She’s a nationalistic liberal. One with different foreign policy views to the most, because she views them to be more favorable for Germany. Probably the lesser evil to the AfD, CDU/CSU and the parties of the stoplight coalition, but that’s a low bar.

Her being a communist until around the late 2000s, but becoming a turncoat with a love for ordoliberalism and Ludwig Erhard is sad. Opportunism, or a genuine conversion (likely influenced by her husband - literally the SPD chairman in the 90s), there is no socialism in the views she spreads.

So you

1. Endorse a reform-capitalist understanding of de facto Keynesian economics, increasing capitalist metrics of “prosperity”

2. Think I agree with a different school of bourgeois economics that supports measures opposed to Keynesianism

3. Think I view increased productivity and getting ahead in the competition between bourgeois economies and states as something worth pursuing and endorse measures meant to pursue those goals

I do not. I want a stateless, classless society, that meets the needs of and acts in favor of the proletariat, instead of creating new wants to be sold to give to the prole as a commodity. A society that would not destroy the planet through constant increases in productivity and output, perhaps? One where competition is recognized as a hinderance?

blames China rather than their own uncompetitiveness

that’s EXACTLY what’s being blamed. And why Germany and the west in general is having a big rise in far-right politics. The bourgeois and their supporters believe cracking the whip on the workers to reduce costs and increase profits will make the line go up again - and it likely will. In the meantime, preventing Chinese companies from capturing market shares to ensure the local bourgeois keep their influence in society and their source of wealth extracted from workers.

At the cost of workers’ wellbeing of course, while the market profits. It’s the capitalist race to the bottom and against each other.

“This is a place of a warning. Of reminding and remembering. The corpses of the thousands of victims of the bombings of the 13. and 14. February 1945 were burnt here. Back then, the horrors of war, brought from Germany to the entire world, returned, to our city as well.”

Not even a “Germany was a helpless victim of war crimes”, as Nazis like to talk those events.

The current hate-campaign is against people on welfare, actually. The government is implementing new rules that allow them to take away those people’s incomes if they refuse a job offer.

The official explanation is the need to save money for the budget, but is actually so little money that even the recent purchase of a few luxury helicopters cost more than the income they seek to get from the cuts. In typical bourgeois fashion, austerity as the whip hitting the wage slave on the back - threatening people who disobey, act up, maybe even… strike? with a drastic reduction in quality of life.

The current protest alliance of agrarian capitalists and petty farmers is also caused by similar things, with eliminating subsidies on fuel.

The military budget has been massively inflated since 2022 and is certainly something that is causing the current malaise (which no, Germany is not collapsing due to deindustrialization or NordStream 2 - it’s stagnant), but that’s not something from prole to bourgeois really complain about or is even talked about. It simply is, for most people. It’s more about how the socdem government is a bad manager, and that is why the right has been massively gaining popularity. Especially since culture wars are fired up by the conservatives and fascists.

When there are ads going “[join the army!] stand for your values!” (and many other such small things, such as the Green Party’s Feminist Foreign Policy)

[as I’ve seen today in Frankfurt]

while a homeless man slept on the floor the opposite side of the camera, the same kind of nonsense as in the United States has it easy to bloom - “woke” vs “normal” etc. But maybe that was never the reason for it. Who knows.

I’d say the likelihood of the current government getting re-elected is 0% it’s almost certainly going to be an old-school, 80s style neoliberal CDU government with Chancellor Merz, probably with the socdems as junior partner. Any of the other outcomes, like a fash win, BSW win (patsoc), etc. are possible, but would require a lot of dice rolls to actually form a government.

I saw people claim the communist movement was growing, but I haven’t really seen evidence of it here in Bavaria. If anything, it’s gotten rather quiet during covid and activity has never recovered. Berlin, etc. are probably the driving force behind the statement, who knows.

The libertarians are driving the government into the ground, using rules Scholz was a hardline supporter of (“Black Zero”). While horrifying because the far-right is about to win the election through either the Reaganite Merz or the fash AfD, there’s a kind of karmic irony to it.