The far-right AfD party won the state elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia with 30.5% of the vote on Sunday (1 September), according to exit polls, marking the party's first win in a state election.
Nothing will change except more people feeling emboldened by the results. This isn’t going to change much for non-whites in the state. If they were treated badly before, they’ll continue to be treated badly now. That isn’t going to change.
But I bet this party won’t achieve much in the next 4 years. Germany is a federation, Thuringia is a state. There’s not much AfD can do at that level that wouldn’t be rejected at national level, maybe even already by the state court. They can’t change the constitution, they can’t “ban immigrants” from their state, in short they can’t implement their “program”.
It’ll be a constant fight to get anything through and after 4 years, I bet they’ll have very little to show for it. All they’ll do is blame the other party for not cooperating.
But federal states have a lot of power on their own exactly because too much centralized power is dangerous. But the political system also wasn’t design to defend itself against a new fascist takeover in many ways, so if a federal state goes rogue that can have very serious consequences.
Unfortunately I don’t have an English source for that but there was an article in German that covered all the possible ways how they could fuck shit up.
One thing I remember is that they could officially host people like Trump or even worse people and get representative resources for that. And they would have significant budget to do networking events with Nazis everywhere iirc. It would massively enable them to take over other federal states as well and legitimate themselves in national politics. If you look at Austria, they have broken the barriers a long time ago and their Nazi party is part of the government regularly, it’s absolutely bad and I’m very worried the same will happen in Germany.
Nothing will change except more people feeling emboldened by the results. This isn’t going to change much for non-whites in the state. If they were treated badly before, they’ll continue to be treated badly now. That isn’t going to change.
But I bet this party won’t achieve much in the next 4 years. Germany is a federation, Thuringia is a state. There’s not much AfD can do at that level that wouldn’t be rejected at national level, maybe even already by the state court. They can’t change the constitution, they can’t “ban immigrants” from their state, in short they can’t implement their “program”.
It’ll be a constant fight to get anything through and after 4 years, I bet they’ll have very little to show for it. All they’ll do is blame the other party for not cooperating.
But federal states have a lot of power on their own exactly because too much centralized power is dangerous. But the political system also wasn’t design to defend itself against a new fascist takeover in many ways, so if a federal state goes rogue that can have very serious consequences. Unfortunately I don’t have an English source for that but there was an article in German that covered all the possible ways how they could fuck shit up.
One thing I remember is that they could officially host people like Trump or even worse people and get representative resources for that. And they would have significant budget to do networking events with Nazis everywhere iirc. It would massively enable them to take over other federal states as well and legitimate themselves in national politics. If you look at Austria, they have broken the barriers a long time ago and their Nazi party is part of the government regularly, it’s absolutely bad and I’m very worried the same will happen in Germany.