GER politics thread

[Skybird]

In a latest poll on the sunday question ("if there would be elections this sunday..." ) the Greens have overtaken the Laschet league (CDU) .

[Skybird]

And now I read that while the CSU in the past days collected over 1000 new party entries per day, the Green collect even more new members and have a total boom in new memberships.
I wonder if people really have red and understood what the greens have written in their program. Its a declaration of war on löiberty, freedoms, and private property, and a declaration of intent to destroy social cohesion and financial maintainability of private households.

What all thsi points at? People have their nose full and fuller of the Merkel gang. The elections in September look as if they will be turned into a funeral: with bands, free beer, free entry variety and street clowns and firework.


Vom Regen in die Traufe.

[Jimbuna]

If so, I doubt Merkel will be all that bothered thinking to herself that she's done her stint

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I wonder if people really have red and understood what the greens have written in their program. Its a declaration of war on löiberty, freedoms, and private property, and a declaration of intent to destroy social cohesion and financial maintainability of private households. [...]

The Greens' party program (shortened, translated from here:
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bunde...icle_id=494383,)

"An "immediate climate protection program" is planned.
The climate target is to be raised: 70 percent fewer greenhouse gases in 2030 than in 1990. The target is currently 55 percent.

The CO2 price for transport and heating introduced in January is expected to be 60 euros (currently 25 euros) per ton in 2023. In order to relieve low-wage earners and families in particular, energy money is to flow back to the citizens.

The Greens want to “campaign” for the coal phase-out to be “completed” in 2030 (currently 2038).

From 2030, only emission-free cars are to be registered. The purchase of emission-free cars is to be promoted through a bonus-malus system in the vehicle tax. A “fund for transformation grants” is to help low-income commuters switch to an emission-free car.

A speed limit, called "Sicherheitstempo", of 130 kilometers per hour is to apply on German autobahns. An expansion of the railway should make short-haul flights superfluous by 2030. In addition, a massive expansion of cycle paths is planned.

The Greens want to rebuild the debt brake in the Basic Law in order to finance additional annual investments of 50 billion euros through loans - in fast internet, cutting-edge research, climate-neutral infrastructures, charging stations, expansion of the railways, emission-free buses, modern urban development.

In order to relieve small and medium-sized incomes, the basic income tax allowance is to be increased. To finance this, the top tax rate for high incomes increases in two stages by three and six percentage points.

From an income of 100,000 euros for a single person (200,000 euros for couples) the top tax rate would be 45 percent and from an income of 250,000 (500,000) euros it would be 48 percent.
A wealth tax of one percent per year should apply to assets above two million euros per person.

The Greens want to limit the rise in housing costs with a nationwide rent cap that enables “rent ceilings in existing buildings”. Regular rent increases should be capped at 2.5 percent per year within the rent index.

Hartz IV, introduced by the former red-green federal government, will be replaced by a "guarantee protection" according to the draft, the standard rates for monthly payments would be gradually increased and sanctions would be removed. A basic child benefit is intended to bundle previous benefits such as child benefit, child benefit and basic security.

The state-subsidized private old-age provision based on the Riester pension model is to be replaced by a “publicly administered citizen fund”.
Vegan milk alternatives are to be equated with dairy products for tax purposes and receive the reduced VAT rate.

Migrants who previously only had a temporary tolerance status are given a safe right to stay after five years of residence.

In security policy, the Greens reject the “arbitrary” NATO two percent target, according to which member states should spend at least two percent of their economic output on the military budget."


Regardless those other ideas, but an Autobahn speed limit in Germany? NEVER.

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Regardless those other ideas, but an Autobahn speed limit in Germany? NEVER.

Unlike a gas-powered vehicle, an EV's consumption increases dramatically as speeds rise. No need to regulate and post speed limits, just install the charging stations farther apart.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Catfish

In security policy, the Greens reject the “arbitrary” NATO two percent target, according to which member states should spend at least two percent of their economic output on the military budget.[/I]"


Regardless those other ideas, but an Autobahn speed limit in Germany? NEVER.

The NATO two percent will go down well with the US no doubt Not to mention the other NATO members

The speed limit I fully understand....back in the day I lived in the Netherlands, I recall driving my parents to Schiphol Airport at the end of one of their visits and my father remarked at the speed of the German registered vehicles overtaking at great speed. A few miles down the road I was pulled over by Traffic Police and issued with an eighty Guilder fine (as was the Dutch currency back then) despite the fact I was confident I was not speeding.

My father being a veteran of WWII remarked to one of the young officers "I hope you and your country never feel the need for my help again because I won't be bothering"

I apologised, took the ticket and carried on to Schiphol.

[Catfish]

^ great story. We once made it from Germany to Amsterdam on two Vespa scooters. We were not very fast but we used the dutch motorway for some time, which was of course forbidden, for such comparably lame vehicles.

So we were pulled over by two policemen driving a Porsche 911 in full police colours. They were very friendly though, just told us to leave the motorway at the next exit, and explained which rural roads to use to get to Amsterdam.

Their german was very good, and when i wondered that i never saw police Porsches in Germany they just said it was the only way to catch up with all those pesky german speeders.. made sense

[Jimbuna]

^ Nice one

[Skybird]

https://www.dw.com/en/german-climate...les/a-57369917

Gott steh uns bei, egal welcher. This will break the middle class' financial-economic backbone, and drive industry away to less restrictive places. It will be like it alraedy is with nculear power: Germany has banned it, and so imports it from others with far more dnageorus powerplants than ours were.

I know why I always was against joining the Paris climate thing. I always feared that sooner or later this ^ would happen.

Those being young now, in the future will be old. And then see how poverty tastes that is due to their own demands and actions. Those activists, none of them works productively anywhere, they all get financed from others, and donations, and so forth. They are young, have often no job training, no job experience, never had responsibility, never were liable for their own living. They never have learned to maintain their own house and home, but are set to regulate the whole wide world outside. Gotta love that.

[Skybird]

^Adding to the above. The unacceptable implications of the verdict given by the Federal Constitutional Law. Both the law and the court have become a threat in themselves.


https://translate.google.com/transla...lima_vorbehalt

[Skybird]

The Neuer Zürcher Zeitung writes:
https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/bundesver...ter-ld.1614612


Germany's climate protection is becoming the dictate of the constitutional judges


The Federal Constitutional Court is expanding the responsibility required by the Basic Law for the preservation of the natural foundations of life to include specific, drastic measures for climate protection. Germany's highest judges ignore the global dimensions of global warming. -

In terms of the immediate effects, the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court seems almost ridiculous: the legislature is obliged to make it clear in 2022 - instead of until 2025 as previously provided by law - according to which timetable Germany wants to further reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions after 2030. The (next) federal government can live well with this arrangement. But on a fundamental level, the court decision goes much further, with potentially far-reaching consequences for Germany. It is therefore understandable that the representatives of the German climate youth movement belonging to the plaintiffs cheered loudly on Thursday.

Even if the judges repeatedly try to relativize this in their justification and refer to the legislature's scope for action, they essentially state an absolute, legally enforceable constitutional duty of the German state to implement measures that are deemed suitable to protect the global climate. The court explicitly states a constitutional mandate for the state to implement the goal formulated in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement of keeping long-term global warming well below 2 degrees. -

In doing so, the court accepts that the measures adopted for this purpose can be so drastic that “practically any freedom protected by fundamental rights is endangered”. Not only is that okay with the judges, it is the state's duty to adopt such extreme measures. They derive this from the well-known scientific studies, which estimate the maximum permissible emissions of greenhouse gases worldwide in this century, which are barely compatible with the Paris climate targets. From the beginning of the next decade, according to these calculations, the judges concisely stated that Germany would only have such low emissions that "almost all areas of human life (...) Are threatened by drastic restrictions". -

The judges base the very broadly formulated duty of the state to climate protection on Article 20a, which was added to the Basic Law in 1994 under the Kohl government. This created a responsibility for the state to «protect the natural foundations of life». So far, this article had been regarded as a dead letter because of its general wording and the priority of the legislature explicitly mentioned there. With the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court, it suddenly becomes the sharp sword of climate protectors. -

This is questionable for three reasons. Firstly, with these orders, the judges unduly intervene in the structuring rights of future parliamentarians and governments. Climate protection is certainly a very long-term business. However, it is presumptuous and inefficient to establish the annual emission quantities and the corresponding measures in a binding manner for decades. Too much can change in this time, on an economic, financial, technological and global level. Why the judges believe that the legislature must make the relevant decisions for the period after 2030 at the latest by 2022 is incomprehensible. -
Second, the court overlooks the fact that the measures mentioned and now criticized by the German Climate Protection Act of 2019 are in any case unsuitable for guaranteeing the “protection of the natural foundations of life” required by the Basic Law.Global warming is a global phenomenon. Germany only contributes a share of 2 percent to global CO2 emissions, with a decreasing trend. Whether Germany actually meets the Paris climate targets and will be climate neutral from 2050 onwards has a minimal impact on the climate. Much more important than the precise setting of reduction targets several decades in advance would be measures by Germany that would contribute to a more rapid rethink in countries like China or India with their much higher and rising emissions. Germany could put pressure on this as an important trading partner, as a leading EU state and as a major investor. -

Thirdly, it is astonishing to what extent the judges take for granted extreme encroachments on the civil liberties to protect the climate in the coming decades. In a democracy, these weightings and decisions must at all times be left to the citizens or their elected representatives, not to a few constitutional judges, who are then probably no longer in office.


------------


The implications of this verdict are desastrous. Not just econiomically, but espoecially for civil rights, and freedoms. They paved the way that in the name of "climate protection" - no matter whether the topic at hand is effective ion supporting that or not! - peope can be ruined, existentially and financially destroyed, can get locked away to blackmail unlimited compliance and total surrender to the dogma. They paved the way for punishments that are beyond imagination- in priciple for even not agreeing with a wanted, claimed paradigm.

It could lead into a total dictatorship. I am shocked that nobody sees this, especially in the industry - they even applaude.

"This is how liberty dies - with thundering applause."

Always the Germans who think the world is just waiting for them to save it and to show the way, and then the world will follow. The endlessly repeating basic sin of German history and mentality. The perfect, superior plan, the divine, infallible best-possible intention.

[Skybird]

After last sundays poll establishd a Green lead over the former CDU, this weekend's poll for the sunday question shows that the Green have increased their lead. The former CDU is still diving and has increased the acceleration for the dive.

Meanwhile:
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-cdu-u...ief/a-57400322


Back then he was crucified because he rejected to follow the at that time already hyperbolic exggeration in the narration that foreigners were being chased through the street by wild mobs. As far as I recall and remember the videos shown back then, they indeed were very much blown up in proportion, like turning a car crash into a city-wide slaughtering festival of car owners. What they do not forgive Maaßen is that he reminds the former CDU that before the 16 Merkel years it considered itself to be a not as left party as it is today. His comment that in the future maybe a coalition with the AfD might be possible, imo is just radical realism - if the CDU wants to stay in power in the future from time on. I think it will share the SPD's fate some time not too far away, having rendered itself meaningless and irrelevant. And like Maaßen did with his comment on the AfD, the SPD also once claimed to never ever form a coalition with the former SED... and now fliorts with bthe idea openly. For the new leadership in that SPD, that is no longer engraved in stone. Far from it.

Maaßen maybe just is a realist, a stubborn man with a thick skin. To call him a rightwinger, is hilarious. A conservative, yes. But for the post-Merkel CDU, that description of itself already is an offence.


And in Germany, EVERYBODY not howlign with the wolves automatically gets called a racist or/and a Nazi.

[Skybird]

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/nation...len-ld.1614551


New nationalism? About the German need to paint the German Empire black

The interpretation that the current interest in the empire is accompanied by a new nationalism is a caricature. The lack of intellectual self-recognition of the united Germany as a nation-state manifests itself here.


The German historians argue again. This is nothing unusual in itself. Debates about national positioning take place between the Alps and the North Sea more than elsewhere in the form of arguments about the past. For this reason, historical controversies in Germany are often highly politicized and have a tendency towards moralization that alienates foreign observers. -

What is new is that the historical self-discovery discussions are not, as is usually the case, about the German dictatorships of the 20th century. The focus is not on National Socialism, World War II and the extermination of European Jews, nor on Communism, the GDR and the Stasi. Instead, a past without contemporary witnesses heats the minds: the German Empire of 1871 moves back into the focus of a broader audience. -

The emotional charge could already be felt in 2014 in the controversy about the causes of the First World War, which was particularly poisonous in Germany. It is currently repeated in the specialist books, feature pages and blogs on the founding of the Empire in 1871 and on the question of how the Hohenzollern Reich proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles should be assessed. -

Even the Federal President ennobled the subject by inviting four historians to a history lesson at Bellevue Palace on January 13 to discuss the founding of the German Empire 150 years ago. Why, one wonders, is a community moving closer to us in this way, which a quarter of a century ago was still called the "past kingdom" (Klaus Hildebrand)? -

A common explanation is that Germans are tired of debates about guilt and turned to a supposedly glorious and historically unencumbered national past before the civilization of the Nazi dictatorship. They saw in the empire, so the diagnosis, the model of a self-confident and tightly governed state, internally and externally powerful, without party bickering, but economically potent and scientifically at the top of the world. Based on this spirit of national apology, the garrison church in Potsdam is being rebuilt and the Hohenzollern Palace is being reconstructed in the center of Berlin. -

In order to defend against such tendencies, the Marburg historian Eckart Conze wrote a book about the “Shadows of the Empire”, which he would like to see explicitly understood as “historical-political intervention”. In depictions that did not paint the picture of the empire dark enough, he saw a new nationalism at work that wanted to place the Berlin republic in a "black-white-red tradition". Who sets the accents differently, the accused Conze and other representatives of this reading of an attempted "self-exoneration", which is "politically dangerous". -

But their interpretation of the renaissance of interest in the empire is a caricature - and twice. It not only distorts recent historical research on the topic. She also fails to recognize the mood in Germany today. A glorification of the empire as the "good old days", as it did in the early Federal Republic after the crimes of National Socialism and the devastation of two world wars, can hardly be ascertained. Calls for a restoration of the monarchy cannot be heard outside of tiny splinter groups from Kaiser Wilhelm fans. -

In the debate about the Hohenzollern legacy, the German public is overwhelmingly on the side of their critics. Imperial pride in the military has given way to a pronounced disinterest, if not mistrust, of German soldiers in the Bundeswehr. The neighbors and allies of the unified Germany do not fear its military strength or supremacy, but diplomatic indecision and a free-rider mentality in security policy. -

It is also misleading to label historical studies that paint a more nuanced picture of the empire as neo-nationalistic or national apologetic. If something connects the more recent research, it is not an apology but an ambivalence. No serious historian denies the authoritarian side of the Hohenzollern monarchy or the incomplete parliamentarization. The dark chapter of colonial history is being explored more and more. The tension between an early and far-reaching democratization at the imperial level on the one hand and the tenacious adherence to the traditional three-class suffrage on the other hand, which made Prussia a stronghold of political persistence, is also undisputed.

In addition to the economic upswing, cultural productivity, and excellence in many areas of the natural sciences and humanities, current research also emphasizes the dynamics of political change more clearly than before. The plurality in the social discussions is striking. The politicization of broad sections of the population, from workers to women, is given greater attention and the practice of democratic practices is recognized as progress. Younger historians like Oliver Haardt see the constitutional order drafted by Bismarck no longer just as a rigid bulwark against change, but as an astonishingly flexible framework that did not develop into a parliamentary system based on the English model, but made considerable adjustments possible within the framework of the constitutional monarchy. last but not least, a considerable increase in the importance of the Reichstag. -

It is the connection between the pace and ambivalence of change in all possible areas of life that explains the increased interest in the empire. It comes less from a dangerous longing to glorify the past, but more from the fact that the years between 1871 and 1914/18 are fascinating as an era of enormous and contradicting modernization, dynamization and polarization. At the same time, they appear to our present - as a time of media revolutions, European crises, international tensions, increasing global networking and a considerable lack of clarity in international relations - despite all the strangeness in their gray tones, even more familiar than the comparatively well-ordered black and white world of the Cold War . -

The fact that the empire is getting closer again in this way also explains a large part of the historiographical defensive reflexes. Since the 1960s, historians have interpreted the history of the Hohenzollern Empire under the sign of a German special path, primarily as the prehistory of National Socialism in order to understand how a totalitarian dictatorship could be established in Germany. The critical turn in national historiography was an important contribution to the internal ties to the West in the Federal Republic. She emphasized the break in 1945, emphasized the rapprochement with Western ideas of state and society and emphasized the democratic new beginning in West Germany. In this respect, the Sonderweg thesis contributed to the intellectual self-recognition of the Federal Republic as a community with its own success story that began in 1945/49. -

The more recent research on the empire no longer fits easily into this pattern of interpretation. In many fields they relativize the special path by placing German developments in a European comparative perspective. All too simple notions of uniform Western standards and patterns are dissolving. The idea of ​​a role model function for the West has suffered anyway in view of the greater emphasis on the dark side of Western modernity. -

1933 and 1945 are no longer the only lines of flight of interpretation. More recent interpretations show the empire not only as a prelude to the "Third Reich", but also as the prehistory of the old Federal Republic, the GDR and the unified Germany. Characteristics and path dependencies dating back to 1933 or 1918 are named more clearly: in the history of democracy and parliamentarism, in federalism and in the social security systems, in the regulatory models for the state and the economy. -

Above all, however, since 1990 the question of a German national history has arisen again beyond the post-national self-image of the old Federal Republic. Not only are historians alienated by this, but also large parts of the political establishment. In his speech on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the German Reich, it was not by chance that the Federal President used terms with negative connotations such as “nationalism”, “national egoism” or “national arrogance” from the word field “nation”. -

The fact that a German nation-state tradition was also established in 1871 took a back seat. The need to paint the empire and the founding of an empire in black results, it seems, not least of all from a persistent discomfort at living in a nation-state again, which may not be a transitory stage for a European republic, but will remain for the foreseeable future. The warning against placing the “national state of the Federal Republic in the tradition of the Reich of 1871” is at the heart of Conze's historical intervention. You don't have to speak of a new “lie of life” (Tilman Mayer). But a lack of intellectual self-recognition of the unified Germany as a nation-state in a world characterized by nation-states can be diagnosed.

---
The author Dominik Geppert is professor for the history of the 19th and 20th Century at the University of Potsdam, and President of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties.

[Skybird]

Warning of the day: the German Greens want to let excessively explode the porices for CO2 emission beyind the realm of madness. It should be pushed upowards from now 23 to 60 Euros. And not in 2030, but 2023. This was annoucned by their party leadership today, in form of the Hafermilchmann Robert Habeck.

They are as bad as Trotzky and Lenin.

Also good to know: their party programs makes severla references to the need to fight agaiunst the violence form the right.

Not one single remark that violence from the left even exists (like to be seen on May 1st again, and on so very very many other occasions). Not one word. And they do like this almost always, even when commenting actual acts of violence, arsonings and others, and after pressure agree to condmen them in mild language: even then they almost never do lose one word on from what direction the violence came if it was from the left - but they start slobbering when it is right-wing violence.

The Green party program is a massive shift to the left , a huge rise in "Verboten!", a formualted wet dream for private property expropriations and destruction of the mere concepts of "private" and "property", and left-based totalitarianism.

More of Merkel politiucs, versus more of this. ^ I wonder how any thinking man of class and format still can morally justify to give his ballot to , his legitimation forgarbage like this. But then, I ask myself that during every election.

[Skybird]

The Frankfurter Rundschau writes about the latest FORSA poll:


10.6 million eligible voters would choose the CDU / CSU - two million fewer than for the Greens (12.8 million). With 6.4 million, the SPD would have half as many votes as the Greens. The FDP could expect 5.5, the Left 2.8 and the AfD 4.6 million votes.

There are four options for forming a government: Green-Black (together 386 mandates), a “traffic light” coalition of the Greens, SPD and FDP (405 mandates), a green-red-red “left alliance” (360 mandates) or a coalition of the Union, SPD and FDP (together 371 mandates).
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Germany's total population is at around 83 million. So any party's voters always only represent a small minority.