, are unable to make a connection between their legitimate feeling of betrayal through our current system (aka capitalism) and factual solutions. Instead they follow those who do not offer solutions and instead propose to make everything worse, but, like I said, manage to present themselves as the ones who “fight the system”. All right wing populists have something in common: They do not publicly say too much about what policies they are effectively going to implement, resulting in them being a huge canvas for every kind of projected wishes their voters have. That’s why Trump worked for conspiracy nuts, libertarians, religious extremists, right wing extremists, moderate conservatives, economically liberals and unpolitical dumbasses alike. Everyone of these factions could project what they wanted for society into what Trump would do, because aside from singular statements, Trump was actually pretty vague in what he wanted. The whole stupid “drain the swamp” theme is a perfect representation of what I mean. The AfDs motto in the last general election was “Germany, but normal”. The proposal of Brexit basically functioned like that, too. It was going to solve all the problems for whatever reason and enough people believed it.
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About 10% of the German population (huge overlap with the proportion mentioned in 1.), and it might be the same for other western countries but i don’t know, are more or less openly fascist. These are the ones who profit from a “collective movement” that manages to assemble different parts of the political spectrum. This is different from a “big tent” approach where a compromise between related groups is thought to give them all a political representation.* This is not a new invention. The NSDAP functioned just like that. They managed to gather a huge chunk of the political spectrum around them, from nobility over capitalists over nationalists to liberals deep into the the political left. There were even former social-democrat and communist groups that merged into the NSDAP. I had a pretty illuminating chart about that, but i can’t find it online. The AfD works just like this. They have a fascist wing (literally called “Flügel” = “wing”), evangelicals, nobility, conspiracy nuts, economically liberals, former SPD and Linke-politicians and voters. They are united in their refusal of migrants, but that is pretty much all they can agree on. The new district leader of Sonneberg is a member of the “Flügel” and I’m sure all of the future ones will be, too. The “Flügel” is pretty effective in bullying everyone else out of important positions or even the party.
Sounds coherent. Would you say there are any effective tools to counter that problem? I wonder what the central banks can do at the moment, because it seems they are kind of in a deadlock regarding the control of inflation.