German establishment desperately clings to power despite democracy — RT World News

At least be classy enough to wait more than five seconds after the election you just lost before you go and sully democracy.

The results continued to become clearer after the exit polls in the eastern German state elections were released. The party in Thuringia, which is in second place, let voters know what was going on via social media.

“The first forecast confirms the prediction – the CDU is gaining ground and will definitely finish second! Red-Red-Green has been voted out! We thank all voters, helpers and sympathizers in the country and from all over Germany! We will seek talks to explore the possibilities for forming a government. The following still applies: There will be no cooperation with the AfD,” wrote a seemingly overcaffeinated teenager who wrote the report for the right-wing establishment party still best known for its former leader, former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Take it easy, exercise. Nothing really screams “respect for democracy” such as loading your post with emojis and telling voters that while you’re glad they’ve pushed back your establishment, opponents (and the National Socialist/Green government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz) “traffic light coalition”) to a deficit of 6.5%, then you will still have to do something about the fact that voters have relegated you to second place (with 24%) behind the populist, anti-establishment right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) with 33%. And that “something” means that a way must be found to keep the real winners of the election out of the driving seat. How? By making shady deals with a number of other losers.

Omid Nouripour, a leader of Scholz’s federal coalition partner, the Greens, told The Associated Press that “An openly far-right party has become the strongest force in a state parliament for the first time since 1949, and this is causing great concern and fear among many people.” People can’t be that scared if they just voted for them, can they?

“The results for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia are worrying,” Scholz told Reuters. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.” This guy’s projection is more powerful than an IMAX theater. Replace “Germany” or “the country” of “me” and it makes much more sense.

The idea that election losers will do anything to deny voters their democratic choice seems to be a new trend in Europe, as populist right-wing and left-wing parties win more and more elections.

Here in France, for example, French President Emmanuel Macron threw a tantrum after his party lost the European parliamentary elections to Marine Le Pen’s anti-establishment right-wing Rassemblement National. So he called a completely unnecessary parliamentary election, scheduled just before the Summer Olympics in Paris. After all, who wouldn’t want to soothe their ego before attending a major international event? It’s hard to enjoy it otherwise. In an attempt to block Rassemblement National, Team Macron did something that would have been openly impeached if it had been done behind closed doors: they agreed with the anti-establishment left-wing coalition New Popular Front (NPF) to strategically withdraw candidates to focus on a single candidate in districts where the right would otherwise have been likely to win seats. In doing so, they deny voters a legitimate democratic choice.

The plan worked so well that the Rassemblement National won the most votes, but it did not have a chance to govern because the left-wing NPF won the most seats.

And despite Team Macron having engineered that outcome, he now refuses to endorse the prime ministerial pick of the coalition with the most seats – something previous presidents from Jacques Chirac to Francois Mitterrand had no qualms about. Probably because it didn’t occur to them to use the calendar of events for weeks – Macron mentioned the Olympics and spent his summer hanging out on the water with his mates – to drag their feet in doing anything other than what convention dictates.

Certainly, “living together” of a president with a prime minister from a party that is not his is annoying, but you have to put on your big boy pants and deal with it, not act like it’s some kind of student house assignment that you can get out of. That’s what Macron is doing now, referring to the need for “institutional stability” in an attempt to justify his refusal to appoint a left-wing prime minister – even one with an elite institutional senior civil service background – for fear that the new prime minister would appoint a left-wing government that would implement a left-wing program. You know, the same one that your team deliberately decided to manipulate to get voters to choose because you didn’t like the right-wing program either.

Macron has been dragging his feet for so long that the left has started impeachment proceedings against him, whose chances of actually succeeding with the required two-thirds support from both the National Assembly and the Senate are increasing every day that he fails to find a solution to his conundrum that does not blatantly go against the will of the voters – what can best be described as an overthrow of the establishment. The same establishment from which Macron would love to choose a puppet to carry out an agenda that the voters have roundly rejected.

The German establishment now looks a lot like the French one, following state elections in Thuringia and Saxony. In Saxony, the CDU narrowly defeated the AfD, with both currently at 31%. There too, the ruling establishment, the Social Democrats, were severely punished, with only 7.5% support. The anti-establishment left-wing faction split the vote between the brand-new BSW coalition of Bundestag MP Sahra Wagenknecht (15.6% in Thuringia and 11.5% in Saxony) and Die Linkie, whose collective success suggests that the vote was more about a rejection of the establishment on all sides and only secondarily about a right/left ideological divide – just like in France.

There really wasn’t much difference between the anti-establishment right and left parties during the campaigns. Both called on the federal government to stop fueling the conflict in Ukraine with German weapons, and demanded security for German economic sovereignty, which has taken a wrong turn somewhere when you let German industry jump ship to the US because it can’t survive on the short cold showers that the German finance minister brags about. Another big issue that came to the fore in this election campaign was that the German elite agreed to let US long-range weapons come to Germany for the first time since the end of the Cold War. And this is the eastern part of the country closest to Russia that risks being directly influenced by those who are hosting plans to let the US, which already has bases all over Germany with NATO, move into another room and take its weapons stockpile with it from 2026.

It doesn’t exactly scream independence when you’re trying to do your thing as a so-called sovereign country and Uncle Sam crashes into the couch with his cruise missiles. But hey, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was unconscious and staring into space when US President Joe Biden threatened to blow up Nord Stream while he was standing next to it, so chances are he wasn’t exactly going to say no to a few armed squatters.

East Germany has always collectively opposed all the nonsense going on in the West, whether it was Nazis around World War II or a subsequent expansion of American influence that favored their Western compatriots and left them with a lower standard of living. The idea that critics of their election choice are spreading that they are throwing themselves into the arms of some kind of right-wing Nazis is laughable, given the historical context.

Apparently any excuse will do to justify the inevitable coup by the ruling elite after the elections so they can lecture the rest of the world about democracy.