Asking because that is why voting for the green party may be a huge turnoff for many (like myself.)
In my opinion, them being a possible choice for conservative voters keeps our conservative party from doing too much rightwing crap, as they will know they'll loose voters to the Greens. We'll see how stuff goes in September (national elections). Under the hood, there's still lots of rightwing tendencies in our conservative party, unfortunately.
Its an officially extremist party (observed by the "Verfassungsschutz" [or: "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution"], that traditionally kind of ignored the far-right), one of their leaders can officially be called a fascist (court ruling), and another leader says the 3rd Reich was kind of not that big of a deal.
Regardless, by this point I think it is inevitable some of the hardcore right wing politics will enter mainstream; we (as in Europe as a whole) took too many immigrants without any consideration of how to manage them.
Lest anyone try to throw the nazi card my way it should be stated that this is a failure born from rigid top-down management structure of the EU which does not even remotely have the flexibility required to manage external shock events like this. Same reason why the joint debt mechanism being forced on the excuse of COVID is a horrible idea and will end in tears for many.
So in Germany, we are actually quite successful in managing the million that came in 2015. Most got a job and pay taxes. Actually quite awesome, fiveteen years ago everyone in Germany was afraid we'll run out of young workers.
> it should be stated that this is a failure born from rigid top-down management structure of the EU
As far as I remember, the problem was that it was actually not possible to do a top-down decision, because each national government did whatever they wanted to do? I guess the only thing we did end up doing on a EU-wide level was border protection. Not sure though.
> Same reason why the joint debt mechanism being forced on the excuse of COVID is a horrible idea and will end in tears for many.
Funny, I strongly believe its the reason the EU will not just survive but strive. Finally, the excuse of "all the money we have to give to the EU" is gone. Soon, the EU will have some taxes that only make sense on the EU level (financial transactions, or a tax on digital goods) and we're good. Besides, no national government would get the low interest rates when taking up debt that the EU combined will get, right?
We paid in 6 billion into the relief fund and are projected to get less than 3 out of it wrapped in some pre-determined financial instruments. It's like paying 10€ for a gift card that's worth 4€ and only works for some specific shops. People would call that a rubbish deal but what do I know.
In addition, our politicians lied very intentionally to us that this is a one-time fund, just for COVID purposes. Less than 2 weeks later after passing the vote in parliament, Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazia Visco is already marketing the fund as permanent and the future of a joint monetary EU strategy.
Excuse me if I don't share your optimism on this swindle, but then again unlike us, Germany is a very likely benefactor from all of this. Because let's call it what it is - it's a redistribution of wealth into the power centers of EU obscured by lies and insane amounts of bureaucracy.
England, for example, did only join the EU back then for economical reasons. Them leaving the EU now doesn't seem like an economical win (and it was probably not an decision made based on economics, I guess).
So I agree that
> Germany is a very likely benefactor from all of this.
but I would argue that all countries in the EU are.
> Because let's call it what it is - it's a redistribution of wealth into the power centers of EU obscured by lies (...)
Which lies do you mean, for example?
> (...) and insane amounts of bureaucracy.
Well yeah. But if the EU would not manage these things, each country would have to manage them with each of the other countries, leading to much much more bureaucracy.
The US senate is even more extreme. Wyoming at 578,759 people has exactly as much power as California with 39,512,223. Clearly a party aiming to minimize the number of voters it needs to please would avoid California. After all if you get the right 10% of voters you win and who cares about anything else.
I don't follow. I assume turnout would have to be taken into account? Also, I was specifically saying "voters", not "population" (more by luck, though) ;-)
> The US senate is even more extreme.
Yeah that's very true. Weren't some of the sates basically only created to give a certain party the majority? Forgot where I read or heard that though.
Actually you don't even need to get that many votes. Depending on the electoral system you might not need to win a majority of the votes in any constituency, you just need more votes than anyone else, which could be a very low percentage if the opposition is split enough ways.
The current governing party in the UK holds a comfortable majority of seats despite only winning 43% of the vote in the last election. And in fact, this was the highest vote share received by any party in decades. Labour in 1997 won more seats on a lower vote share.
> Weren't some of the sates basically only created to give a certain party the majority?
I've read that the reason Dakota Territory was split in two (North and South) upon statehood was mainly as a cynical ploy to get two extra senate seats for the favoured party.
Ah ok, got it. However, probably an unlikely scenario even in a "segregated" (republicans vs democrats) country as the US. But yeah - the reality right now that 40, 45% of the votes are enough for - in the case of the US - the republicans to win is pretty bad already.
> Depending on the electoral system you might not need to win a majority of the votes in any constituency,
In Germany we have two ways to get into the Bundestag (national parliament) - the one is a "Direktmandat" (the candidate with the most votes in one county county gets the seat), the other is via the party ticket. The parties have lists of candidates, and depending on their percentage of the total vote, the first X candidates get a seat.
That system tries to balance between each county getting the representative in they favor, but also representing the relative votes via the party ticket.
As you said, there are good politicians. Its us that do not vote for them.
In Germany, it was always the same: in between elections, the Green party have really nice results in polls. However, when it comes to the election, people prefer reducing (or not increasing) taxes and stuff over fixing the climate.
People DO know about climate change. There IS good information available online. Its not that people have no idea what's happening. They just don't care to do something themselves - there's enough other people to fix it. Its like an email with lots of recipients, no one feels responsible to reply.
> But feel free to support them.
I never said I support them. I said we could easily get rid of them, of we only wanted to. The problem is (half of) the people around you, not the elites put in power by them.