The Duran Podcast - Germany elections. SPD implodes, AfD triples, Merz panic

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Germany elections. SPD implodes, AfD triples, Merz panic

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the German elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW. Now, these elections, in the past, these elections would not have garnered so much attention around the world. In Germany, very important. But elsewhere around the world, I don't think many people would be paying too much attention to these elections in North Rhine-Westphalia. But of course, we have two narratives that have played out during these local elections. The first narrative is the rise of the AFD and the collapse of Chancellor Black Rock Mertz. So you're going to update us on that and how AIFD did in North Rhine Vesphalia, which is, from my understanding, an SPD stronghold. So that's narrative number one.

And, of course, the second narrative in and around North Rhine-Waizphalia is concerning the deaths of AEFDA candidates in this area, seven deaths in three weeks. We finally had the elections. What was the result, Alexander? What is the breakdown of what happened in North Rhine-Westphalia? Right. Well, let me first of all begin by saying a little bit about North Rhine Vestphalia, which is a region of Germany. I happen to know very, very well. It is big. It's got a population of around 17, 80 million. It has a bigger population than East Germany does, the former East Germany. It is where the Ruhr is mostly located. You know, the great big industrial area region of Germany with its factories, its cities, its steelworks, its former steelworks. The cities like Cologne, Essen, Dusseldorf, they're all located there. The former capital of West Germany, Bonn, is also in this area too. So this is very much the industrial heartland of the former West Germany. And of course,

it is still an absolutely key state in Germany. And you're absolutely correct. It used to be a SBD, a stronghold, the dominant party in this area, as you would expect in an area where there is so much industry, was the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Germany's oldest party created in the late 19th century, the party that represented,

presented workers, the party of socialism, a party that was at one time supported by and inspired by no less a person than Karl Marx, the party of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, sorry, and a party within a long storied history in German life. Now, it's also a place where, until very, very recently, a party like the IFD would have had barely any presence at all. The IFD was essentially an East German phenomenon. It would do very well in places like Leipzig, Dresden, those sort of places. It was most unlikely ever to make a significant impression in a region like this, North Rhine-Westphalia, where politics had long been dominated by the SPD, but where the traditional party of the centre-right in Germany,

the CDU, also always had traditionally a strong presence. Well, this election has completely upturned that. The SPD has crashed from where it was the dominant party of North Rhine-Vistvalia. It's now fallen to 22.5% of the vote. When I said the dominant party between the mid-1960s and mid-2005, the SPD ran north-vast, North Rhinevestphalia continuously. I mean, they had an uninterrupted stretch of 40 years when they were the local regional government.

They've now crashed to just over a fifth of the vote. I mean, this is a catastrophic plunging decline. The IFDA, which previously, as I said, was a marginal player in North Rhine Vistvalia, has now trebled its share of the vote from 5% to 15%. It's now become a significant presence in North Rhine Vistvalia. in the heartland region, if you like, of the old West German Federal Republic of Germany. It's winning most support in precisely those industrial areas where the SPD used to be strongest. So it's precisely those areas which are deindustrializing and deindustrializing rapidly,

which are now swinging away from the SPD to the IFD. And other parties, the Greens have plunged. The CDU is 33%. That's Philip Manses' SDU. It still has support in the sort of middle class areas of North Rhine-Bisfailia, as it used to do. It's still the regional government. It went into this election as the incumbent government.

But I suspect that this is, again, only the start of a decline as well, because it is now facing for the first time in North Rhine, Westphalia, a rival from the right, which is now polling at roughly half the level that the CDU, had. So the IFD is now well positioned to grow in North Rhine Vestphalia as well. Now, there were regional elections in other places across Germany. They all confirm that the IFD is continuing to advance and grow, but it is North Rhine Vesphalia, which is the important place. And I suspect that this is a shock in Germany and will reinforce the already widespread view. the SPD, Germany's oldest party, is now in a state of irreversible decline. It is only a question

of time, in my opinion, only a question of time until it reaches 10% and then falls below, at which point it will, the decline will accelerate still faster and it will gradually melt away and vanish. So this is a momentous election, a momentous change. It shows the extraordinary change that is happening in German politics at the moment. It is a major blow for Friedrich Mertz, by the way, because despite the fact that, as I said, his party has just about held steady in North Rhine Vestvalia. His coalition partner, the SPD is now collapsing. And of course, it means that he now has arrival in Germany's West German heartland. And that is something that the CDU has never confronted before. So that's the overall story. Now, you mentioned the very strange,

unexplained, mysterious deaths, one after the other of seven IFDA candidates. Got a lot of attention. They got an awful lot of attention. Now, of course, we are asked to believe that this is entirely, you know, child's coincidence. I read somewhere that the statistics against that are enormous. It is true, apparently, that at least two of these people were elderly and not in the best of health, But it has sharp and suspicions of all sorts of things going on. And given the unending attempts, which are now going to intensify to ban the IFD.

And you can imagine that the SPD now is going to be particularly keen to have the IFDA banned because the IFDA is eating the SPD's vote. It's eating. It's eating away the support of the industrial. working class that formerly supported the SPD. Given that that, obviously the suspicions about what has happened, how these people died, is there and it is going to grow. And in Germany, people don't really trust the police very much.

I've encountered that increasingly in more and more places. And on top of all of that, it's going to make the eye of death themselves. even more wary and hostile of the establishment in German politics. If these people were, if there was something sinister to this, that is a very, very ominous development indeed. It demonstrates again the extent, the deepening extent of the crisis in Germany and these results in North Rhine-Vistphalia show why. Well, we're getting to a point where the political elite in Germany or the establishment, political elite, the CDU, the SPD, the Greens,

they're not going to have, well, they're going to come to a choice, aren't they? Either we allow the I of Debt to be the number one party or we're going to ban them. I mean, that's where we're heading towards it. Yes. You know, the Avede was not strong in North Ryan Vesvalia, not strong at all, but it tripled its votes. Yes. And it's gaining across all the other areas in Germany. Yes. And it's gaining in strength in areas where it already was strong. So it's just getting stronger where it was. Yes.

And it's picking up a lot more votes in areas where it was traditionally weak. And so it's inevitable that they're going to be the number one party, that they are the number one party. Yes. Yes. And they're getting bigger and bigger with each passing week and each passing month. And so this German political establishment is going to either have to allow the I've debt, just suck it up and allow them to be the number one party. It's going to happen. Or they're going to have to ban them, which is what I think they're going to try to do.

And then what is that going to result in? I mean, what's going to happen in Germany when they make that move? I mean, they've already, they've hinted at it. They've poked around. It's trying to ban them. They've taken certain actions to try and ban the Avde, but they haven't quite pulled the trigger just yet. They're going to pull the trigger. Or they're going to be the number one party.

Well, they do have a third choice. And I'm going to say what it is, even though there is absolutely not a chance in 100 million that they will adopt it. But they do have a chance. They do have an alternative. The German establishment does have an alternative, which is that they stop behaving like the political class that cares about Germany. Never going to happen. But, you know, I mean, let's, I mean, I mentioned that the people who are abandoning the SPD

are people from the old in manufacturing industrial, regions. We've talked about de-industrialization in Germany. We've talked about the causes of it. We've talked about the follies of stopping imports of gas from Russia. We've talked about the folly of Friedrich Metz's debt-fueled, rearmament, surge and all the splurge and all of that. If they changed direction, they started to pursue entirely different policies of rapprochement with Russia, ending the conflict in Ukraine, getting the gas flows, which is now going to be very difficult because, as we discussed in another video, the Russians have now committed to transferring the gas eastwards to China, not westwards to Germany.

But if they started to do those things, yes, in theory, the situation could be changed. as you absolutely rightly said, that isn't going to happen. I mentioned this point because it's important always to remember that these parties, the CDU, the SPD, the Greens are making choices. They are choosing to go down this road. They are choosing to pursue policies that are not only against Germany's national, economic interests, but which are alienating more and more of Germany's society and its people. But, of course, they will, as you absolutely righty say, continue to do that.

And you're absolutely correct. They have a choice. They either sit back and let these processes take their course and allow the IFDA to win eventually the elections, the parliamentary elections, Germany and to form the government and to have the choice of Chancellor or they ban the IFDA and the demands to ban the IFDA are going to grow and they are very widespread within the political class. A couple of months ago there were attempts, if you remember, to get various judges appointed to the Constitutional Court of Germany, left or centered judges, connected to or supported by the SPD.

And one of those judges who wasn't able to win support in the German parliament, but who Friedrich Meitz backed, was clearly a supporter of banning the IFD. So it's supported by the judiciary. It's supported by the intelligence agencies, or at least sections of the intelligence agencies. There are lots of calls to do it from ever wider, of that part of German society that still embraces the mainstream and supports the political class, the specter of the 1930s is always conjured up, even though to repeat again, there is no real

connection. There's no connection at all between the IFTA and the political movements of the 1930s. And that whole theory should be abandoned. But it is quite plausible. In fact, I'm not. I would say likely that with this progressive growth of the IFD, reaching places in West Germany now, where they were never previously strong, like North Rhine Vestphalia, gaining support in other places in West Germany too, strengthening their positions in the former East Germany and in other places also, It is highly likely that that is where we're going to end up. They could allow the elections to run, eventually the parliamentary elections, to take place, and they could use the Romanian model, and they could say Russia meddling and stuff like that,

what they pulled in Romania and cancel out the I've dead doing that. I don't know how possible that is. So that's another model that they may opt to adopt. The other option, another option that they may have, Alexander, is to continue to escalate towards some sort of a conflict with Russia. I'll get to the point where they're just about in a conflict with Russia. You can combine that with clamping down on speech. You can throw that in there.

You can then push for the digital currency as well. You can try to push that forward over the next. next year and just basically get to a situation where you have this authoritarian Mertz, CDU, SPD Green type of structure in Germany, which then says, look, we now control the information space, we now have a digital currency, we're just about to go to war with Russia, or we're almost there, we're almost in indirect conflict with Russia, so we have to start canceling out all the parties or get to a situation like that. that also couples in the Romanian model as well, where you just start talking about Russian

meddling on TikTok and stuff like that. I mean, they can create that type of scenario on the next year or two. I don't know. When are the elections, by the way, though? Oh, I think they're, well, I mean, we just have them. They're many years away. They're many years. They're like four years away. Four years away. They have time to do something like that. Yeah. They have time to do lots of things. The only problem they have is obviously that the economic situation in Germany is deteriorating and the SPD, which is Merz's coalition partner, is now clearly on life support. I mean, it is falling fast. And the question then is, can the government, the Mertz government, in its existing forms survive. Because as the SPD disintegrates, and the CDU isn't doing that well either,

by the way, I mean, the fact that they held onto their vote in North Rhine-Vosphalia is what's the least one might expect. I mean, overall, they are also now in decline too as a party. That is going to increase the sense of urgency to try to deal with this situation as fast as possible. And there will be people who will be saying we can't leave it long because we need a strong government in Germany and the IFDA is gaining critical mass and if we take action against the IFDA when it's achieved critical mass, in other words, if we leave it too late, then it becomes socially and politically much more difficult to do. You outlined entirely plausible scenarios. There are other ones. They can ask.

argue, for example, that the IFD in some form pursues policies that are contrary to that of Germany's constitution. The constitution of Germany is a strange construct. I say strange construct. I mean, it has many admirable features, but it was basically created. But through the help of the Western allies, primarily the British, after the Second World War, many people say it's not even a proper constitution at all. But anyway, I'm not going to get into that. The point is it was created with the purpose of blocking the revival of the parties of the 1930s, the Nazis, and by the way, the Communist Party as well.

And so it contains mechanisms that make it easier to ban parties than is the case in other places. So I would have thought that this would be one, certainly one option for the German political elite to follow. But they can absolutely adopt all of the other ones. They can say that we're in a state of unreclaired war with Russia now. And the IFD is clearly a pro-Russian party. It's a traitor in the midst of Germany. And we need to take action against it for that reason. And about the information space, well, largely they do.

already controlled it on the German media is one of the most conformist medias in Germany that you can, in the West that you can find. And Germany does have an alternative media space, bigger than in Britain. But of course, it's not comparable to what you see in the United States. Yeah. The best thing for them to do would be to talk to Russia, but not with these leaders. No. So how do you replace these leaders in the CDU? SPD and the Greens, I mean. Absolutely.

But just to reiterate again, there is a choice. The fact that it's a choice that's not going to be followed doesn't mean that one shouldn't point the fact that the choice is there. One shouldn't point it out. Because as I said, if this was a properly functioning democratic system in Germany, people would be discussing that choice. the fact that they cannot do so, unless, by the way, they belong to the IFD, already tells you how deeply dysfunctional the political system in Germany already is, and the extent to which it has already fallen very far short of its democratic pretensions. All right, we will end the video there, the durand.com.

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