Honestly I hate clouds of strawberry hitting me even more than regular cigarette smoke

I just wanted to say that the differences between Söder and Merz arent that big compared to other people that once were in the talks

The more interesting canidates would have been Günther or Wüst, both of them are currently ruling their states together with the green party and seem happy about what they were able to achieve there. Söder and Merz only differ a bit on how much they love bavaria.

Yeah that’s true. But the market demands it nonetheless and thus liberals are happy to use public funds to further corporate goals, even if it means that there is also some egalitarian aspect to it.

Yep that’s why the left is losing voters. This is, somewhat funnily, a result of them being partly successful. One of their main programs they actually achieved back then was to make education more accessible to the lower classes. While the education systems still have a lot of flaws, they are more egalitarian than they used to be. Percentages of people with higher education have exploded. (This is of course also driven by market demand and that’s why the liberals supported these policies to an extent making them possible). With this they split their former voting group into academics and non-academics. But they source a lot more party-personelle from the academic portion which leads to a feedback-loop that favours the academics. Since academics tend to have higher incomes and sometimes accumulate a little wealth they’d like to keep, the left depending on these voters looks a lot like the parties that always wanted to protect higher incomes and wealth.

The ones that were left behind by that development are the ones that got turned away from the left.

Actually Piketty writes about this in his book “capital and ideology”. The left has been slowly losing support in the lower education classes which traditionally voted left, this has apparently been going on since the 1960s/70s. They either went to conservatives or stopped voting. Now that there is a new party that claims to actually listen to their concerns (even if they won’t actually solve any of these concerns) causes them to flock to that party. They have been disappointed by everyone in the political system and the populists are using this to their advantage.

Nazis don’t just become the way they are. There are reasons people flock to the far right. Not naming these reasons and being content with “Nazis will be Nazis” isn’t productive.

Politics that consistently benefit the upper classes, while always framing the necessary helps for the weakest as stealing from the lower classes will get you there.

This didn’t just happen, we did this to ourselves.

At least for Italy it’s probably related to the very low birthrates

why the fuck would you as a rich guy live in a country that robs you with joy?

Everyone has to contribute to the system. Calling taxes robbery is just bullshit.

Anyways, the whole “the jobs will be lots” thing is bullshit too. As long as there is value to be extracted capitalists will employ people.