AfD's infighting never seems to end. Frauke Petry now says she doesn't want to be art of the AfD group, and will sit in the Bundestag as an independent.

Let's see where this leads.

As I wrote in post 552 "Will be interesting to see how the AfD manage their time in Parliament. Often Conservative right wing parties split into different factions" but I did not expect major cracks so soon.

When she read your post she just coulnd't help it.

Meanwhile the CSU is fast becoming a wildcard.

With an election in Bavaria coming up, and the CSU licking its wounds over heavy losses, the CSU thinks it needs to reaffirm a stronger right wing message to make good the lost ground at least at home in Bavaria. As the greens will be tugging Merkel to drift more to the left, there could be an interesting showdown brewing. There is little love lost between CSU and Greens. Even if they do agree to a coalition in principle, that could break apart while they are actually governing.

If the parties fail to reach an agreement, new elections will be necessary.

The FDP were coming back from an all time record low.

There seems to be a mechanism that whoever forms a colation with Merkel ends up being obliterated in the next election. It hapapned to the FDP previously. It happened to the SPD this time.

If Merkel really wanted to destroy the AfD, she should form a coalition with them.

For being a party who are supposedly a collection of assorted reformed and unmreformed communists pining for the good days when Erich Honnecker was still in command, and who would peter out as that demographic either died off or saw the errors of their old ways....they're still doing extremely well. They have managed to grow their base and appeal significantly outside of their initial demographic and are far from being the bunch of nostalgics they sometimes get painted as.

is this like schweizer-englisch?

Like trump eh :-)

IMO, that's mostly because of Sarah Wagenknecht and maybe a few other figureheads.

If the party only had people like her, they'd be be at 20%.

We'll soon get a lot of politicians like Mr Lindner - in all parties.

It's bit like the Eurovision Song Contest: if a combo of four women with parrots on their heads wins, next year you'll see a lot of variations of that theme....

Unfortunately the reason for Afd's rise (which is how many Germans can barely make ends meet since they are working on crappy jobs with crappy contracts) will not change.

The FDP will demand to get the Finance ministry from Schaeuble.
They can only make things worse in that case.
They will continue his austerity and his obsession with balanced budgets and they will force even more poor people to Afd.

Only hope is that the SPD will win next time and put a stop in this madness.

That would be the same SPD that, when Chancellor Schröder came into power, privatized most of the remaining federal assets and whose brethren and sisters in the various Bundesländer also privatized city-owned "Wohnungsgesellschaften" (mostly sold to private-equity investors and hedge-funds).
Now people are complaining about lack of affordable housing...
There's even more free-market big-capital-pleasing BS that became law when Schröder was at it (AFAIK the Körperschaftssteuerreform, which allowed the tax-free sale of equity holdings or whatever it's called).

For most aspects, the SPD has been a better FDP than the FDP themselves during the last 20 years ;-)

Yes, but hopefully they've learned something.
This is in any case our only hope.
If SPD does not win the next election, or SPD wins but continues the austerity madness then we are doomed.

Maybe - but the problem of the SPD is (and has been for a very long time) that the people who are elected into office for them do not represent their electorate.

It's mostly lawyers or civil servants.

https://de.statista.com/statistik/da...6-wahlperiode/

Can't find exact numbers split by party - but it's a general problem - it just hurts SPD most (IMO).

Somebody who is a civil servant never has to spend a single second in his life about the prospect of losing his job. I know: my father was a civil servant (retired now) and because my mother grew up on a farm she can't really grasp that fear either.

It will be interesting to see how this statistic looks for the current election period.

Lol.

Don't underestimate the FDP. Schäuble may have his good points but he's clearly also become part of the problem. Having a new person in that job may help dispose of a lot of the baggage that has collected around it.

In contrast to what they say, FDP may well twist Merkel's arm into accepting an upper limit on migration. They do have sufficient realists to understand the necessity. They may yet be the key to stopping the rise of the AfD.

There's a large part of the electorate that would vote Green if they had a "better" stance on immigration.

A lot of Green mayors wouldn't mind a quota either.

Given the right price, I can see the Green base approving it.

CSU is for it, too, anyway.

A good part of the one million voters who switched to AfD from CDU would probably switch back just for that.

But so far, Merkel has not even allowed a discussion about it.
It's not mentioned in the party-platform.

You have to give it to Merkel: she must have not only balls of steel but really balls of depleted Uranium or Tungsten.
All the years, all the months of the campaign, she resisted to give-in to those who demanded a quota.
This quota thing is now a big chip she can "sacrifice" in the coalition-talks and get big concessions for other things.


BTW: Schäuble has been sitting in the Bundestag since 1972. He's by far the longest serving member. If he lives to a full term, that'll be 50 years.
Holy cow!

There's talk about him being "promoted" to President of the Bundestag so that his old job can be traded to someone else...

But remember that Merkel is also the leader who made a U-turn on nuclear power over Fukushima. And also remember that she is a nuclear physicist herself, so she was fully aware of the statistical risks. So rationally she could have said, I knew that this could happen, the probability was small, it did happen, it could happen again, but the probability remains small, so there is no rational basis to change policy. Instead she looked out of the window and saw the mob and decided to please them. In other words, she's not going to stand up for what she believes but will rather do what the mob wants.

I'm sure that if the mob demanding a stop to uncapped migration were to grow bigger and angrier, or if chunks of the establishment parties were to jump onto that bandwagon, she would flip before things started getting ugly.

The Greens too, depute their love of grandstanding and eloquent vacuity, are really just cheap populists at heart. They will try and second guess where the mob is going and then pretend to be leading it there.

The SPD are more principled, or at least significant sections of it are (although probably not the current leadership). But they are voluntarily staying aloof of the fray.

Nice colours but what does it mean?
For example "Flüchtlinge, Einwanderung und Asylpolitik" is 44? 44 what?
44 potatoes?
It is clearly not a percentage? Where did the graphs come from? Reputable organisations or the Mothers Union?

Publishing graphs with no legend on the vertical axis is one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book.

Using a bundled question like "Flüchtlinge, Einwanderung und Asylpolitik" is also an old trick. Then you are not informed whether refugees represent 43 of the 44 potatoes or just one?
This result might simply mean that like in the UK a lot of people (rightly or wrongly) believe East Europeans are coming in and working for lower wages and so the answer is little to do with refugees.

Without knowing the source of the numbers and how any questions were phrased (neutral or biased) then this is of little value
There are a couple of books in the series "Statistics for Dummies" that touch on how phrasing survey questions influences the replies in a required direction or you can read a Wikipedia article here.