A lot of us chastened by experience have seen defectors from "resistance" movements. What are odds that some from within AfD ranks defects? Their kind can always count on being met with media praise and accolades, "brave," "courageous," "statesmen." Not black-pilling this, just curious what would stop enough defections from AfD to put the CDU/SPF in power? As in the movie Indecent Proposal, everyone has their price. Including the oldest profession in the world. Especially the oldest profession in the world.
It's a possibility, just look at Canada. They've had half a dozen "defectors" from various parties (including the so called conservative) join the liberals.
That said, unlike Canada, where that is tolerated, I think any AFD defectors would be afraid to go home if they did. They know why they were elected and who did it. They know those same people are on a very short fuse right now.
Don't use the enemy's language. They are migrants, plain and simple. The number of genuine refugees who require asylum is minuscule, and even then, those people should simply be removed from immediate danger, not allowed to migrate to a country of their choosing.
"Refugees" should be resettled in any Third World country that can be bribed to take take them.
Mali would no doubt be happy to take $1,500 a head to give refugees a passport and to provide basic accommodation (tent), food and healthcare (emergency only, Mali-standard) for two years.
Mali can afford to take in more people, currently ranking a lowly 215th in population density at 46.6 inhabitants per square mile.
Two years should suffice for the "refugee" to learn one of the local languages at a basic level, and to become familiar with Malian agricultural techniques or a trade, and to start earning a living, just like all other Malians.
In the migration question, there is a small window of time where, as divers joke, you don’t have to swim faster than the shark but only faster than your buddy.
This is true internationally, where Spain and Italy can afford to have porous borders because most migrants will only pass their countries on the way to Germany. But it also holds for Germany itself, where even small welfare cuts in one state can make a big difference in how many migrants will settle there.
Well, Germany will have to have big welfare cuts anywhere due to their benighted economic policies. Probably Berlin will be the last to cut spending, given that they're financed by the hapless rest of the federal states.
Rational economic judgment should have led to severe cuts long ago, but instead, the state just increases borrowing exponentially. It pushes the economic disaster down the road, and ensures that it will be all the more catastrophic when it inevitably happens!
The preponderance of the mass media present the immigrants as beneficial and losing them as bad for the natives, and a large proportion of the public is willfully gullible. You can see that in America, and Eugyppius reports on it in Germany.
Now they will put their thumbs on the scale in every way they can, while continuing to ignore the reason that AfD is winning in the first place.
You have to wonder why so many governments around the world are willing to commit political suicide in order to import millions of illegal immigrants, all without a single actual vote on the issue.
It's not political suicide. It's a concerted election strategy. Germans don't support their globalist government, so they're importing people who will.
Yes correct, it's population replacement with the intention of diluting culture and dividing society so as to ease the way for the globalist reset and NWO. The politicians are not so much elected as selected and they are all in the pockets of the Globalists in one way or another, many through "control dossiers".
You're also correct is saying why on earth would politicians double down on strategies they know do not have the support of the people? Return to para 1. It's really a no-brainer and there is no other possible explanation.
The people they are importing do not really believe in civil government at all. They are used to minimal interference in their lives back home and obey only the words their religious people tell them come from the Koran, etc.
This is true. The foreign invaders believe in the opposite of "liberal democracy." But they will vote for it because it allows them to redistribute the wealth we have built for centuries to them. They will not practice "liberal democracy" once their numbers are sufficient. They will go back to the tribalism of their homelands and turn the West into a South Africa style kleptocracy.
Perhaps the jabs removed their critical thinking caps, or just exposed the lack. Now it’s all about mass formation around idiotic virtue signaling policies. Hopefully it goes the way of climate change.
Might be a little US-centered of me but I think back to those German diplomats laughing at Trump's speech to the UN back in his first term, and I wonder how they're feeling these days.
And yes! Stop sending migrants to Sachsen-Anhalt! Them cunning Turks, they nailed it.
Unfortunately, I'd bet money that these guys still think they're right. They'll have developed some insane post-hoc rationalization for why that is, like that it was Trump's fault the Nordstream was blown up, and Trump's fault that Germany denuclearized just in time for the energy crisis. It won't make a lick of sense, but it doesn't matter to them.
You see it with these people over and over. They're right, despite reality proving time after time that every prediction or claim they've ever made is abjectly, definitively wrong. But they're still right. It is reality that is wrong (and racist).
Why not? Call it "democracy" and anything is permissible. Call it "anti-fascist" and anything can be justified. This is why the left spends so much energy on word games. I belong to the George Carlin school - the more syllables they use, the further from the truth they are.
I agree! I had no idea that he has this degree of witty writing ability and cleverness, OK Yes I understood he's very clever. Thank you so much for linking this up Tardigrade!
"Hey, if you vote for the anti-migrant party we will have the migrants leave your area and stop them from coming there" is supposed to be some type of threat by the Turkish associations?
It's not an entirely empty threat. A real pull-back of non natives will reveal the shocking demographic hole the west has dug for itself. I am from New York, where 65% of Queens is foreign born. If one's dad needs a nursing home, guess who is taking care of him?
The problem is that family carers often have to give up work and impoverish themselves both financially and physically in the process - especially if mom or dad has dementia. If there were more support for carers, this would be a more rational option to take.
My brother went the high road route. After the third time he had to lever Mom off the bathroom floor, clean up the blood pools after the ambulance had left, then get to the hospital quickly to view the skull x-rays, he bowed to the inevitability of "assisted living" and was lucky to find some. It wasn't a question of impoverishment, it was a question of physical capabiity.
The economic system in the West has been INTENTIONALLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY re-jiggered since the 1950s to force women out of the home and into the workplace.
Especially since Sachsen-Anhalt is one of the German Bundesländer with the highest average age (since everyone young and ambitious packed up and left long ago).
One might have hoped that the exclusive use of paper ballots would provide a fairly secure election outcome but because of the boom in mail-in ballots, confidence in the vote that occurred has to severely questioned. The AfD took 51% of the in-person vote on Sunday but only 24.27% of the mail-in vote. In some places, the AfD got nearly 63% of the vote but only a little over 24% of the mail-in ballots. I saw that in 1 district, Magdeburg, the AfD only got 5.5% of the mail-in vote versus 41.5% of the in-person voting. One wonders how every party other than the AfD could receive more mail-in votes than in-person votes and by significant margins.
I find it much easier to believe (Occam's Razor) that establishment party voters are more likely to vote by mail ballot. ESPECIALLY since the AfD has been sowing doubt about mail-in ballot security: that would have incentivized AfD voters PARTICULARLY to vote in person. Using this fact and the discrepancies it creates to further discredit mail-in balloting is kind of elegant. (I personally would certainly not mind restricting voting by mail. If people can't be bothered to vote once every five years, they don't seem to be all that invested. I just don't see it as evidence for fraud.)
I will leave you with the story of Susie Wood. Susie Wood was a witness in a case that I tried in Jackson, Mississippi when I was in the US Justice Department. We proved that people were having their ballots voted by third parties. Susie Wood was one of the people who had someone else vote for them.
What would happen in Mississippi is the activists would follow the postman. They would drive down the road behind the post office, and they would snatch ballots out of mailboxes, and they would knock on the door of the voter.
They'd say, "Hi, Susie. I've got your ballot here. Would you like help voting it?" They would go inside Susie's kitchen. I would be happy to send the transcript to anybody interested from this trial.
They go into Susie Wood's kitchen, and all of the activists would mark the ballot for Susie. They would vote for her. She wasn't telling them who to vote for. The whole reason this was possible because it was mail. You did not have an election official in the precinct watching over this. It was a mail-in-ballot.
We were doing the trial in Jackson, Mississippi, and Susie was on the stand and it was so preposterous, her testimony. The judge stopped the trial. Those of you who are lawyers know, judges don't often ask questions of a witness.
The judge said, "Hold on here. Miss, I want to ask you a question. You can read and write, can't you?" She said, "Yes." He said, "Well, why on earth were you allowing someone else to vote for you?" Susie Woods said, "Well, Your Honor. She always knows the best person to vote for."
I'm sure isolated cases like this happen. But I still don't see how this would scale to numbers that meaningfully influence elections, whether in Mississippi or in Sachsen-Anhalt. "Activists would follow the postman", so you need one activist to stake out Susie's house (figuring out that she would be susceptible in the first place; how often would they follow the postman and be greeted not by Susie-the-easily-swayed-grandma but by Susie-giving-them-three-seconds-to-get-off-her-property-with-a-shotgun?), convince Susie and fudge the ballot, all for pretty exactly one fraudulent vote per day (how often can one activist follow a postman to one mark?). I' rather skeptical you'd find the requisite hundreds of activists with enough criminal energy, coordinate them all (to find all those Susies and assign activists to their postmen), and get pretty much everyone to stay quiet. Sure there are a few people claiming to have done precisely that, but where is the large-scale conspiracy that might even stand a chance to influence the outcome?
Sorry, but extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence, and Occam still suggests my explanation above is more likely. To me, at least.
In the U.S., election cheating on a major scale (+/- 5% of votes) has been a feature, not a bug, at least since Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. bought West Virginia and Illinois for his son JFK.
Germans appear constitutionally unable to imagine that their seemingly stodgy but of course ruthlessly unionized Beamten (public employees) would be parties to SYSTEMATIC cheating.
"One wonders how every party other than the AfD could receive more mail-in votes than in-person votes and by significant margins."
--Not wondering. US has perfected corrupt elections, esp CA. Our election system has been raped by corrupt Democrats, globalists (Soros), and foreign countries (esp China) in every way possible.
He just would have had to open dawum.de, which publishes all the pre-election polls. Or call a friend. Or listen to the news. Although of course I wouldn't begrudge Eugyppius Merz as a subscriber.
Merz wants to communicate better on an emotional level with the German voters. Merz wants to take them on weekend away from the kids, on the Rhine. Just the two of us, like during our honeymoon.
He's famously unpopular and has no rapport whatever with the electorate, who mostly think he is just a sad old man in a gray suit utterly unfitted to his position. I guess that's what he's alluding to. I guess by now Germany would mostly waiver their chance to a romantic weekend with the chancellor and just take a gift card instead.
If you were, say, an American reader of this blog, and you had a relative of quite mature years who'd had a successful career as a data researcher etc. etc. etc. and who'd done plenty of traveling abroad & working with Europeans and was in most respects a sensible, intelligent sophistsicated person except for having got a raging case of TDS and its related maladies, and who was presently convinced that Germany is barreling back to the times of That Guy, and you knew he could never be persuaded to read any of your political analyses, but you wanted to gently refute his conviction that Germany is--well, I needn't specify more--what might you say in a couple of sentences of calm remarks on the subject?
"Remember Meloni? The media absolutely had their collective knickers in a knot when SHE was voted in, "post fascist" this, "fascist" that. None of the dire dirges of predictions came true, so just breathe and relax."
Oh, I know that. These have been rough years for all of us, haven't they? So many of our loved ones are horrified that we find what's presently happening with AfD so cheering.
I make sure to take my vitamins so I'll still be there to watch my loved ones weeping over my grave as they choke out "You were right! You were right about all of it!"
I stopped being afraid of nuclear annihilation after I saw the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turn into the biggest wildlife refuge in Europe. As a mammal I really don't see why I can't adapt equally well.
"Merz ultimately concluded that he needs to communicate better, but then upon realising that this is a shopworn cliché he added bizarrely that he must “try to connect with people more deeply on an emotional level,” because that will make everything better."
This directly below a photograph depicting Merz as the financial account manager for the retirement funds of the Society of Embalmers and Undertakers.
Any chance of AfD/BSW immediately implementing one or more policy decisions supported by the vast majority of the voters, then engineering a "snap election" (in parliamentary fashion) to solidify and expand its electoral majority and policy mandate(s)?
Not really. EITHER they have new elections if they can't elect a new prime minister (in which case there won't be those policy decisions), OR they can only call for new elections after at least 6 months, and need a 2/3 majority for this (the other parties will only agree if they see a chance to better their own results) OR the prime minister could ask for a vote of confidence and lose by design, which would look like some VERY blatant politicking, for which there is little precedent in Germany (in contrast, say, to the UK, where this is accepted procedure) https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Wann-es-zur-Neuwahl-in-Sachsen-Anhalt-kaeme-id31278410.html
Thanks for the quick primer on German election options. Seems like one avenue could be to propose the "killer policy" in detail (likely some form of aggressive remigration coupled with economic development for native Germans) then pull the "no confidence" trick to force a new election and finish off the CDU and its "wall of ashes." Shit gonna get real as they say around here (USA).
Heh, lots of fun options on the table. But just as in the US, lots of options would be challenged in court and presumably defeated, so many killer options are prima facie empty threats, and everyone knows that.
Please excuse my long comment. As usual you made me think this through in greater depth. Born in 1942, my life began under the heavy shadow of two hideous world wars. My parents and grandparents fought, were wounded, and died in them, leaving me with a deep, protective prejudice against Germans. But over my 84 years, my heart has changed. I met many Germans and read accounts of the profound, lonely courage of those who fought almost futilely against the Nazi horror. I learned to separate a brutal state from ordinary human beings, letting go of a lifetime of inherited resentment. Today, I am in deep grief, having just lost our son suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 45. He held no anger against the world, and in his beautiful, peaceful memory, I lean even further into that spirit of reconciliation. This is why I do not fear the current seismic shifts in German politics. While mainstream critics view these changes with alarm, I believe a return to Nazism is incredibly unlikely. As you well know, history doesn't repeat itself cleanly. Karl Marx wrote, historical events happen twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In today’s Germany, trying to equate modern democratic pushback with the actual horrors of the 1930s turns history into a farce; it reduces a monstrous, singular historical catastrophe into a cheap political caricature. Similarly, Mark Twain noted that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. To me, that rhyme means we're hearing familiar echoes - a resurgence of patriotism, populist anger, and a desire for national identity - but these chords are playing out in an entirely different era. The rhyme I hear today - in other countries such as Britain, Italy, France and Ireland too - is not a dark prelude to totalitarianism, but the rhythmic correction of a democracy rebalancing itself. There are no searchlight-lit stadiums, no vast torch-bearing rallies, no violent street thuggery, and no menacing uniforms. The sinister theatricality and physical terror of the Nazi era are entirely absent; what we're witnessing now belongs to modern, electoral politics, not the totalitarian abyss. The German people share, perhaps more than any other nation in Europe, a deeply ingrained, collective memory of how quickly a civilised nation can go mad. Having stared into that historical abyss, they possess a psychological immunity to repeating it. You can love the landscape - small and vast - without descending into the völkisch layer (Thomas Mann). Furthermore, I see the absurd and toxic burden that decades of Erinnerungskultur (memory culture) have placed on the younger generations. Forcing young people, who have no connection to the horrors of the past, to carry the suffocating weight of inherited guilt and ritualistic shame is an absurdity that breeds nothing but resentment. Crucially, this obsessive institutional framework has actively dispossessed and alienated so many ordinary communities (across Europe by the way). We see this when a local village council is branded backward or suspect simply for flying the national flag during a community festival, or when a traditional town hall meeting about local infrastructure and overstretched services is shut down by urban elites weaponising the past to stifle valid grievances. By rendering everyday patriotism taboo and forcing a singular, state-mandated narrative of historical penance, the current political establishment has left vast sections of the population - particularly in working-class regions and the neglected towns of the East - feeling like strangers in their own land, their local identities and immediate concerns ignored, even despised. It is this systematic displacement of working-class and regional communities that has naturally attracted them to new, alternative policies. Welcoming this political realignment isn't about embracing extremism; it is about trusting the German people's hard-won democratic maturity, lifting an unfair historical burden off their youth, and honouring a population's right to move past collective guilt into national normalcy. Ultimately, choosing to look upon these political changes with hope rather than fear is the greatest tribute I can pay to my son's legacy. He walked through life with an open heart, entirely free of bitterness, showing me that true strength lies in understanding rather than division. In a world so often quick to condemn, I choose to honour his memory by believing in the capacity of human beings to find their way forward in peace, trusting that the German people can embrace their future without being forever chained to the ghosts of their past.
Simon, I see you have a substack with no articles yet. Suggestion: simply paste this comment in as your first article, but please put in some paragraph breaks to make it easier to read. Aside from that it's simply wonderful.
What a beautifully written comment, full of the understanding and wisdom age and experience brings. As well, Mr. Baddeley is entirely on point and grasps the root and branch of the current social and political dysfunction in Germany in particular, and the West in general. My condolences on the death of your son, sir.
The list system means "the most loyal party functionaries" retained their seats while the less favoured were thrown out. That will generate additional tensions in the Union. I anticipate the former include a lot of life long politicians whereas the latter were more often younger ones so their departure might be permanent and the succession more difficult for the Union. I hope so.
Although it would not affect the state parliament, what is the chance some discarded CDU politicians might join AfD.
In the unlikely event that 80% of immigrants were to leave it would assure SfD an even bigger vote at the next Lande elections, anywhere.
The constitution of S-A restricts the parties‘ ability to create their lists by proscribing some sort of regional quotas, so they can’t just push any uncertain candidates to the back of the list.
difficult to imagine a stronger incentive to vote AfD than promising “any state that votes AfD will lose nearly all its migrants to the other states”
prisoner’s game: lightspeed defection edition
If the AfD states get to deport all their refugees to everyone else, pretty soon everyone is going to be an AfD state
Will you be accepting bets on who will turn AfD last? My money is on Berlin.
Bremen would hold out longer than Berlin
I would go for Baden-Württemberg with their weird Greens obsession.
How about Hamburg, they seem to pride themselves on being an "open city" or whatever it's called?
I think Hamburg
Saarland
Why Saarland? I mean they're said to marry their cousins a lot, but...
Heh, know wnat I would do?
I'd send ff the migrants I want to be rid of with a one-way ticket and 24-hour VISA to the EU-zone of Brussels, and no ption of going anywhere else.
Here you go, Eurocrats! Rocket-surgeons and brain-scientists by the train-load, on the hour, every hour!
In the EU, trains have stopped arriving on the hour years ago. You are lucky if one arrives on the same day.
A lot of us chastened by experience have seen defectors from "resistance" movements. What are odds that some from within AfD ranks defects? Their kind can always count on being met with media praise and accolades, "brave," "courageous," "statesmen." Not black-pilling this, just curious what would stop enough defections from AfD to put the CDU/SPF in power? As in the movie Indecent Proposal, everyone has their price. Including the oldest profession in the world. Especially the oldest profession in the world.
It's a possibility, just look at Canada. They've had half a dozen "defectors" from various parties (including the so called conservative) join the liberals.
That said, unlike Canada, where that is tolerated, I think any AFD defectors would be afraid to go home if they did. They know why they were elected and who did it. They know those same people are on a very short fuse right now.
We are far more likely to see AfD members retire due to threats and even physical violence against their families and themselves.
Lord, let Your will be done and please let this be in it.
Amen
Don't use the enemy's language. They are migrants, plain and simple. The number of genuine refugees who require asylum is minuscule, and even then, those people should simply be removed from immediate danger, not allowed to migrate to a country of their choosing.
"Refugees" should be resettled in any Third World country that can be bribed to take take them.
Mali would no doubt be happy to take $1,500 a head to give refugees a passport and to provide basic accommodation (tent), food and healthcare (emergency only, Mali-standard) for two years.
Mali can afford to take in more people, currently ranking a lowly 215th in population density at 46.6 inhabitants per square mile.
Two years should suffice for the "refugee" to learn one of the local languages at a basic level, and to become familiar with Malian agricultural techniques or a trade, and to start earning a living, just like all other Malians.
In the migration question, there is a small window of time where, as divers joke, you don’t have to swim faster than the shark but only faster than your buddy.
This is true internationally, where Spain and Italy can afford to have porous borders because most migrants will only pass their countries on the way to Germany. But it also holds for Germany itself, where even small welfare cuts in one state can make a big difference in how many migrants will settle there.
Well, Germany will have to have big welfare cuts anywhere due to their benighted economic policies. Probably Berlin will be the last to cut spending, given that they're financed by the hapless rest of the federal states.
Rational economic judgment should have led to severe cuts long ago, but instead, the state just increases borrowing exponentially. It pushes the economic disaster down the road, and ensures that it will be all the more catastrophic when it inevitably happens!
Absolutely, I don't see a good way out of this. You cannot kill your economy and waste money left, right, and center at the same time.
The preponderance of the mass media present the immigrants as beneficial and losing them as bad for the natives, and a large proportion of the public is willfully gullible. You can see that in America, and Eugyppius reports on it in Germany.
They didn't think that comment through!
Well that's hysterical emotional incontinence over rational thinking for you.
Now they will put their thumbs on the scale in every way they can, while continuing to ignore the reason that AfD is winning in the first place.
You have to wonder why so many governments around the world are willing to commit political suicide in order to import millions of illegal immigrants, all without a single actual vote on the issue.
It's not political suicide. It's a concerted election strategy. Germans don't support their globalist government, so they're importing people who will.
Yes correct, it's population replacement with the intention of diluting culture and dividing society so as to ease the way for the globalist reset and NWO. The politicians are not so much elected as selected and they are all in the pockets of the Globalists in one way or another, many through "control dossiers".
You're also correct is saying why on earth would politicians double down on strategies they know do not have the support of the people? Return to para 1. It's really a no-brainer and there is no other possible explanation.
The people they are importing do not really believe in civil government at all. They are used to minimal interference in their lives back home and obey only the words their religious people tell them come from the Koran, etc.
This is true. The foreign invaders believe in the opposite of "liberal democracy." But they will vote for it because it allows them to redistribute the wealth we have built for centuries to them. They will not practice "liberal democracy" once their numbers are sufficient. They will go back to the tribalism of their homelands and turn the West into a South Africa style kleptocracy.
REMIGRATION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION!
TENS OF MILLIONS MUST GO!
Yeah I liked the Great Replacement's original name -- "Demographics is Destiny".
"The future belongs to those who show up (for it)." — Mark Steyn
They destroyed and came very close to killing Mark Steyn. He's one of the best. And also one of the funniest.
Same with all the Western “democracies.”
Not so sure the new germans are down with the woke agenda. At this point the antileft is getting a big tent.
Cults often spread widely and then people call 'em mainstream religions.
Perhaps the jabs removed their critical thinking caps, or just exposed the lack. Now it’s all about mass formation around idiotic virtue signaling policies. Hopefully it goes the way of climate change.
Might be a little US-centered of me but I think back to those German diplomats laughing at Trump's speech to the UN back in his first term, and I wonder how they're feeling these days.
And yes! Stop sending migrants to Sachsen-Anhalt! Them cunning Turks, they nailed it.
Unfortunately, I'd bet money that these guys still think they're right. They'll have developed some insane post-hoc rationalization for why that is, like that it was Trump's fault the Nordstream was blown up, and Trump's fault that Germany denuclearized just in time for the energy crisis. It won't make a lick of sense, but it doesn't matter to them.
You see it with these people over and over. They're right, despite reality proving time after time that every prediction or claim they've ever made is abjectly, definitively wrong. But they're still right. It is reality that is wrong (and racist).
So long as they feel increasingly miserable and horrified.
'…developed a new interest in banning the AfD, calling for a federal and state “working group” to look into this possibility.'
Amazing. Do they expect to disenfranchise 43% of the citizens?
Why not? Call it "democracy" and anything is permissible. Call it "anti-fascist" and anything can be justified. This is why the left spends so much energy on word games. I belong to the George Carlin school - the more syllables they use, the further from the truth they are.
Why, yes, yes they do 🤣
It's the most globalist of globalist stances.
Malone's take on this is pretty good. Warning: satire.
https://www.malone.news/p/a-modest-proposal
I agree! I had no idea that he has this degree of witty writing ability and cleverness, OK Yes I understood he's very clever. Thank you so much for linking this up Tardigrade!
Sometimes you have to destroy democracy in order to save it.
That would depend on if the citizens are revolting or not.
(Apologies to Parker & Hart)
Yes, yes they do.
"Hey, if you vote for the anti-migrant party we will have the migrants leave your area and stop them from coming there" is supposed to be some type of threat by the Turkish associations?
Are they that retarded?
It's not an entirely empty threat. A real pull-back of non natives will reveal the shocking demographic hole the west has dug for itself. I am from New York, where 65% of Queens is foreign born. If one's dad needs a nursing home, guess who is taking care of him?
Here is the thing - for thousands of years when your elders got old the person who took care of them was their kids.
Bringing in hordes of foreigners so that you, god forbid, will never have to take of your dad for a couple of years is not a good deal for society.
The problem is that family carers often have to give up work and impoverish themselves both financially and physically in the process - especially if mom or dad has dementia. If there were more support for carers, this would be a more rational option to take.
My brother went the high road route. After the third time he had to lever Mom off the bathroom floor, clean up the blood pools after the ambulance had left, then get to the hospital quickly to view the skull x-rays, he bowed to the inevitability of "assisted living" and was lucky to find some. It wasn't a question of impoverishment, it was a question of physical capabiity.
It's not feasible if a) a substantial number of people don't have kids and b) the rest has to work to get a meager pension one day.
The economic system in the West has been INTENTIONALLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY re-jiggered since the 1950s to force women out of the home and into the workplace.
Especially since Sachsen-Anhalt is one of the German Bundesländer with the highest average age (since everyone young and ambitious packed up and left long ago).
One might have hoped that the exclusive use of paper ballots would provide a fairly secure election outcome but because of the boom in mail-in ballots, confidence in the vote that occurred has to severely questioned. The AfD took 51% of the in-person vote on Sunday but only 24.27% of the mail-in vote. In some places, the AfD got nearly 63% of the vote but only a little over 24% of the mail-in ballots. I saw that in 1 district, Magdeburg, the AfD only got 5.5% of the mail-in vote versus 41.5% of the in-person voting. One wonders how every party other than the AfD could receive more mail-in votes than in-person votes and by significant margins.
Mail-in ballots are how the establishment cheats.
I find it much easier to believe (Occam's Razor) that establishment party voters are more likely to vote by mail ballot. ESPECIALLY since the AfD has been sowing doubt about mail-in ballot security: that would have incentivized AfD voters PARTICULARLY to vote in person. Using this fact and the discrepancies it creates to further discredit mail-in balloting is kind of elegant. (I personally would certainly not mind restricting voting by mail. If people can't be bothered to vote once every five years, they don't seem to be all that invested. I just don't see it as evidence for fraud.)
"I just don't see it as evidence for fraud."
From https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19180/election-issues :
I will leave you with the story of Susie Wood. Susie Wood was a witness in a case that I tried in Jackson, Mississippi when I was in the US Justice Department. We proved that people were having their ballots voted by third parties. Susie Wood was one of the people who had someone else vote for them.
What would happen in Mississippi is the activists would follow the postman. They would drive down the road behind the post office, and they would snatch ballots out of mailboxes, and they would knock on the door of the voter.
They'd say, "Hi, Susie. I've got your ballot here. Would you like help voting it?" They would go inside Susie's kitchen. I would be happy to send the transcript to anybody interested from this trial.
They go into Susie Wood's kitchen, and all of the activists would mark the ballot for Susie. They would vote for her. She wasn't telling them who to vote for. The whole reason this was possible because it was mail. You did not have an election official in the precinct watching over this. It was a mail-in-ballot.
We were doing the trial in Jackson, Mississippi, and Susie was on the stand and it was so preposterous, her testimony. The judge stopped the trial. Those of you who are lawyers know, judges don't often ask questions of a witness.
The judge said, "Hold on here. Miss, I want to ask you a question. You can read and write, can't you?" She said, "Yes." He said, "Well, why on earth were you allowing someone else to vote for you?" Susie Woods said, "Well, Your Honor. She always knows the best person to vote for."
I'm sure isolated cases like this happen. But I still don't see how this would scale to numbers that meaningfully influence elections, whether in Mississippi or in Sachsen-Anhalt. "Activists would follow the postman", so you need one activist to stake out Susie's house (figuring out that she would be susceptible in the first place; how often would they follow the postman and be greeted not by Susie-the-easily-swayed-grandma but by Susie-giving-them-three-seconds-to-get-off-her-property-with-a-shotgun?), convince Susie and fudge the ballot, all for pretty exactly one fraudulent vote per day (how often can one activist follow a postman to one mark?). I' rather skeptical you'd find the requisite hundreds of activists with enough criminal energy, coordinate them all (to find all those Susies and assign activists to their postmen), and get pretty much everyone to stay quiet. Sure there are a few people claiming to have done precisely that, but where is the large-scale conspiracy that might even stand a chance to influence the outcome?
Sorry, but extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence, and Occam still suggests my explanation above is more likely. To me, at least.
Perhaps you'd enjoy reading the entire linked article for more than the one anecdote.
There are thousands of tales like this in the Naked City, including the nursing homes where everybody votes but nobody remembers voting (https://truethevote.org/news/red-white-true-news-episode-7-colleen-vera), the vacant houses where dozens of unrelated voters "live"(https://truethevote.org/news/13-voters-one-vacant-house-thousands-more-like-it), the illegal aliens who are automatically registered to vote (unknown to them) by the vehicle department, and then cast regular ballots (also unknown to them) (https://truethevote.org/news/non-citizen-voting-in-november-ttvs-611-project-has-answers).
The underlying principle never varies: when voting is done out of sight of official election monitors, fraud becomes a profitable industry.
As with many things, I'm sure it's partly demographic self-selection, and partly fraud. The question is how much of each.
Re mail-in votes, saw this today, but have not read it yet. https://johndavidrosenthal.substack.com/p/how-did-germanys-anti-afd-firewall
It just discusses the highly improbable massive discrepancy between in person and mail-in voting. Including in graphic form.
In the U.S., election cheating on a major scale (+/- 5% of votes) has been a feature, not a bug, at least since Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. bought West Virginia and Illinois for his son JFK.
Germans appear constitutionally unable to imagine that their seemingly stodgy but of course ruthlessly unionized Beamten (public employees) would be parties to SYSTEMATIC cheating.
"One wonders how every party other than the AfD could receive more mail-in votes than in-person votes and by significant margins."
--Not wondering. US has perfected corrupt elections, esp CA. Our election system has been raped by corrupt Democrats, globalists (Soros), and foreign countries (esp China) in every way possible.
"an unmitigated and deeply deserved disaster"
Writing like this makes my day replete, and it's not even 9 AM yet.
Thanks for the inside update. Keep them coming! I am gaining hope that Germany can be saved!
That will teach Merz had just been a subscriber to you he would not have been surprised at the outcome.
He just would have had to open dawum.de, which publishes all the pre-election polls. Or call a friend. Or listen to the news. Although of course I wouldn't begrudge Eugyppius Merz as a subscriber.
Merz wants to communicate better on an emotional level with the German voters. Merz wants to take them on weekend away from the kids, on the Rhine. Just the two of us, like during our honeymoon.
What the hell is he talking about.
He's famously unpopular and has no rapport whatever with the electorate, who mostly think he is just a sad old man in a gray suit utterly unfitted to his position. I guess that's what he's alluding to. I guess by now Germany would mostly waiver their chance to a romantic weekend with the chancellor and just take a gift card instead.
You forgot the part where he also wants to shag the electorate silly, because you want it too, b*tch! (Will this get me banned?)
If you were, say, an American reader of this blog, and you had a relative of quite mature years who'd had a successful career as a data researcher etc. etc. etc. and who'd done plenty of traveling abroad & working with Europeans and was in most respects a sensible, intelligent sophistsicated person except for having got a raging case of TDS and its related maladies, and who was presently convinced that Germany is barreling back to the times of That Guy, and you knew he could never be persuaded to read any of your political analyses, but you wanted to gently refute his conviction that Germany is--well, I needn't specify more--what might you say in a couple of sentences of calm remarks on the subject?
"Remember Meloni? The media absolutely had their collective knickers in a knot when SHE was voted in, "post fascist" this, "fascist" that. None of the dire dirges of predictions came true, so just breathe and relax."
I'd need something a little more forceful.
Even that would not work, I'm afraid. They WANT to believe the 4th Reich is just around the corner.
Oh, I know that. These have been rough years for all of us, haven't they? So many of our loved ones are horrified that we find what's presently happening with AfD so cheering.
I wouldn't have the patience. I'd tell my relative to cope and seethe. I have enough problems to consume my attention without adopting his/hers.
I make sure to take my vitamins so I'll still be there to watch my loved ones weeping over my grave as they choke out "You were right! You were right about all of it!"
In my mind's eye, since this scenario is invariably accompanied by a close-range nuclear fireball, the vitamins are not high priority. 😇
I stopped being afraid of nuclear annihilation after I saw the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turn into the biggest wildlife refuge in Europe. As a mammal I really don't see why I can't adapt equally well.
"Merz ultimately concluded that he needs to communicate better, but then upon realising that this is a shopworn cliché he added bizarrely that he must “try to connect with people more deeply on an emotional level,” because that will make everything better."
This directly below a photograph depicting Merz as the financial account manager for the retirement funds of the Society of Embalmers and Undertakers.
He has to appeal to them emotionally, it's his only hope.
Certainly no *rational* argument would ever persuade anyone to vote his way.
The condescending arrogant distain in his expression on every photo of him. Don't think so!
Never read an apter description of this least charismatic of politicians, thank you.
How do you say “Kneel, peasant” in German?
Is there a sight more beautiful to behold than the shrinkage in CDU votes?
Hey! The voting pool is COLD! It's a perfectly normal physical reaction!
Thanks for the Seinfeld reference.
Any chance of AfD/BSW immediately implementing one or more policy decisions supported by the vast majority of the voters, then engineering a "snap election" (in parliamentary fashion) to solidify and expand its electoral majority and policy mandate(s)?
Not really. EITHER they have new elections if they can't elect a new prime minister (in which case there won't be those policy decisions), OR they can only call for new elections after at least 6 months, and need a 2/3 majority for this (the other parties will only agree if they see a chance to better their own results) OR the prime minister could ask for a vote of confidence and lose by design, which would look like some VERY blatant politicking, for which there is little precedent in Germany (in contrast, say, to the UK, where this is accepted procedure) https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Wann-es-zur-Neuwahl-in-Sachsen-Anhalt-kaeme-id31278410.html
Thanks for the quick primer on German election options. Seems like one avenue could be to propose the "killer policy" in detail (likely some form of aggressive remigration coupled with economic development for native Germans) then pull the "no confidence" trick to force a new election and finish off the CDU and its "wall of ashes." Shit gonna get real as they say around here (USA).
Heh, lots of fun options on the table. But just as in the US, lots of options would be challenged in court and presumably defeated, so many killer options are prima facie empty threats, and everyone knows that.
But I have stocked up on popcorn.
Please excuse my long comment. As usual you made me think this through in greater depth. Born in 1942, my life began under the heavy shadow of two hideous world wars. My parents and grandparents fought, were wounded, and died in them, leaving me with a deep, protective prejudice against Germans. But over my 84 years, my heart has changed. I met many Germans and read accounts of the profound, lonely courage of those who fought almost futilely against the Nazi horror. I learned to separate a brutal state from ordinary human beings, letting go of a lifetime of inherited resentment. Today, I am in deep grief, having just lost our son suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 45. He held no anger against the world, and in his beautiful, peaceful memory, I lean even further into that spirit of reconciliation. This is why I do not fear the current seismic shifts in German politics. While mainstream critics view these changes with alarm, I believe a return to Nazism is incredibly unlikely. As you well know, history doesn't repeat itself cleanly. Karl Marx wrote, historical events happen twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In today’s Germany, trying to equate modern democratic pushback with the actual horrors of the 1930s turns history into a farce; it reduces a monstrous, singular historical catastrophe into a cheap political caricature. Similarly, Mark Twain noted that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. To me, that rhyme means we're hearing familiar echoes - a resurgence of patriotism, populist anger, and a desire for national identity - but these chords are playing out in an entirely different era. The rhyme I hear today - in other countries such as Britain, Italy, France and Ireland too - is not a dark prelude to totalitarianism, but the rhythmic correction of a democracy rebalancing itself. There are no searchlight-lit stadiums, no vast torch-bearing rallies, no violent street thuggery, and no menacing uniforms. The sinister theatricality and physical terror of the Nazi era are entirely absent; what we're witnessing now belongs to modern, electoral politics, not the totalitarian abyss. The German people share, perhaps more than any other nation in Europe, a deeply ingrained, collective memory of how quickly a civilised nation can go mad. Having stared into that historical abyss, they possess a psychological immunity to repeating it. You can love the landscape - small and vast - without descending into the völkisch layer (Thomas Mann). Furthermore, I see the absurd and toxic burden that decades of Erinnerungskultur (memory culture) have placed on the younger generations. Forcing young people, who have no connection to the horrors of the past, to carry the suffocating weight of inherited guilt and ritualistic shame is an absurdity that breeds nothing but resentment. Crucially, this obsessive institutional framework has actively dispossessed and alienated so many ordinary communities (across Europe by the way). We see this when a local village council is branded backward or suspect simply for flying the national flag during a community festival, or when a traditional town hall meeting about local infrastructure and overstretched services is shut down by urban elites weaponising the past to stifle valid grievances. By rendering everyday patriotism taboo and forcing a singular, state-mandated narrative of historical penance, the current political establishment has left vast sections of the population - particularly in working-class regions and the neglected towns of the East - feeling like strangers in their own land, their local identities and immediate concerns ignored, even despised. It is this systematic displacement of working-class and regional communities that has naturally attracted them to new, alternative policies. Welcoming this political realignment isn't about embracing extremism; it is about trusting the German people's hard-won democratic maturity, lifting an unfair historical burden off their youth, and honouring a population's right to move past collective guilt into national normalcy. Ultimately, choosing to look upon these political changes with hope rather than fear is the greatest tribute I can pay to my son's legacy. He walked through life with an open heart, entirely free of bitterness, showing me that true strength lies in understanding rather than division. In a world so often quick to condemn, I choose to honour his memory by believing in the capacity of human beings to find their way forward in peace, trusting that the German people can embrace their future without being forever chained to the ghosts of their past.
Simon, I see you have a substack with no articles yet. Suggestion: simply paste this comment in as your first article, but please put in some paragraph breaks to make it easier to read. Aside from that it's simply wonderful.
What a generous thing to say. I know this will sound crazy, but can you explain 'substack' - what is it, where would I find it?
What a beautifully written comment, full of the understanding and wisdom age and experience brings. As well, Mr. Baddeley is entirely on point and grasps the root and branch of the current social and political dysfunction in Germany in particular, and the West in general. My condolences on the death of your son, sir.
Well stated, Mr. Baddeley
The list system means "the most loyal party functionaries" retained their seats while the less favoured were thrown out. That will generate additional tensions in the Union. I anticipate the former include a lot of life long politicians whereas the latter were more often younger ones so their departure might be permanent and the succession more difficult for the Union. I hope so.
Although it would not affect the state parliament, what is the chance some discarded CDU politicians might join AfD.
In the unlikely event that 80% of immigrants were to leave it would assure SfD an even bigger vote at the next Lande elections, anywhere.
The constitution of S-A restricts the parties‘ ability to create their lists by proscribing some sort of regional quotas, so they can’t just push any uncertain candidates to the back of the list.
Can you briefly explain how the lists are created?