The Duran Podcast - AfD & Sahra rise. Scholz & Greens defeated

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

AfD & Sahra rise. Scholz & Greens defeated

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the German elections that took place yesterday. And the results are shocking, but predictable. AIFD winning in Thuringia coming in second slightly behind the CDU. And the only reason that the Avede appears to have come in second place in Saxony is because the support was thrown to the CDU in order to prevent AIFD from winning, not because the CDU had had the support to come in first place. It was more of a preventive measure to stop AIFD from winning in Saxony as well. But a historic day in Germany, what are your thoughts? Absolutely, a historic day. I mean, we are talking about two regions of Germany. I mean,

they're not the most populous or the most economic. developed regions in Germany. I mean, putting aside that they're East German regions. But they are, I mean, if we're talking about Thuringia, Thuringia is seen by many people as a kind of cultural heartland of Germany. It contains many of the most beautiful and scenic areas of Germany. It also contains places that, you know, intellectual powerhouses of Germany, like Weimar and Erfurt, places of this guy.

And, of course, Saxony, as a... major region within the former East Germany, major economic centre, the two great cities of Leipzig and Rezden are located in Saxony. So what we've seen in these two German states is the collapse of the established parties. The SPD, the liberals, the Greens, they've done shockingly badly. The Greens and the Liberals will no longer be represented, apparently, in the parliaments of either of these two states. The SPD's just clinging on. It's just got minimal representation in Saxony, and it's seen it fall even further in Thuringia. At an immediate political level, it's clear that I think Chancellor Schultz's coalition government is now an environment.

a very advanced state of collapse. I mean, there is no return from this. The European elections a few months ago were a disaster. That disaster caps it. It shows that the IFDA obviously is on the march in eastern Germany. What is overlooked, people don't talk about it as much, is that the left is on the march in these regions in eastern Germany as well. And obviously, The galvanising figure has been Sarah Wagnernecht, who's created this new party around herself, which is, by the way, an old-fashioned, if I can put it like this, a social democratic party of the kind that we used to see very commonly in Europe. The old German SPD, when it was led by people like Vili Brandt and Helmut Schmidt,

and others and going back, you know, in history even further. But policy positions were not so different from those that Sarah Wagnernerch now has. Anyway, she got 16% of the vote in Syringia, about the same, about 11% in Saxony. If you combine Sarah Wagnernax, 16%, with I believe it was the 11% or so, that the old left party, the former Communist Party, got in Thuringia. And remember, the party that she's formed is a breakaway for that old party. Well, the combined left got almost as many votes as the IF did in Thuringia. The fact which people are overlooking.

But of course, it's a left which is not in any case. conceivable sense, the sort of neoliberal, globalist left that we become used to. This is a much more hardline, working class-oriented, socialistic left of the old type of a kind that we used to see in Europe. They've done very well in Thuringia. They've done a little less well in Saxony, but that's probably because in Saxony, you have these two cities, Leipzig and I'm guessing that these are probably more connected with the global world. So you're going to get more liberal-minded people there. And that's probably having some effect.

But even there, the left is now well on the move. And I think repudiation, obviously, of Chancellor Schultz's bankrupt coalition. But also no real enthusiasm for, for the mainstream alternative. In classical politics, electoral politics, when a coalition made up of left-wing parties, which is what the Schultz coalition is supposed to be, is doing badly and is perceived as being doing badly,

there is a swing to the centre-right, to the CDU. But in Germany, that isn't happening. So they failed in Thuringia, they clinging on by their nails in Saxony. As you absolutely rightly say, they only won in Saxony because the other mainstream parties basically arranged for their voters to go and vote for the CDU. What we're seeing is, in other words, in East Germany, a repudiation across East Germany. society of the German political establishment. And by the way, we got votes in other each Germans at Lander in Berlin, in Brandenburg. I think the results would be the same.

But, and this is where I think so much analysis of these results is wrong. The same disaffection and malaise exists in the former West Germany as well. We have a German. whose economy is going from bad to worse. We did a recent program about this, about how the pace of de-industrialization in Germany is accelerating. The country is constantly slipping just, and it's probably only a statistical quarks. It's just sort of hovering on the brink of a recession, except probably there is in fact already a recession. Its gross rates, even before the crisis that we're just seeing now, the one that started in 2022, has been low.

There is, I think, a widespread feeling across German society that the political system has failed, that it is breaking down. The problems that Germany has are not being addressed and that the political class has no understanding of this and no clear idea of what to do. It's just that in East Germany, which doesn't have the sense of ownership of the political system that they still have in West Germany, the political system, the political mainstream in Germany is ultimately the old West German political mainstream. So the East Germans don't feel the same connection to it as the West Germans do. It's just that in East Germany, people are prepared to look at alternatives, whereas in West Germany, they are slower to do so.

But eventually, I predict they will do so in West Germany as well. Because the underlying story in Germany, we've discussed it in program after program, going all the way back, to the start of our channel is that we have an ossified political system. We've had Merkelism that was created, which caused total stagnation in the German political system. And this goes back obviously right through Merkel's time, but further back still through decades, We've had a system where the structural immobilism that exists in Germany was concealed for a long time because Germany was able to capitalize on the captive markets that it had within the EU. And it was also able to capitalize on imports of cheap energy from Russia, which has now been stopped. Now, the capital, the captured markets within the EU are exhausted.

The energy flows, the cheap energy flows from Russia have stopped. And the immobilism, the stagnation of the system, which is ultimately a product of the stagnation of the political system in Germany, is now becoming ever more evident. Yeah, Merkelism opened up the way for mediocre politicians like Olaf Schultz to become Chancellor. That was Merkel's doing. And we talked about deindustrialization. We were the first channel to bring up the word. You coined that phrase, that word, deindustrialization. Two, three years ago, the minute Germany started to sanction Russia and cut off the Russian energy supply.

On the Duran, we talked about de-industrialization. A lot of people thought we were crazy. It's never going to happen. No way, Germany's an economic powerhouse. The Russian economy is going to sink. Nope, that's not what happened. What we are seeing now is de-industrialization of Germany in full effect. And Sarah Wagenek, her party is the far right.

Alexander is not a traditional left. The way the German political class rationalizes everything that's happened to them during this election and everything that is happening to them over the past couple of years, the de-industrialization of Germany, the rise of these political parties, the Avede and Sarah Wagon Act, is that they say this is just the far right. So what we need to do is we need to clamp down on the far right. Even Olyf Schultz said that they need to take action against Aftde. They need to do something about Afti. They don't need to solve the sanctions against Russia. They don't need to wind down the Ukraine war. They don't need to tell Zelenskyy to know.

negotiate. They don't need to bring Russian energy back somehow. Figure out a way of reprashmone with Russia. If it's even possible, I doubt it's possible, but figure out a way to bring the Russian gas back to Germany, nope, it's a far right problem. That's how they're going about this. You're absolutely right. I mean, by the way, this narrative about Saha Vaganek, being the far right, has spread to Britain as well.

I was reading in The Guardian, an article which referred to her as being on the our right. I mean, I was just incredible. It is beyond ridiculous. I mean, it is so stupid. But anyway, let's not waste time debunking that particular piece of absurdity. What you see is a stagnant political class which has presided over immobilism in Germany for a very long time, and which is completely empty of ideas. it has no ideas and no personalities to speak of. What it is doing is that it is preparing to use repression. Still, those voices in Germany,

which are trying to find alternative solutions, actual solutions, do some real thinking about how to address Germany's problems, it's deep-seated problems. So you have people like the IFD who want a return to a more market-based system because that's what the IFDA does. It's a more, you know, free market right-wing system, but they also have perspectives about German foreign policy and how migration policy should be administered and all kinds of things to disguise. It's not just a one-size-fiddle problem. I mean, the whole far-right label is a ridiculous one.

Again, just to say, much that the IFTA is coming up with, most of what the IFTA is coming up with, 90%, 99% of what the IFTA is coming up with. Conrad Adenau and Ludwig Earhart, you know, the Titan figures of the CDU, who basically set up the CDU in the 50s and who presided over Germany's economic miracle of that period, they would have no problem with. They weren't massively keen on migration in that kind, in the way that it's been conducted in recent years.

They had their own, obviously, Atlantis' positions, but they were deeply sovereignist in their own way. Anyway, I'm not going to probe into this. So the IFDA has, has ideas about Germany, how to progress Germany, which might work. Sarav Agenev has some ideas about Germany, which also draw on German traditions, political and economic and cultural traditions. Germany was the place where social democracy began.

I mean, the Sbede was first created in Germany in the 19th century. It was they who started systems. you know, like, you know, social security and things of this kind in a big way. And also she wants, as you would expect left-wing parties to do, more economic interventionism in the economy, trying to get the economy moving again by adopting more planning mechanisms and things of that kind, things which the Germans also once did. So, I mean, it's different, obviously, from what the IFTA is proposing. but it has its, you know, it has their ideas. I'm not saying these ideas are necessarily the right ones or the ideas that would work,

but they are thinking. Now, what the German leadership, the political class wants to do, is they want to close all those discussions down. They want to bring down the shutters. They want to perpetuate stagnation and immobilism. in Germany, even as Germany as a result declines, because they have no ideas at their own. And they're using, you know, the Russia's scare and all the rest and the inspector of the far right and conjuring up the ghosts of the 1930s in order to do exactly that.

To close down debate, to close down discussion in Germany, to keep themselves in power, to prolong Merkelism, even as Merkelism is destroying Germany and everything around it. Yeah, just a final thought. As Germany goes, so does the European Union. Absolutely. Can I just say something about this? Because again, once, you know, we said this. There's one of our very early programs. We made the point in it that, contrary to what many people say, Germany is not a beneficiary of the EU system in a different way, very different way from Greece and Spain and all of these other southern European countries. It has also been a victim of it because what the EU system did was it made that immobilism in Germany possible. it fostered that culture of political and stagnation and stagnation in economic thinking that we have seen in Germany.

And what we have also seen is that over the last 15 or so years, the EU centre has to a great extent slipped out of Berlin's control and now controls Berlin. So that the Germans themselves are finding it very difficult to go against, to develop economic policies of their own. Because if they did so, they would come up against the same kind of opposition from the EU centre that everyone else is doing. The EU centre, we said many times, the EU centre does not like strong states or strong politicians leading those states. And Germany is no exception. That's something I think people have never understood. Now, with Merkel gone, because Merkel did understand the system very well, she had enormous skill in reconciling and papering over the contradictions.

She was enormously clever at kicking the can down the road and keeping the project going, going of course always in the wrong direction. But with her gone, all the contradictions, all the problems in the system are starting to increase. And you are absolutely right. Despite the EU centre, having slipped out of Berlin's control, if Germany goes down, so does the EU. Because without Germany, there is no EU. The whole project becomes unsustainable.

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