German Elections - 2025

I was meaning post-election, and her mea culpa over Russian fuels may have been clearly stated, but regret or any form of contrition wasn't at that particular party. Her appearance at the Royal Festival Hall was hardly a tour de force of self recrimination.

Ok, then that much is true. She famously congratulated Merz per sms -- the two hate one another.

No, regret and contrition were absolutely the topic of those public statements and interviews in Germany. What happened at the Royal Festival Hall I do not know, it's not where I look for messages from Angela Merkel to the German electorate.

The directly preceding government, the one in charge until this election is seen through to inauguration, was formed by the junior partner from the previous coalition, without the senior. The senior came out of that election with a historically bad result.

https://bsky.app/profile/taniel.bsky.social/post/3ljv2n2afm22a

It is agreed. CDU/CSU and SPD Grand Coalition. Again.

They also agreed to a big infrastructure package, increased border security and a minimum wage hike.

According to this person SPD and the Greens are still refusing to coalition with The Left. I thought they had gotten over that. Especially with the BSW wing being excised out of the party.

The abandonment of fiscal rigidity is welcome I suppose.

You've whispered that in someone's ear before they pegged you, don't deny it.

https://www.dw.com/de/ard-deutschlandtrend-usa-kein-verlässlicher-partner-mehr/a-71851036

I know some people like to pretend horseshoe theory isn’t real but look how in lockstep the BSW (former communist wing of The Left, pro-Putin and social conservative) and the AfD (neo-Nazis) are on the issues.

You can fantasy world rep me all you want but the charts speak for themselves.







Are you really arguing that AfD and BSW voters aren’t side by side on the issues?

If I find issues that the technocratic centrists agree with fascists about, will you draw similar conclusions about them?

I didn’t have to go ‘find’ these issues. They were polled because they are the fundamental issues facing the German people right now.

And on all three issues the shitty Putin parties are in lockstep agreement on shitty positions even though they are supposedly on opposite sides of the spectrum.

You don’t find that interesting?

I'm sure he doesn't.

I find it stupid. There are two parties (or arguably even four) of the six included that are nominally on "the left". You've selected the least prominent of them electorally, ignored the others and decided that those guys - despite their political positions being all over the map - represent left politics in general. Then you've used their agreement with the fascists on three issues to make a swingeing generalisation about political philosophy in toto.

As I say every time this comes up, the left-right spectrum is useful for shorthand but there are obvious limits to trying to represent the diversity of political thought one a one-dimensional line. Trying to simplify it even further in this particular way is just another variation on the "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a Nazi" trope that rears it head from time to time around here.

Now you are just lying.

I never said the BSW represents the left in general. Heck Germany makes it easy as in one of their three non-Putin left parties is named The Left (Die Linke) which I have discussed multiple times.

As the polling shows the SPD, the Greens and the Left are all within the normal band of opinion.

What I have done is point out how the far-left, the former communist wing of The Left (which broke off in part due to Sahra Wagenknecht’s support of and from Putin) the BSW has near exactly the same opinion as the far-right AfD.

That is horseshoe theory. Not that left and right are the same but when you go extreme left (communist) and extreme right (fascist) there is quite a bit of overlap.

As the polls here clearly show.

The parties of Union, SPD and the Green Party have agreed upon to change the German constitution in order to open the way for infrastructure (€500 billion) and military spending. This will open up the necessary funds to equip the German army with all means necessary.

„Whatever it takes.“

https://bsky.app/profile/tendar.bsky.social/post/3lkedhmadwk2p

*Basic Law, but whatever.

It is an interesting point, but I think the problem with your interpretation here is that if you don't start off with the horseshoe theory as a given, you'd have to count the BSW as the right wing, not the left wing, of the former unified Linke. They are nationalists rather than internationalists, they demonize the unemployed, they oppose alternative lifestyles in the name of 'German culture'. While Wagenknecht did call herself a Communist and even Stalinist thirty years ago, she has explicitly distanced herself from that. The remaining Linke, however, still embraces internationalism, a strong welfare system, cultural diversity, and most of Communist theory. (If you are comfortable listening to German, Wagenknecht's long-form interview on the podcast 'Alles gesagt?!' is a fascinating source on her as well as her environment's political shifts).

A lesser but similar problem arises when you look at the Christian Union's placement in your graphs. They're lower on the consensus scale than SPD and Greens, but according to their electoral success, their opinion should be in the middle of the horseshoe, if you were just constructing the horseshoe freshly without previous assumptions.

I think a better political topology would place totalitarianism versus democracy orthogonally to economic left/right wing positions (as we've often seen in other models). The horseshoe theory tempts people to assume that a totalitarian left-winger is by definition to the left of a democratic left-winger, and a totalitarian right-winger to the right of other right-wingers, and then confirms that self-fulfilling prophecy empirically: Having defined the extremes of left and right as equally totalitarian, we turn around to find that they surprisingly share the quality of equally embracing totalitarianism.

Yes, and a good thing too, though whether Merz will stick to his promise of investing 20% of that into Green infrastructure, as he told the Greens, is anyone's guess. (Btw, the main part of the constitution being changed here was only introduced to said constitution in 2009, so It's not as if it's a long-standing principle suddenly abandoned.)