So “unexpected”. Who could have seen this coming?

I prefer not to get into that sort of name-calling, it’s not productive.

My money is on no, on all three counts. They won’t stop antagonizing China over Taiwan, they won’t let go of project Ukraine, and they certainly won’t abandon their most precious neocolony. These people have no reverse gear. All they know how to do is double down.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong though.

Probably. I haven’t clicked on that link but that sort of thing is to be expected from this source.

When i recommend a piece i generally vet it for that sort of stuff, and if there is any problematic content i try and add a warning. But i don’t vouch for other things the same author may have written.

We should always be aware of the bias of the media we consume, and when reading analysis by conservative leaning authors like this one, caution is advised. That’s part and parcel of critical media consumption, knowing what we can take that is of value from a piece of media and what to discard.

There are elements of that but i think that’s too shallow of an analysis. First and foremost they are a splinter of the Left (Die Linke) party (which has now all but collapsed, and it would be fascinating and highly educational to get into a whole analysis of why that happened, but not now), with similar but not identical positions.

Here’s an overview of which parties their voter base comes from:

And here’s a demographic breakdown of their base:

Source: https://www.boeckler.de/data/Boeckler_Impuls_2024_10_4.pdf

For those who don’t speak German, what the second graph basically says is that their voters are:

• much more likely to be anti-establishment (lit.: “low trust in the government”)

• predominantly low income

• predominantly from east Germany

• sightly more likely to be women

• significantly more likely to have lower educational qualifications*

• more likely to have an immigrant background (lit.: “immigration experience”)

*(Germany has a three tier educational system that is a bit confusing, but basically this is another class indicator - those who have gone or could have gone to university are less likely to vote BSW)

The last one is particularly striking as it does not fit with what you say about them “courting white workers” (in fact it is debatable if that kind of framing even applies to Germany… Germans don’t tend to think in terms of “white” and “non-white” but rather of native Germans and foreigners, though there is a strong anti-muslim prejudice as well on top of that). I personally know a few people of Turkish background who voted for BSW (this is anecdotal of course, i wouldn’t extrapolate anything from it).

As you can also see by which parties they “poached” voters from, they are a mixed bag, they draw from both left and right wing parties but the common denominator is that these are people who have become disillusioned with the establishment.

There is no analogue in US politics. The closest would be the UK’s George Galloway and his Workers Party (WPB). Reactionary on some social issues but not always (anti-LGBT but not racist or islamophobic like the “right populists”), while on economic issues they are closest to what the old-school social democrats used to be before they went all neoliberal. The establishment calls them “left populists”.

It’s also a bit strange i think to use the term “class demagoguery” because that’s what the liberal establishment calls it when anyone, including us communists, talks about any class issues.

Overall i would say they are a tailist working class party, and their mixed views on social issues reflect the mixed views of the working class itself which tends to be economically left but also sometimes skeptical of the social issues they perceive as being championed mostly by upper middle class university educated liberals (incidentally that’s exactly the base of the Greens, and so unsurprisingly Greens voters are the least likely to switch to BSW), the liberal establishment, and the mainstream media.

They are certainly not socialists or communists but they are useful insofar as they pull away support not just from mainstream parties but also from the far right (where a lot of disaffected people gravitated towards when that was the only anti-establishment alternative), and most importantly they are one of the only prominent anti-war voices in German politics.

The drop in support for the establishment capitalist parties and the social democrats brought no significant gains by left parties. There were a few exceptions: […]

There is another notable exception which is BSW in Germany. They went from 0% (they didn’t exist before) to 6%. They have some cringy right wing positions on a few issues but nominally they are a “left” party.

I mean, if i lived there and i saw what the EU and Germany did to Greece i wouldn’t trust them either.

I’ve had experience living in both western and eastern Europe. Western (and northern) Europeans are extremely gullible and trusting when it comes to their own countries’ institutions. They almost never question official narratives and media (and when they do it’s because they think their institutions are not being racist and fascist enough toward non-western European people). They have this almost religious faith that everything will work out in the end if you trust the system.

Eastern Europeans are much more cynical toward their own governments and recognize how corrupt they are, but unfortunately they make up for that by idealizing to the point of near worship Western Europe and the US. They have this inferiority complex and disdain for their own people where they constantly talk about how inherently stupid, lazy and criminal they are and how that’s why they don’t have the nice things that the West does.

And then there’s the pervasive anti-communist paranoia where even today many are convinced that communists are still secretly running their countries and that’s why the utopian liberal promises that they were sold on in the late 80s, early 90s never came true.

I don’t know how it is in southern Europe, i don’t have any lived experiences there but i wouldn’t be surprised if it was some mix of those two types of mentalities (minus the post-socialist cognitive dissonance).

Even then it would be a long shot. People outside of Europe just don’t understand what kind of an iron grip the Euro-Atlanticists have on all of our institutions and media, and therefore also on the minds of the people.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, it appears that EU institutions are now already pre-emptively applying pressure on national governments to prevent any deviation from the Brussels line from happening as a result of the recent EU elections.

This tweet by the author of the article does a great job of explaining how that happens through ECB monetary policies. I was so impressed by the quality of the analysis (even if some of it is also in the main article) i added it to the body of the post.

You just don’t understand our European culture. Likeability is seen as less important in Europe than pedigree. Von der Lyin’ comes from old Nazi aristocracy, and that counts for a lot in Brussels.

European values tho.

I’m just speaking anecdotally. You may be completely right and i just don’t have a big enough sample size of people.

I haven’t looked too closely at the results in other countries but for sure in Germany the two main political forces that are skeptical of the war, AfD and BSW, have done quite well.

My worry is that this might not have so much to do with people actually connecting the deterioration in their everyday situation with what is happening in foreign policy, but rather that they are merely responding positively to some of the right wing populist grievances that both of these parties are taking advantage of and which the liberal establishment has been ignoring for so long.

I think we’ll have more clarity after the next national elections. Then we will really see which way the wind is blowing and whether people really are starting to wake up.

I don’t think that foreign policy was even a factor in these elections for most people i know. Unlike our political elite, most of the regular people in Europe are very inward focused, we’re only really thinking about our own immediate, everyday concerns. Most people i know here in Germany hardly ever think about the fact that there is a world outside of their own city or Bundesland, let alone outside of Europe. Their main reasons for voting are local grievances.

Admittedly this is because i mostly interact with a certain milieu. I may have a totally different impression if i was embedded in the socio-economic strata who have the money to go on expensive vacations multiple times a year and who go on fancy international business trips and hobnob with the corporate elite on both sides of the Atlantic. But those people are certainly not going to want us to move away from the US, they are the sort of people who want to double down on the Atlanticist project.

So i’m not so sure about there being any shift away from the current policies in this regard.

But why leftists would actually adhere to it […] is a mystery to me.

I don’t think it’s that much of a mystery, they’re simply racist/chauvinist.

They didn’t just not present an obstacle, it’s far worse than that. The “leftist” orgs were at the vanguard of the repressions and denunciations. They were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the anti-Russian witch hunt. They were so desperate to prove that they were not with “the enemy” that they became “more catholic than the pope” as the saying goes.

I don’t know exactly what it was in Europe that caused this derangement. At least the US left has the excuse of having their brains broken by the Russiagate psyop. But the European left has no excuse. I guess Europeans are just deeply russophobic and really enjoy thinking of themselves as culturally superior and more civilized than “those eastern barbarians”.

I’m gonna calm you down a little here and say that at least in Germany we are still firmly in the grip of neoliberal centrists. The AfD may have made gains (especially in the east) but the biggest winners were still the CDU/CSU. The same goes for the wider European picture. Ursula von der Lügen’s coalition of center-right parties is still by far the biggest player in the EU parliament. Nothing that much will change, the liberals will still have a firm grip on the reins of power, and they will continue, as they have already been doing, to capitulate on more and more non economic, non foreign policy points (i.e. those which do not harm the bottom line of capital and do not threaten the Euro-Atlanticist project in Europe) to placate the right. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chôse.

This wasn’t mask off enough already?:

It’s a bit naive to think that they weren’t already fascist. Banning Russian news outlets and putting people in jail for expressing pro-Russian opinions isn’t fascist? Giving arms, training and billions of Euros to Nazis isn’t fascist?

What is happening in the inevitable backlash to the disastrous failed policies of the so-called “centrist” liberal parties and the misguided center-left that constantly tails them. They have allowed the right wing xenophobes to monopolize the anti-war position by denouncing anyone who advocated for any form of caution or common sense in the policy toward Russia as a Putin puppet. Their obsessive sanction mania has plunged Europe into a catastrophic economic crisis from which it may never recover, cutting themselves off from the cheap source of energy upon which the international competitiveness of Europe was built. Europe is being deindustrialized.

They put all their chips on the US, NATO and the EU. They (and this includes the vast majority of “leftist” parties) tried to marginalize anyone critical of Europe’s subservience to Washington and of the EU’s undemocratic and neoliberal impositions upon sovereign European countries and in so doing drove them right into the arms of the right.

I am not at all surprised by this result. It is what happens when the left (excluding the communists) totally and utterly fails to provide an alternative. An anti-war alternative, an anti-NATO alternative, an anti-EU alternative, an anti-austerity alternative. When the entire mainstream European left throws its lot in with the neoliberals and the Atlanticist warmongers.

Of course. It’s good to clarify the ideological orientation of a piece of geopolitical analysis so that we know how to contextualize it and understand where its strengths and weaknesses lie based on the biases of the source. The article you linked is very good and all the points it makes are absolutely correct.

I think most of us here would agree that outside of his analysis of the Ukraine conflict (which for someone with his popularity and reach in western geopolitical circles is decent, though woefully incomplete - he never talks about the Nazi problem in Ukraine and the shelling of the Donbass for instance!) Mearsheimer is not that impressive of an analyst.