The Duran Podcast - German Greens, strong and secure as coalition collapses

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

German Greens, strong and secure as coalition collapses

All right, Alexander, let's talk about Germany. Lots of, lots of stuff going on in Germany. We have the vote to not send tourist missiles to Ukraine. We have the Olaf Schultz government doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on Project Ukraine to send more money to Ukraine. Ola Schultz is absolutely adamant on sending $7 or $8 billion to Ukraine. we have the farmers protest and strike that is shutting down the German economy. And it's a strike that's spreading to other countries in the EU. Romania is now having a strike that's going on, a protest that is shaping up.

And you had the German leadership at Davos kind of. seems to me oblivious to what's going on. It just doesn't care. I guess Adelina said it best a year or a half ago where she was like, we don't care what our citizens think or say. We're going to do what we want to do because we know best. This is exactly right. Now, she said, anyway, what's going on in Germany?

In a kind of sense, one's sense is increasingly that in political terms, as far as the coalition is concerned, the wheels are coming off. I mean, the Germans, you know, the mass of the German public are now turning strongly against the coalition. I mean, its support has fallen for 50, you know, the aggregate support of all the, of all of the various parties that make up the coalition, the social Democrats. The Greens and the AFDA has fallen, sorry, the Free Democrats, has fallen from 52% at the time. of the last parliamentary election to 31% now. Now that is an unprecedented collapse, but even that doesn't convey the sense of the malaise in Germany.

So we've had an article in the Financial Times, which I think I'm right in saying has a, you know, has, well, certainly it has a lot of presence in Germany. So it says fractious German coalition lurches from crisis to crisis. And then it gives us some polling numbers and they are absolutely incredible. They say that 81% of Germans support the farmers. 66% want the fuel subsidy, which is what's been with. withdrawn from the farmers, reinstated.

And then the most incredible figure of all, 45% of people who answered that poll saying that they would be prepared to protest themselves. Now, you know, this is Germany, mind you. I mean, this is one of the most orderly countries in the world. There was that joke attributed to Lenin, you know, long ago that before the German storm a railway station, they'll queue up to buy the tickets.

This is the kind of culture that we're to. talking about, 45% of people are now protesting. And we've also had this spillover in contacts between real people, ordinary people, and German political leaders. So Robert Harbeck returns from holiday. He spends a holiday on a German island. He arrives in Germany. He's met, he encounters a group of about 300 people. They are incredibly angry with him. They're abuse and heckling. The entire German political class is in total shock, apparently, because this is, again, something that doesn't happen in Germany. Christian Lindner, who is from the Free Democrats, the Liberal Party, he's the finance minister,

he tries to meet the farmers, this film of this, apparently enormous amount of anger from the farmers. He shouted down. He has to try and raise his voice to get heard. They're not impressed by him. People are very, very angry. And of course, we've now had this vote in the Bundestag, the German parliament people refusing to authorise the delivery of terrorist missiles to Ukraine. And this, if you take your mind back a year ago when there was the decision to send the leper, two tanks to Ukraine. At that time, the German parliament, apart from the IFDA and D'Linka, was solidly in favour, so you can see the reversal. But despite all of this, despite all of these protests, the German government and the political class carry on. And there are reasons for this. I mean, why they're able to do that. Now, you mentioned, you know, Annalina and all of these people and the fact that they turn up in Davos and they seem insulated from what's happening. Robert Habek, who's the one of the leaders of the Green Party, and he's the vice-chancellor,

he's the economics minister. He comes along to the Bundestag. He says quite straightforwardly, as if he doesn't really care that the reason there are so many problems is because Germany isn't receiving cheap gas for Russia any longer and this has deprived Germany of its competitive advantage. He openly admits this. He doesn't seem to be at all concerned or alarmed about this. If you look at the coalition, the party whose vote is standing up best is the Greens. They're continuing to poll 12%. And there is a reason for this because the Greens are very insured. They're overwhelmingly affluent, youngish, middle class people.

They're less affected by all of these events than, you know, working class people are or business people are. And from their point of view, they're not interested in economics. They're not interested in, you know, welfare and prosperity for Germany. They have ideological obsessions, which are more important to them, European integration, the climate issue, environmental issues, their visceral loathing of Russia. So from their perspective, from the perspective of a lot of these people within the Green Movement, they will say, look, if everything is going wrong, if the economy is contracting, which it now is in Germany, if people are protesting, if living standards are falling, what that proves actually is that

the policy is working. We want the economy to contract. we want to see deindustrialization take place because that's consistent with our beliefs. And, you know, at the end of the day, we are more ideological people than we are practical people. So there is, at the heart of the coalition, this party, which as it is insulated from the collapse of the other parts of the coalition, and is still to a very great extent the dominant part of it, because they are strong, they are stronger relative to the others. The free Democrats might lose their presence in the Bundestag if there were elections tomorrow. the Greens are not at risk in that way. The Social Democrats, Germany's oldest political party, a party which used to once upon a time routinely poll about 40% of the vote.

It's now down to 15% and might even fall further. But the Greens are still secure. And because the other parties are weakening within the coalition itself, they're actually getting stronger. Yeah. The Green Party is not a party. It's a religion. It's an ideology. The ends justify the means for them. Yeah. For them, it's, yeah. It's a pity. But what about the Aye Fé? Yeah. The thinking, the plan, I guess, is that they're going to deal with the AIFDA by canceling the AIFDA. That's the way democracy works nowadays. I guess in the collective West. So what's going on with the after?

Yeah, I mean, this is very fascinating because, you see, we've talked about the coalition and the fact that it's imploding. We haven't mentioned, by the way, that we might just as well do so, that it's not really particularly important, that there's again talk, more talk of replacing Olaf Schultz

with Boris Bistorius, why that will make a difference. Why people think it will make a difference, I cannot even begin to understand, but there's more talk about that. But let's talk now, not so much about the coalition as the other big party block, which is, of course, the CDU, CSU, the part, you know, the core party that used to form, the dominant party, you know, that Merkel used to lead,

and which has been the major political force in Germany since the establishment of the Federal Republic back in the 1940s. Well, they're currently polling 31. Now, that looks a lot better than the Social Democrats on 15. And it's better, I think, than they did in the last parliamentary election. But again, you have to remember that historically, the CDU, CSU, used to poll around 45% of the vote. So at a time when the popularity of the coalition is collapsing, you're going to. you would have thought that the CDU, CSU, would be soaring in the polls. It's not.

And why is that happening? Because more and more conservative right-wing voters in Germany are becoming increasingly alienated from the CDU-CSU, they see that it is essentially, to all intents and purposes, the mirror of the coalition in terms of the policies it's going to follow. So they are migrating to the IFD, and that might potentially make it very difficult if there were elections tomorrow. And the polling numbers that we are seeing were to reproduce themselves for the CDU, CSU, to form the kind of centre-right coalition that it likes to form. I mean, it could make form a coalition with the social Democrats, which is what Merkel used to do. do. But bear in mind, this would be after the social Democrats were overwhelmingly rejected by

German voters after leading a catastrophic government. So what to do? From a logical point of view, CDU, CSU should go into coalition with the IFDA. They can't do that because the IFDS policies are different from the CDU, CSUs. They're more right-wing. They're more anti-immigration. They want to end the economic war with Russia. There are people within the IFDAQ who explain clearly and precisely to the German people. This is why we are in this economic crisis. It is because of this economic war. The economic war is failing. They're critical about the whole policy of antagonizing Russia and supporting the war in Ukraine. So this is heresy for the CDU.

And therefore, from the CDU's perspective, if they want to form the next government, if they want a stable majority after the election, they have to get rid of the IFDA in some way, which is why we're starting to see more and more demands for the IFDA to be banned. And of course, there are people in the EUFDA to be banned. On the left, in the Green Party, amongst the social Democrats, who were clambering onto this bandwagon.

And, you know, a group of people from the IFDA, which, to be clear, is a very, you know, heterogeneous coalition. There's an extremely clever, very tough people who, you know, would lead Germany in a, I think, pretty effective way if they were ever to reach power. But there are some people on the fringes who do generally have some. very, very far-fetched views. Anyway, they've seized on the fact that there was a meeting between some people on the IFDA and others, apparently even further to the right, about finding some means to decant immigrants to an African country. A policy, by the way, that the British government is currently following. They're actually sending or trying to send immigrants to Rwanda.

So it's the same policy to all intents and purposes, as far as I can see. But anyway, this is all said to, you know, bring back the memories of the 1930s and 1940s and Germany can't possibly do anything like that. And this is outrageous. It's not IFDA policy. It's just some people from the IFDA

had a meeting to talk about this. Immigration being a big issue for many people in Germany. So you seize on that and you talk about banning this party and you organize protests across Germany calling on the German authorities to ban the party and I've never seen a figure or number for the number of people who supposedly came out to support these protests but you could see what you could see both the rationale about why they want to ban the IFDA and the way in which a sort of completely unconvincing case is being put together in order to do it. Let me repeat a point that I made on a recent program that we did.

If Germany bans the IFDA, that is the end of the German Federal Republic that we have known that was set up in the 1940s. I mean, from that moment on, Germany is a completely different place. that will be an incredible act of political destabilization. It would be an authoritarian and anti-democratic act beyond all reason, and it would set the scene for a political disaster. If you think that they overstep the limit by having this discussion, you know, about sending people to Africa, well, by all means, say it, campaign about it, make it an issue in the election.

but to actually use it as a pretext to ban what is now the second most popular political movement in Germany is a disastrous idea. This seems to be the way most countries in the collective West are operating now, which is just to ban people or parties outright. I mean, it seems like Germany is just following the example set by other countries in the collective West. I'm sure people that are watching this video understand which countries and which parties are talking about. But what are the possibilities of this actually going through? I mean, how realistic is it that I have day gets bad? I think it's very high. I would put it at 50-50, actually.

I mean, it's probably unconstitutional. But, you know, bear in mind that, you know, if the IFDA were to petition the constitutional court, even if they were to win, it's likely that the case would only be heard after the election. So I think it's, I think there's a, I wouldn't put money on it, but I think, I'm a betting man anyway, but I mean, I wouldn't put money on it, but I think there's a very real chance it might happen, because the political class in Germany are both extremely nervous about the situation. in its totality. They don't really have a clear plan about what to do. They don't really want to

reverse course. They're all signed up to Project Ukraine. They're all, you know, facing the Zelensky curse. Even, as I said, even the CDU, if it wins CDU, CSU, if they win with 31%, it's going to be difficult for them to form a coalition. So I can see why it could happen, why the temptations to do it would be very, very strong. And of course, within the intestines of Germany's deep state, you know, the, well, we won't analyze who make that up. But already you can clearly see that there are people there lobbying and pushing for it to happen because of course they are even more committed now and invested in Project Ukraine than the political leaders are because of course they're part of the NATO Euro-Atlantic enterprise. They're paid officials of that and for them

Project Ukraine is a test of loyalty to Brussels and Washington which they are determined to honor. Amazing stuff. All these countries destroying themselves for a clown in Kiev. I mean, the historians, what they're going to write about, this period of time. It's incredible to watch all of this unfold. Well, the tourists, yeah, okay, comment on that and then also just get it to the tourists. I think it's a pretty good segue since we're talking about Project Ukraine to also talk.

about the tourist missile parliament vote. I mean, again, as I said, go back a year and see the enthusiasm that the wars in Germany for supplying leopard twos. I say enthusiasm. I don't mean most of the German public were enthusiastic about the idea, but certainly the parliamentarians and the Bundestag were. And by the way, as I remember, there were opinion polls in Germany back then, which did show that most people had been persuaded to come round. This is, of course, all based on the assumption that project Ukraine would succeed. There were high hopes about the summer offensive. It was a time of optimism and confidence. What's happened is that all of that has drained away. And Germany finds that it's increasingly short of money. There's a budgetary crisis in

Germany. That's why the farmers are protesting, by the way, because the government has had to make economies announce cutbacks in other forms of spending, and they're cutting subsidies for diesel oil to German farmers. By the way, I understand that there are some people in Germany who say it's not actually a subsidy. I'm not going to get into the mechanics of this, the technical side of it. I don't really follow. But anyway, so the point is, the point is, that enthusiasm for this project has waned. And again, I think it's also true that, as happens everywhere else, the more people see of Zelensky himself, the less they like him.

And I think this is absolutely true in Germany also. So again, I think that there's been a major shift of opinion. In fact, there definitely has been a major shift of opinion in Germany against this thing. are aware that if they give these tourist missiles to Ukraine, Ukraine will try and use them to launch strikes on places within pre-2014 Russia, which a lot of Germans are extremely nervous about. And the result is there's been a groundswell of opposition, and that has now been reflected in this vote in the Bundestag. This has come as a shock, by the way, the authorities in Brussels, the nation's, the nation's

Brussels bureaucracy did not expect this. They assumed, as most people did, that the tourist missiles would indeed be supplied to Ukraine. So the fact that there is now this vote in the Bundestag is an alarm signal that German opinion is shifting. And again, a strong sign of how alarm they are, is that the most Atlantisist country of all, Britain, the media here are not reporting that story, are not reporting that fact. Now, it does say a lot. Now, of course, you know, we have to be realistic.

I mean, we're talking about people who have never been unduly concerned about parliamentary votes and that kind of thing. It's not impossible that the tourist missiles will find their way to Ukraine. eventually if I had to put my money on it and again I said I'm not a betting man but I would not be surprised if that is what they eventually do and you can stage more votes you can put more pressure on parliamentarians you can force them to change their mind or perhaps votes like

this you can argue that they're consultative anyway and the German government has to make difficult decisions and it can't let itself be swayed by the mere sentiments of parliamentarians or most people in Germany. It's too important now. You've got to provide these missiles to Ukraine because the other thing that's going on in Germany is that there is now a major campaign coming from the political class to try to persuade Germans that Project Ukraine is essential because ultimately the Russians intend to march on Berlin. Now, we touched on this in previous programs, but I mean, there is more and more of this coming out in Germany. The media in Germany are writing this up a lot, probably more so than

in any other European country. I think I mentioned in our previous video, and we touched about this, that there's a film which shows, you know, Russian missiles crashing into Berlin, that kind of thing. And there is a built sighting, which is Germany's biggest tabloid, is running pieces about this. I mean, I haven't read them, but so I understand. And so there's an awful lot of this going on. But against that, Germany historically has had perhaps the biggest alternative media or independent media in Europe, much bigger than in Britain, for example. So, of course, pressures to clamp down on that too and all kinds of things coming out of Brussels with a view to bringing all that under control as well.

But for the moment, a lot of people in Germany are taking their news from it. All right. We will leave it there. The durand.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, bitchchute, telegram. rockfin and Twitter X and go to the Iran shop 15% of all t-shirts take care