Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods

I hate everything.

Why.

In 2011, Angela Merkel idiotically accelerated the German nuclear phase-out just a few months after her coalition passed legislation that would’ve slowed it down by twelve years. Because of an earthquake and a tsunami that happened 13,000 kilometers away in Japan, Merkel suddenly decided that Germany needed to abandon nuclear power as soon as possible, although the Federal Republic knows neither tsunamis nor earthquakes and not even the Japanese drew this drastic conclusion from the Fukushima disaster.

Merkel’s real motivations were, as always, tactical: She hoped to deny the surging Green Party a winning electoral issue in the Baden-Württemberg elections that year, and so we can call her move a twofold failure: The Greens won over 24% of the vote anyway, which was just enough to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and force the CDU into opposition. And today, citizens of a denuclearised Federal Republic must live with a declining economy and ongoing deindustrialisation, thanks in large part to having some of the highest electricity prices in continental Europe. It was a multi-dimensional fractal fuckup, what Merkel did in 2011. We’re still paying for it.

Even many in Merkel’s own party claim to recognise these past errors, which makes it all the more maddening that the CDU keeps making them. Yesterday, Baden-Württemberg elected a new state parliament, following a long and dismal campaign in which the CDU under their genuinely stupid lead candidate Manuel Hagel …

… did everything in their power to make themselves impossible to differentiate from the Greens under a vastly more intelligent and capable Cem Özdemir.

Hagel and his CDU sought for months to banish politics from this election entirely, fearful of alienating clueless Baden-Württembergians who might just cast their vote for the deindustrialisers if the Union didn’t let them scratch their conscience sufficiently. In the end, however, Greens outmanouvered the hapless Hagel, capitalising on a seven year-old video in which the CDU man spoke with slightly lascivious undertones of a “doe-eyed” girl he met on some high-school visit ages ago. A far more significant slip-up – one that hardly won any notice outside of alternative media – showed Hagel on another school visit attempting to explain the greenhouse effect to a bunch of bored seventh-year students. Hagel, a hopeless climatoid who supports the energy transition in a German state where Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are fighting for survival, explained why we need to stop all meaningful competitive industrial activity this way:

Between the earth and the sun is the atmosphere, and when it gets thinner and thinner, the sun gets hotter and hotter. And the reason for this is emissions, CO2, and so on. And that is the greenhouse gas effect. All right?

Yesterday evening, the bill for all of this humdrum imbecility came due. The Greens emerged as the winners, if barely, with 30.2% of the vote – just a few points down from their historic high of 32.6% in 2021. The CDU improved over their last showing but managed to underperform even the most pessimistic forecasts, with a mere 29.7%.

Yesterday’s election results, compared to 2021 (faded bars).

Thanks to a slight edge in direct mandates, the CDU and the Greens will enter the state parliament with 56 seats each, but that may not matter too much. The CDU have asked the Greens if they might split the Minister Presidency between them, with Hagel and the “realo” Green Özdemir each serving two and a half years, like two little boys taking their turn on the bicycle. Özdemir has said no, because “we are adults.” In truth Özdemir is poised to become the next Minister President of Baden-Württemberg in yet another cursed Kiwi coalition.

This was a predictable outcome, and nevertheless it is astounding. The Greens and the CDU are the undisputed architects of German decline, and yet the prosperous voters of this beautiful southern state have sent both of these terrible parties back into the Landtag with an enormous mandate to do more of the same. This is proof number 5,234,345 that deep and lasting prosperity has the power to do what few other forces can, namely turn millions of otherwise sensible intelligent people into walking retards. Alas, there seems to be no way to de-zombify the voters without making them massively poorer.

Hagel and all twelve of his braincells are bitter about his failure to best the Greens, although his chances of achieving the Minister Presidency have only been dashed because the Union refuses even to contemplate any coalition with the no-longer-right-wing-extreme Alternative für Deutschland. A clear if purely theoretical majority exists for a Union coalition with the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler Party, as the latter have nearly doubled their share of the vote since 2021. This is largely down to the rapidly shifting political preferences of actual workers and net taxpayers:

The worker vote in Baden-Württemberg has split overwhelmingly for the AfD.

Even contemplating such a coalition is forbidden of course, and nowhere so much as in Baden-Württemberg. It is also forbidden to point out that the mere possibility of a CDU/AfD coalition would give the CDU enormous leverage over the Greens in coalition negotiations, because in a world without firewalls the CDU would have two potential coalitions partners, whereas the Greens would have no options beyond the Union. In coming decades everyone will look back upon the firewall as one of the most ridiculous and self-destructive tactics ever pursued by any Western political party anywhere, for any reason.

There are silver linings here, of course. Note what a drubbing the Social Democrats have taken. They almost didn’t make it over the 5% hurdle for parliamentary representation at all, and they are left calling themselves the “only democratic opposition” in the Stuttgart Landtag.¹ This is a party full of crazy people on an express train to the land of total political irrelevance. They’re going to do a lot more damage before they get there of course, but there can be little doubt that that’s where they’re headed.

When they finally arrive in this grey pointless liminal space, they’ll get to meet the market-liberal FDP, the junior partners of Olaf Scholz’s failed traffic light coalition. These are the guys who signed off on every last catastrophic thing the Scholz clown car did, from extended mask mandates to extreme vaccine mania to destructive home heating ordinances. Happily, in doing so, they also signed their political death warrant. The FDP were once uniquely strong among the wealthy voters of Baden-Württemberg, but they have been chased out of the state parliament after bleeding more than half of their support since 2021. The FDP are slated to be voted out of Rheinland-Pfalz next, on 21 March; then out of Sachsen-Anhalt on 6 September; and finally out of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on 20 September. After the next round of state elections in 2027, only Hessen will still have any FDP members in the Landtag at all, and that is simply because the next election Hessen will not happen until 2028.

1. According to the SPD, the AfD are not a “democratic” party so they don’t count.