“60% growth” seems large, but there are almost 85,000,000 people in Germany, so we’re talking about growing from ~0.03% to ~0.05% of the population here.
Since not everyone is expected to become member of a political party, a more apt comparison would be to membership numbers (and changes in those) for other German parties.
Yeah, that makes more sense:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitgliederentwicklung_der_deutschen_Parteien
AfD is still the smallest of the big parties. I expect them to overtake the Linke this year though.
Thanks for the link. Some big parties seem to have hundreds of thousands of members. Didn’t see much for 2024 other than:
Zu Beginn des Jahres 2024 meldeten mehrere Parteien einen starken Mitgliederzuwachs. Bündnis 90/Die Grünen berichteten von 8.000 Neumitgliedern in den ersten beiden Monaten des Jahres.
In any case, considering the political context of our times, AfD’s growth is nothing to scoff at.
You’re saying this now but they’re on course to leave the left in the dust and are likely to compete with greens in terms of members and votes by election sunday next year.
How relevant is that in terms of government leadership?
They start getting seats
Is that politically significant?
Yes, to some extent. More seats means more pressure
So they wouldn’t have significant political power, but they would have a political presence at all, which feels threatening?
Yes
They already have a presence, and are shaping the politics of Germany indirectly. As our leading conservative party (and our socialdemocatric middle -left party to some extent) makes the same error as in US as trying to cater to those extremist views. Which is frightening as fuck, as more and more fascist views are being adopted and normalized
Not really, they’d need to triple their numbers.
Numbers on the far left are misleading as Die Linke is bleeding members to the BSW but the BSW is taking their sweet time handing out membership cards, double-checking every single applicant. Reportedly they have a backlog of at least 8000 applicants or such and at least 20k people generally interested. Wagenknecht is at least 70% tankie so it doesn’t surprise that they’re doing a vanguard thing.
Actions have consequces. Similar thing is happening other places.
Why would people be doing such a thing
Why?
That’s complicated.
People see a lot of immigrants coming into their area, and taking jobs. It’s not hard to see how people would draw a connection between the above statement and connect it to “that’s why I couldn’t get a job”. There’s a natural push back there.
Some companies see the influx of immigrants and realize they can get cheaper labor, and those that don’t get the job (the ones who already lived in that area) get disgruntled. It’s easy to talk some of them into joining a side that pushes back on immigration.
One of the things the far right looks at is immigration.
The left typically asks for bigger government and more social welfare programs (more taxes).
The right is typically smaller government and less social welfare programs (less taxes).
At a time when we are drowning in debt and can’t afford to buy food, have less taxes and more money in our pocket is an enticing idea. Easy to pull people to the right.
The worse the above problems get, the further to the right people go.
The further to the right they go, the less they hear from the left. Now they only see and hear one side. It becomes a vicious cycle at that point.
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