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   Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2024 23:45:05 JST Rasmus Fleischer

   For this week's Flamman, I wrote a pretty long piece about Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, countering the misunderstanding that this party would represent any kind of "radical" or "extreme" left. (There really are leftists outside Germany who seem to believe that BSW represents a return to a "classical", class-based leftist politics, and that "the left" should learn this from Wagenknecht's relative success.)

   But if anything, BSW is a centrist party and its program almost could have been written by ChatGPT; it reads like a statistical average of the programs of Germany's other parties.
   Sahra Wagenknecht is also not very keen of talking about class. The party's economic policy is just a banal form of (ordo)liberal nationalism, based on a romanticized image of the "Mittelstand" (which is indeed a very centrist word, like "Mittelmacht" also is). It is the interests of German industry that motivates BSW's pro-fossil and pro-Russia stance.
   I'd say that BSW's politics demonstrates that such a repulsive politics can still be very much centrist. It would be a mistake to assume that you only could find Putinversteher, or pro-Russia positios, at the so-called political fringes.

   Oh, and in the same text, I also write a bit about my own relatives in Erzgebirge, my memories from visiting DDR as a child, and more generally about the economic geography of (eastern) Germany.

   https://www.flamman.se/i-hastskons-mitt/

   • Embed this notice
     Kristoffer Patrick Cornils (konkrit@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 15-Dec-2024 00:31:18 JST Kristoffer Patrick Cornils

     in reply to

     @rasmusfleischer rot angemalte AfD tbh

   • Embed this notice
     Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Sunday, 15-Dec-2024 00:31:18 JST Rasmus Fleischer

     in reply to

     • Kristoffer Patrick Cornils

     @konkrit But are they even red-painted? In a sense they are, for historical reasons. But looking at BSW today, how they present themselves in words and in images, I can't see much of an attempt to appear (even on the surface) like a red, socialist or working-class party. As someone said, they seem more willing to look like some regional bank office.