Alternative for Germany has joined France’s National Rally and Reform U.K. in becoming the most popular party in its country, according to polls.
A poll Tuesday showed Alternative for Germany — which is under surveillance by the country’s intelligence services over suspected extremism — is now the most favored by voters. The survey by broadcaster RTL put the AfD at 26%, ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats at 24%.
This is a high watermark for the European far right, a once fringe movement whose virulently anti-immigration, anti-Islam and culture-war politics were shunned by the mainstream just a decade ago.
Today, these parties have developed deep ties with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, who openly cite nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as inspirations on policy and tactics.
It isn’t rocket science, people become uneasy when they see or at least perceive there to be an influx of newcomers, they don’t even need necessarily to be from a different race or culture. It’s simply a fact that isn’t going to change any time soon. And more and more people globally are going to be on the move as the climate breakdown and more wars break out. If you don’t want to see populists thriving then you need to put in the leg work to slow the pace of change that people see and reassure them.
Sigh
Canada got the message. Why don’t you?
Canada didn’t get the message. Poilievre’s Conservative Party won 24 new seats and came within 2% of plurality. They just didn’t get the landslide election pollsters were predicting a few months earlier.
That’s nothing compared to the Labour Ba’ath Party-esque majority Starmer was handed last year. And it’s a bit crazy that UK Labour has fallen so far and so fast, by doing dick all about the tanking economy while demanding you make eye contact with a state censor while you jerk it.
Schultz and Macron have similar problems. People hate them, and for good reason.
Labour has lost more support by its benefit cuts to the disabled and its willingness to kowtow to US defence corporation lobbying to suppress Palestine Action. Relative to those violations of fundamental rights and basic human decency, the porn ID brainfart is just noise.
Uh oh
So it appears that ~30% of people in any given population are evil. That tracks.
Maybe if the left wing party that got in for the first time in 15 years actually behaved remotely like they should, this would not be happening in the UK
All Kier Starmer has managed to accomplish is vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same” and fuelling Reform’s populism.
His government’s current policy focus areas make Tony fucking Blair look like a socialist by comparison—and he earned the fucking red-tie Tory assessment of his policies.
All these leftists become conservatives when their wealth is threatened.
vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same”
When a “left wing” party is still far right, the people who complain have a point. Yes, there is a difference between extreme right and far right, but in the absence of any meaningful leftist options, people will gravitate toward those they hope will implement actual change, even if the change is worse than every other alternative. This most often tends to be those who want to pull the world even further to the right.
Yeah. I naively thought that finally there might be some change now the fucking Tories have imploded, but no.
What a monumental turdpile.
Same thing is happening in Australia. It’s controlled opposition. The real leftists have been progressively out-capitaled from the center-left parties. Now their majority are corporate whore “centrist” neoliberals that continue to screw the workers, just slower than the center-right party, which is now a borderline fascist party.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism. The major difference is how much lube they apply before they fuck you.
Spot on
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism.
People having this realization and solidarity amongst the common folk are the only way to we have a hope of fighting this pile of shit back.
It’s still nowhere near a guarantee of a win, and it’s made monumentally more difficult by the oligarchs plotting to divide us up (using the politicians and social media platforms they own) but it’s the only chance we have.
Labour has been a joke of a party for the past 3 decades. The only reason they are in power right now is that the Tories actually managed to completely destroy the UK. Labour and the Tories are going to go the way of the Whigs the nezt election and will be replaced by Reform UK and Corbyn’s new leftist party.
WTF is happening in the world rn? Why are all the right wingers taking control? I thought it was just the US going through a crazy-stupid phase
Social media. Muskrat, Zucc, Thiel, etc. are high on the fumes of the AI hype, and want that sweet AI money, from the surveillance state using AI.
Well right now in the UK we voted for the supposed
left, centre,centre right wing party (The UK has the same 2 party issue as the US more or less) and they reacted by being even more right wing than the right wing we just got rid who recently also just imploded their popularity and now we’re stuck with the far right party next election because UK politics is such a caste based exclusive club that no one on the left or even real centre has enough political or monetary capital to form an opposition.and want that sweet AI money
actually i think rich people don’t really personally profit from extra money. They have already more money than they could ever spend to fulfill personal wishes. in that sense, the money is not “sweet”.
the reason they’re hoarding so extreme levels of wealth is because they believe in “greatness”, in being a part of something greater and bringing the world progress, one way or another. that’s why “techno-optimism” is such a common theme among them. “mars settlement” might go in a similar direction, though that one has more reasons (jobs programs, mostly). it’s more for a desire for greatness (you could call it imperialism, but without the bloodshed) more than a desire for money, i think.
the reason they’re hoarding so extreme levels of wealth is because they believe in “greatness”
They only believe in the “greatness” of themselves. Which is expressed monitarily.
Their entire self worth is based on the size of their bank accounts, on what they “could do” with their money.
Instead of, you know, what they’re actually doing with their money: nothing.
They hoard it to feel special. They could literally give away billions to the right places to fix shit immediately and still be billionaires. But they don’t.
Despite that very literally leading to them being worshipped. Which would be more greatness for them then they have now. And more greatness for the world. And it ain’t happening.
Because. They’re all convinced they’re the smartest people ever, and not big idiots that never learned the basic social benefits of sharing.
“Greatness” isn’t found on top of a pile of money. It’s found at the bottom once it’s been spent. That’s how people and the economy actually benefit from it. By the velocity in which it changes hands. Which so far, is near 0% for these billionaires seeking “greatness.”
It’s embarissing, if anything, to see them so incapable of achieving their goals of greatness simply because they’re too insecure about having anyone else that isn’t them spend their money. Especially when it comes to actually using it to benefiting the world instead of their egos.
You’re confused because you’re existing in a censorship bubble.
it’s not just censorship. people have fundamentally different instincts, and that leads them to see different behavior as “normal” or acceptable.
We can either blame the western political system for it or some other agents interested in making it fail…
Asimov’s second foundation spoilers
spoiler
As with the second foundation, it was strange to see psicohistory predicting so precisely the future, here it is very strange to see all western democracies fail at the same time
Idk man, while it’s possible that this is russian influence, I think it’s beating around the bush and facing the fact that people are capable of being terrible all on their own* (talking about the manipulative people in politics, not the gullible citizens)
Russia and china are only using failures in western policies against us. They don’t create them. It’s up to our nations to resolve those tension spots so they cannot be used against us.
The Russian argument is understandable because it’s what our governments point to as the origin of their failures. It allows them to keep pointing at that “outside interference”, invest in surveillance while not investing in what the subjects used by the interference reveal about the real wants of the population are.
That’s true as far as it goes, but breaking the chain of Russian (and other hostile nation) influence on our politics is still the most direct way of dealng with the fascist problem. They’re puppets and we must cut the strings.
This is true. But at the same time, a THIRD of our population ACTUALLY IS dumb and brainwashed. How the fuck do you fix that?
The Foundation has been out for 75 years. I think we’re past the time limit needed for spoilers
Imo we are never past the spoilers… someone may be doing its first steps into it and deserves to have the full experience.
Billionaires learned how to use the world wide web as an AI powered disinformation network
perfectly written.
I think you’ll get a lot of different answers depending on who you ask, and i think liberalism and allowing other people their own opinion / interpretation of things is important. Yet here’s my take:
- There was a gross mis-interpretation of reality around the 2000s when people believed that we could lay down all violence and gross behavior and enter a “perfect, soft world” which was understood as an absence of sexism and nationalism, mostly. However, these are instincts so deeply rooted in people that you can’t just “get them out” in any way, even if you try to create a social movement around “calling out” men who show sexist behavior. What happens instead is that these suppressed groups seek their own expression, and you end up with far-right populism.
I don’t want to love on this planet anymore
Hey UK, they’re all being funded by Russia, just like to dipshits who told you brexit was a good idea. Don’t fall for it again
Narrator: They were going to fall for it again
King Farage pledged the UK’s loyalty to the Russian Empire.
UK has been on a dark path for a while now, Kier Starmer has done a great job of pushing the population down that dark path. When people say both sides are the same, Kier has made sure that everyone feels as though that is true.
Not really surprising, social networks are dividing people up and rather than recognize it, people on all political isles are following up with more barriers, essentially demolishing the need for an objective truth for democracies to work in. Social networks as of now are social slaughterhouses designed to lull in people like cattle and turn enough of them into pawns for those with pockets.
You identify issues that certain groups will crowd around divisively, you foster them into ridiculously zealotry, and you break them up into small bubbles you can politically manipulate. Take Reddit - before they used to think they would have more power by focusing on centralized communities that got legitimacy from rigorous contributions, now they are perfectly ok with each community being taken up by whatever brigade is interested in them and whereas communities like T_D were banned before, now they are actively encouraged for each international, localized domain of users.
Anyone who speaks the language / can go through to that RTL site able to tell us the specifics of the poll done? Like what was used for a sample, confidence level, etc.
One thing I’ve seen in other areas are polls claiming broad support for right wing politics, based on internet polls that have huge bias / confidence issues – like in Canada, they claim Alberta’s suddenly separatist, based on online polls where they can’t verify the respondents were even in Alberta. Elevating that sort of non-poll to news-worthy story is likely a combination of click bait journalism and right-wing/US propaganda biased.
Die Daten zu den Parteipräferenzen, zur politischen Kompetenz und zu den Wirtschaftserwartungen wurden vom Markt- und Meinungsforschungsinstitut forsa im Auftrag von RTL Deutschland im Zeitraum vom 5. bis 11. August 2025 erhoben. Datenbasis: 2.505 Befragte. Statistische Fehlertoleranz: +/- 2,5 Prozentpunkte.
Die Daten zur Zufriedenheit mit Friedrich Merz sowie zum Fortbestand der Regierungskoalition wurden im selben Zeitraum (bzw. vom 8. bis 11. August 2025) erhoben. Datenbasis: 1.001 Befragte. Statistische Fehlertoleranz: +/- 3 Prozentpunkte.
(rough) Translation:
Data for party preference, political competence and the expectations for market development were collected by market- and opinion research institute forsa for RTL Germany in the time frame from 5. to 11. August 2025. Basis for analysis: n=2505, error tolerance +/- 2,5 percent points.
Data for approval of Friedrich Merz and about the continuation of the coalition in power were collected in the same time frame (or rather from 8. to 11. August 2025). Basis for analysis: n=1001, error tolerance +/- 3 percent points.
I looked up the current ownership structure of RTL, which is owned mainly by the Bertelsmann Group; It doesn’t look like there was much bias at play here on a cursory glance.
A Wild Mimic’s info is what you asked for, but for what it’s worth, you can just look at the election that happened earlier this year to see if it passes the smell test (and it does):
The AFD won 20% of the vote in the election earlier this year and then the incoming chancello passed a policy with the old parliament (as leader of the opposition still) that would change a financial rule that would have no chance to pass once the new parliament was seated (because the AFD and most of his own party opposed the change), so a lot of the people who voted CDU/CSU (his party) felt betrayed and said “fuck it, I’ll vote AFD next time”
My fellow Europeans, fight! Keep fighting until we drive them back to their basements!
Honestly, this is way past that point now.
I know an otherwise perfectly normal middle-aged woman who has booked herself train tickets to a pro-Tommy Robinson protest march in London next month.
It’s not National Front skinheads with dog whistle tattoos any more. It’s hit the normies. If they want the normies back, the ruling parties are going to have to stop putting asylum seekers in local hotels in shithole towns like mine, because it’s just going to take a spark to set this whole country ablaze right now. They need to get processing people to an insane level, build actual accommodation to house them (because this isn’t stopping any time soon).
The whole asylum process needs a radical overhaul, like being able to apply for it without having to trek across the world (go to an embassy for example, and then get distributed to countries according to their means). If they carry on with this “we have to take them in because they made it to our country and it’s the law” routine, the whole continent will fall to fascism. If sane rulers do not listen to the people, they will turn to monsters to fix their perceived problems.
100% agree. With climate change, folks are not going to stop coming, not going to just stay at home and die. We have to urgently reform the whole immigration system with an emphasis on integration.
And by integration I don’t mean giving up their own cultures or language, but rather that life is better for people when they are comfortable in their environment. You won’t get comfortable if no one shows you how the culture works, which, it’s been my experience, they don’t.
It’s easy to blame Russia and China, but it’s not really that. It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong, and that is stagnating or worsening living conditions, unhappiness with how society operates and people hearing that turn to reaction.
Left doesn’t have an answer given how marginalized they are, all you get are center-lib parties that pretend everything is okay or that focus on liberal middle class issues. It’s no surprise
The problem is simply humanity. At any given moment in time, there are a lot of these ugly, angry, nasty, unhappy people, and they want control of everything so they can take their anger out on those they hate. This is a natural human archetype. They are with us now, and they have ALWAYS been with us. The are the MAGAs and the European far right, they are the warlords that run various small nations, they are the Vikings, the Huns, the Mongols, the Romans, etc.
It was the Nazis in the 20th century, it’s the MAGAs in the 21st. It’s not that MAGA is copying the Nazis, they are both the same sort of people following the agenda that those people always follow - just generally making life miserable for as many innocent people as possible.
The archetype includes being arrogant and demanding, but that doesn’t mean we have to allow it. Most of the time, a strong moral leader can keep the assholes at bay, but every now and then, someone drops the ball, and they gain power, and start fucking with the world. The 21st century Dems dropped the ball badly, over and over, and did nothing to prepare for the MAGA onslaught.
Even after decades of the worst possible election behavior, the Dems instantaneously defended MAGA, and declared the 2024 election “fair & square,” before even waiting to see if there had been any review of the election at all. These people are treasonous criminals who will do literally anything. This election was the ONLY thing keeping him from getting a life sentence, how could anyone believe that this is the first election that he didn’t cheat on?
We aren’t going to defeat these people by appealing to their better nature, they have none. It’s who they are, and who these people have always been. We tend to forget from generation to generation that we have to hold the line against the worst people in the world, because they are out there, and they are ALWAYS planning to take control. It’s important to remember that, and fight them every single step of the way. We can’t accept any excuses like we have to let them do it because we don’t really know that the outcome will be bad until we do it. Yes we do, because we’ve let these people have their way over and over, and they ALWAYS kick us in the nuts.
We need to stop trying to kick the football that our enemy is holding.
Congratulations, you’ve written probably the most hitlerite comment I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, and I’m genuinely concerned.
Instead of investigating what makes people act this way in terms of material conditions, incentives and values that are promoted, maybe the way power is organized and how it leads to inevitable opportunism or this being an inevitability of a class dictatorship that we have now, you instead go for the “undesirables” angle.
People didn’t vote for the candidate you wanted because they were irredeemably evil. What do we do, kill all MAGA voters now for having the wrong human archetype? Prohibit them from voting? That only seems the natural conclusion from everything you wrote.
Yep, your kind of thinking is the problem. No sense of history, or the people who have consistently rampaged through it. People have been people for as long as there have been people, and we’ve ALL seen the variations between humans. To PRETEND that somehow everybody is born exactly the same is contrary to everybody’s experience, especially anyone who had siblings raised in the same situations.
Some people are born with wiring to be decent people, and some people are just born to be evil. There are videos of Stephen “Pee Wee Himmler” Miller in high school arrogantly defending highly racist concepts, illustrating that this psychopath has been a bad seed his entire life.
It’s time to stop pretending these are normal people for whom we have a normal philosophical disagreement. By definition, MAGA supports a POLICY of treason, pedophilia, rape, racism, intolerance, corruption, slavery, hate, and more, and they aren’t novel. People with these same sorts of philosophical leanings have emerged over and over throughout history. Pointing that out, and telling people like you that it is your responsibility to hold the line against that sort of oppression, is not “hitlerite,” it’s patriotic. If you can’t see that, you’re either MAGA, or one of those weak, spineless Democrats who allowed all this to happen with your political weeniness.
“Pee Wee Himmler”
Fuckin’ lmao. Absolutely cannot explain to my coworker why I’m laughing in my office.
It’s not that MAGA is copying the Nazis
Oh, they very much are, though.
The problem is simply humanity
No, the problem is a set of very specific political conditions that derive from geopolitical power struggles.
We need to stop trying to kick the football that our enemy is holding.
If you’re implying that we should kick the enemy instead, I agree.
Our specific political issues aren’t really causing this. These people have ALWAYS been with us, throughout human history. Sometimes we have rulers strong enough to resist them, sometimes we don’t, but the problem with evil humanity is that they are infinitely patient, and they never give up. So if this generation manages to resist them, they’ll make what progress they can, and wait for the next generation. That’s what they’ve been doing since Reagan and Rush took over the American political scene in the 80s, and have been mucking it up ever since, until they finally saw their chance, and grabbed it.
My point is that no matter what the political situation is, good or bad, these people are always waiting in the shadows, organizing, planning, and getting into position. We can never forget who they really are, and what they really want, so that when they emerge, we can tell them that we know they are liars, and shove them back into their hole. Evil people don’t deserve the privilege of walking among us with their hate on full demonstration mode.
Depends on, the outer rings often have better nature that is being slowly eroded by hate fed from the inner rings.
They get these people by trying to appeal to things liberals at least seem to glimpse over, then they give you scapegoats instead of real solutions. Then slowly they feed you even more “problems” that don’t affect you, with scapegoats to get rid off, often with a web of conspiracies tying it all together.
I was a Fidesz voter in 2010. They told me the previous government were radical communists, who will kick me out of college, then force my disabled ass to work in underpaid factory jobs, with mandatory overtimes that may not get paid for a while. I saw a lot of my girl classmates getting groomed as teens, and thanks to the fucked up laws of Hungary, it was all legal. I got targets to hate for it; feminists, who forced these girls to “marry rich guys ASAP”; and LGBTQ+ people as MSZP did not raise the AoC to match it to homosexual relationships, but lowered it for everyone.
Then after 2010, my face got eaten by the leopards. On the day Fidesz added a “close in age” exception to our fucked up AoC laws to allow 17 year olds to prey on 12 year olds, I was so angry I couldn’t sleep. I also was a young atheist who just didn’t believe in a “Stalinist form of persecution of religion” (of which I got a horribly distorted description), but after how strongly religion got pushed by Fidesz, I started to gravitate towards stronger forms of secularism. And lastly the widely criticized implementation of mandatory internships only got solved for those in vocational education, meaning as a college student I would have had to paid a used car’s price to a HR personnel to hire me, especially due to my autism, which at leas in one place thought was actually “intellectual disability, like in Forrest Gump”.
So interesting to read a perspective from another country dealing with much of the same issues.
The feeling of not being able to sleep, of impotent outrage? Yeah, that’s how I felt when he started that family separation policy, and they started stealing children from their parents. It was the most egregious thing they’d done to that point, and it was beyond belief that this was happening in my country. There was nothing I could do except call and email my elected representatives, most of whom agreed with it.
I FEEL your frustration.
It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong
The “something” that’s wrong has been wrong for multiple generations, but it has only flared up now, when Russia and China started interfering. Surely that’s a coincidence.
Thanks Elon, for your financial support of Hitler acolytes worldwide. Also, get fucked you Boer-reject piece of shit
A Brit told me
I vote for whomever says they will get rid of the boat people
The Danes, or the Angles, or the Saxons? Or the Romans? Or the …
The US is a huge cautionary tale that other countries would do well to heed. I see “Why don’t the Americans do something??” all the time, but meanwhile, your country is creeping towards the same conclusion. “We’ll do something to stop it if it gets too bad!” Yeah, that’s what we said while the far-right continued to gather support.
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale? I wasn’t present at the time, but i heard that Bad Things happened.
I also thought that after WWII, systems were put in place to ensure that it would not happen again. Where are these systems and why aren’t they working?
Right after WW2 pretty much every European country that still had colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, and Asia went straight back to ruling them with a iron fist. Wars swept across the world outside of Europe and the Anglosphere. Wars of independence.
To that point I don’t think there were truly any safeguards put in place for minorities. Really it was just ban Nazi imagery and formation of European trade zones that would progressively include more governance cooperation eventually forming the EU.
The safeguards in place were done to prevent EU member states from waring with each other, not safeguards for minorities or anyone outside of EU member states. Solution for Jewish people wasn’t to make the EU safer for Jewish people, it was to take land elsewhere and make Israel. Anyone outside of EU member states including colonial holdings were fair game for mass destruction. A lot is made about the civil rights era in the US, European countries had there own versions of that too. The lesson of WW2 was that war sucks, wars should be fought on other continents, move the Jews to Israel. Modern civil rights in European countries had to be fought for as well post-WW2 but I think it was easier there because the minority groups were much smaller in number compared to the US so there was less racist blowback against social safety nets that non-whites could benefit from. Minorities were politically irrelevant until the past couple decades once the children grew up and population sizes grew and they started making it into significant political offices and corporate leadership positions. Now racists started feeling insecure a lot more regularly against the growing number of successful and visible minorities. People that were certain they weren’t racist are finding themselves racist as minority populations are now in their surroundings rather than just a passing mention
Right after WW2 pretty much every European country that still had colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, and Asia went straight back to ruling them with a iron fist.
Colonialism largely collapsed after WW2, with the unwinding of the British Empire (what’s left largely consists of Gibraltar and the Falklands) and the end of French dominance in Algeria and Vietnam. It was US policy after WW2 to support decolonization.
Imperialism remained, but more as an arms-length interference in the politics of former colonies (especially by the French in Africa).
because the minority groups were much smaller in number compared to the US
Like the Catalans, Basques and Galicians in Spain, who together comprise 13 million of Spain’s 48.7 million population? The same could be said of groups in a number of other European countries.
Minorities were politically irrelevant until the past couple decades
I think you’re specifically referring to immigrant-descended minorities. They’re not the only ethnic minority groups within a country-- almost all countries have long-term ethnic minority groups as well as descendants of relatively recent arrivals.
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale?
It was. We fucked up. Badly. Now we’re another cautionary tale.
