In Björn Höcke the German left and the international liberal media have found their perfect bȇte noire. The 48-year-old leader of the Thuringian branch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the man they love to hate. Perhaps even the devil himself. Spiegel International accused the CDU in Thuringia of entering into a Faustian pact with Höcke when they voted with the AfD to elect Thomas Kimmerich Prime Minister of the region in February 2020. The FDP man resigned the following day after Chancellor Angela Merkel had the CDU in Thuringia reverse its decision to back him. The CDU eventually abstained, thereby facilitating the re-election of Bodo Ramelow of the Left Party: the successor of the East German communist party responsible for the Berlin Wall and the shoot to kill policy on the inner German border. Such are Chancellor Merkel’s preferences. Anybody except Björn Höcke and the Thuringian AfD will do. Swiss journalist Roger Köppel has commented that if you do not demonise Höcke you will be demonised yourself. Germany’s media is notorious for its groupthink and conformism and coverage of Höcke is, of course, overwhelmingly hostile. But, as we will see, his book “Nie zweimal in denselben Fluss” (Nobody Steps into the Same River Twice) published in 2018 provides invaluable insights into his actual and more complex worldview.

L'articolo Who is Björn Höcke of Alternative for Germany? proviene da InsideOver.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded in Berlin in 2013 by long-standing members of the Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU), Alexander Gauland, Konrad Adam, Bernd Lucke and Gerd Robanus. Gauland, a journalist and historian and Adam, a publicist, had become involved in the so-called Berlin Circle of conservative party members concerned by what they saw as Merkel’s leftwards drift and abandonment of conservative ideals.

Gauland recalls in an interview with the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche that the upper echelons of the party had already told him in 2007 that conservatives would be excluded from institutional roles in the CDU at national level and should go and work for their local parties. What proved the breaking point for Gauland, however, was the “shamelessness” with which Merkel reneged on her promise not to bail out Greece during the Euro debt crisis. In an article for the same magazine Adam describes Merkel’s flip-flop as his “road to Damascus moment.”

L'articolo What is the Alternative for Germany (AfD)? proviene da InsideOver.

Recent headlines: “German Conservatives’ Faustian pact with the far-right” (Spiegel International), “Germany shaken as far-right helps elect regional leader” (The Independent) and “Turmoil that Echoes Nazi Germany” (New York Times). This is how elements of the international press greeted the news that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), elected Thomas Kemmerich (FDP) as Prime Minister of the Free State of Thuringia on February 5.

Consternation Over Thuringia Election Result

In Germany the vote triggered apoplexy in many circles. Neues Deutschland attacked the “Pact with the Fascist AfD” as protestors took to the streets in Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt and many other German cities. The German weekly newspaper the Junge Freiheit reported that the FDP has submitted over 100 complaints to the police since the start of the political crisis and that Kemmerich and his family have been placed under police protection.

Well, the experiment was not to last. At the behest of Merkel, the Thuringian CDU dropped their support for Kemmerich who resigned a mere 25 hours later.

Who is Mephistopheles in Thuringia?

In the “Faustian Pact” the media describes, Mephistopheles is of course the national political pariah AfD, and its controversial local leader Björn Höcke in particular. In the Bundestag on February 11, Merkel accused the AfD of having a clear agenda: to undermine and destroy democracy. Merkel’s decision to torpedo the government in Erfurt appears to have been driven by pressure from her SPD Grand Coalition partners to quit the government but that is not a full explanation. The CDU has increasingly drifted leftwards under Merkel and in one particularly notorious and emblematic episode at a conference in 2015 the chancellor grabbed a German flag from a colleague and, disgusted, cast it away. It is not only the AfD that is in the firing line. In recent days CDU politicians have outrageously described a conservative group in the party called the Werte-Union (Values Union) as a “cancerous tumor”. It would seem to be CDU politicians rather than the AfD that is employing Nazi-style rhetoric. Such is the state of the CDU under Angela Merkel.

Echoes of the 1932 Coup in Prussia

The astonishing chain of events in Thuringia over the last few days was not a fascist coup attempt by the AfD. Rather, the defenestration of Kemmerich calls to mind the notorious Preußenschlag (Coup in Prussia) of July, 1932 when Chancellor Franz von Papen took over Germany’s largest state on the basis of an emergency decree issued by President Paul von Hindenburg. Von Papen’s move had been prompted by the fact that the center-left coalition that had ruled Prussia since 1918 had lost its majority in the state parliament in April, 1932. Under the Prussian constitution, a government could be removed from office only if there was a positive majority for a prospective successor. The Communists and National Socialists between them held over half the seats but would not cooperate with each other or with other parties. The coalition remained in office until the controversial step by the Reich government. It is to be noted, however, that in contrast to the Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun in 1932, Kemmerich actually did have a majority behind him in the Erfurt state parliament.

Criminal complaints issued against Merkel

According to Junge Freiheit, the AfD has submitted a criminal complaint under section 106 of the German Criminal Code against one Merkel for coercion of a member of a constitutional organ. The chancellor had commented during a trip to South Africa that the election of Kemmerich had been “unforgivable” and “must be reversed”. Kemmerich announced his resignation the following day. The party has also decided to submit a legal warning with a cease and desist declaration to the chancellor in relation to abuse of office.

The newspaper further reports that Björn Höcke is also planning to submit a criminal complaint against the chancellor. Höcke made reference to a report in the Welt according to which Merkel threatened that unless Kemmerich resigned immediately the two coalition governments with the FDP in Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia would be terminated. Höcke commented that Merkel is no longer Chair of the CDU and had made the comments in her capacity as chancellor. “That is nothing less than a Putsch against a constitutional organ of the state of Thuringia”, he added.

Merkel has Undermined German Democracy

Former SPD leader Gabriel has commented that Merkel has “saved Germany’s honour”. In fact, Merkel has undermined the independence of a Federal State, weakened Parliamentary government and violated the right to freedom of conscience of Thuringia’s Parliamentarians. Germany is now—in effect—dominated by a cartel of far-left and center-left parties. The unquestioning pro-Merkel line taken by vast swathes of the media is particularly unsettling; a phenomenon also observed during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016. As Roger Köppel of Weltwoche has noted, Germany has become a “gelenkte Demokratie” (a guided or managed democracy).

L'articolo Merkel’s Coup in Thuringia proviene da InsideOver.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has introduced his latest measure designed to boost Hungary’s sluggish fertility rate. Since 1 February Hungarian couples have been able to obtain free IVF treatment from the country’s fertility clinics that the Fidesz government took into state ownership last December after announcing that the sector was of “strategic importance” to the Central European state. Budapest wants to raise the fertility rate from the current 1.5 births per woman to the replacement level, which is considered to be 2.1.

‘Threatened With Extinction’

In an interview with the Hungarian daily newspaper Napi Gazdasag in 2015 Orbán expressed his concern that Hungarians were “threatened with extinction” because of their low fertility rate. The country’s population has fallen from around 10.7 million in 1980 to around 9.7 million today. The decline is not only due to fewer children being born but also to large-scale emigration by working age Hungarians. According to UN data the country’s population may fall to approximately 8.5 million by 2050.

Orbán’s 2019 Family Protection Action Plan

Orbán’s move follows his announcement in February 2019 of the Family Protection Action Plan that includes a preferential loan offered to every woman under the age of 40 when they first get married; a loan program to support home purchases; a subsidy for purchase of a car for large families; a loan payment of up to 1 million Hungarian forints ($3,235 USD / €2,955) for mortgage loans taken out by families with two or more children; lifetime exemption from personal income tax for women who have raised at least four children; thousands of new nursery places in the next three years; and subsidized parental leave for grandparents. The speaker of the parliament, Kövér, commented: “Good Hungarians not only speak Hungarian but have 3 to 4 children and 9 to 16 grandchildren who speak Hungarian.”

The Fidesz government introduced its first family friendly measures immediately after coming to power in 2010 when Hungary’s fertility rate stood at an all-time low of around 1.3. According to Minister of Family and Youth Affairs Katalin Novák in a recent interview with the US National Catholic Register, Hungary’s abortion rate dropped by 33.5% between 2010 and 2018, marriage increased by 43%, and divorce fell by 22.5% between 2010 and 2017. Policymakers will be observing whether Orban’s measures prove effective. Trump officials reportedly attended a “Make Families Great Again” conference organized by the Hungarian government in Washington D.C. in March of 2019.

Hungary’s demographic problems are of course hardly unique and some European countries are faring even worse. Italy, Portugal and Greece, for example, are currently languishing at around 1.3 in terms of their birthrate. What marks Hungary out, then, is not population decline in itself but its response to the phenomenon. For decades Western Europe has touted immigration—including mass immigration from non-European cultures—as a solution, but in contrast to the liberal establishment Orbán has steadfastly ruled out such an option and, in particular, he has ruled out mass immigration from Muslim nations.

Hungary’s Moments In The Global Spotlight

As historian Norman Stone pointed out, Hungary has hit the world’s headlines on three occasions since the Second World War. In 1956 when the country unsuccessfully attempted to throw off the Soviet yoke and in 1989 when it opened up its borders, heralding the end of the Cold War. The third moment came in 2015 when, faced with hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim refugees and economic migrants trying to reach northern Europe, Orbán ordered the deployment of the military and the erection of a razor wire fence on the border with Serbia and Croatia. This move turned him into the standard-bearer of the populist-nationalist movement across Europe and a hated bête noire of the left. In a controversial interview with the German newspaper Bild in 2018 Orbán claimed that Hungary did not want “Muslim invaders” on its territory, adding that migration threatened the “culture and sovereignty” of Hungary. In a fiery speech in Rome a year later he reiterated his rejection of mandatory EU migrant quotas but said he would accept deportation quotas “with pleasure.”

Hungary’s New Constitution

The new Hungarian constitution passed by the National Assembly in April, 2011 heralded Orbán’s rejection of globalism and post-modernism. Its adoption demonstrates that the post-modern model of society is not irresistible. The preamble states, inter alia, that: “we Hungarians are proud that one thousand years ago our King, Saint Stephen, based the Hungarian state on solid foundations, and made the country a part of Christian Europe”;

“We are proud of our forebears who fought for the survival, freedom and independence of our country”;

“We are proud that our people have over the centuries defended Europe in a series of struggles…”;

Article L (1) states that “Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman…” and, according to Article L (2): “Hungary shall encourage the commitment to have children”.

These last two provisions in particular constitute a radical break from the Western liberal orthodoxy of recent decades.

Magyarphobia

Orbán has of course raised the ire of the liberal media and globalist politicians. His landslide victory in the 2018 election triggered a veritable hate fest. German public broadcaster ARD lambasted Hungary’s electoral system as unfair and argued that Hungary’s government had fed voters with disinformation. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, Hungarian voters had simply been “brainwashed”. Readers will note similarities with the attacks on the “stupid” UK electorate after the 2016 Brexit referendum. And of course Adolf Hitler had to come into it sooner or later: in 2019 Swedish minister Annika Strandhall compared Orbán’s pro-family policies to the Third Reich. The demonization of Orbán and Hungary looks set to continue into the foreseeable future.

Traditional Magyar Saying: ‘A Cowardly People Has No Homeland’

In an article in the Swiss weekly magazine Weltwoche in 2015, journalist Boris Kálnoky outlined the historical origins of Hungary’s intense preoccupation with its identity and survival as a nation. The Magyars’ self-image, he argued, is marked by an eternal struggle for survival. Kálnoky is surely right. The Hungarians gained control of the Carpathian basin in the 9th and 10th century and had established a Christian kingdom by around 1000, retaining their non-Indo-European language in the process. They lost many times: against the Mongols in 1241, the Turks in 1526 and the Russians in 1849. The Ausgleich of 1867 finally accorded them parity with the Austrians but in 1920 they lost two-thirds of their territory in the Treaty of Trianon and in 1956 their attempt to expel the Soviets ended in disaster but somehow they survived.

Speaking at an event to mark the 170th anniversary of Kossuth’s rebellion against the Austrians in 1848 Orbán warned: ” […] there are those who want to take our country from us. Not with the stroke of a pen, as happened one hundred years ago at Trianon; now they want us to voluntarily hand our country over to others, over a period of a few decades. They want us to hand it over to foreigners coming from other continents, who do not speak our language, and who do not respect our culture, our laws or our way of life: people who want to replace what is ours with what is theirs. What they want is that henceforth it will increasingly not be us and our descendants who live here, but others. […] Day by day we see the great European countries and nations losing their countries: little by little, from district to district and from city to city. The situation is that those who do not halt immigration at their borders are lost: slowly but surely they are consumed. External forces and international powers want to force all this upon us”.

L'articolo Viktor Orbán, Demography And Hungarian Identity proviene da InsideOver.

Uttering the name Boris Johnson alongside the epithet blue-collar would have been incongruous, to say the least until just a few months ago. As mayor of London 2008-16, Johnson positioned himself as a liberal Conservative who advocated an amnesty for illegal immigrants, touted his green credentials and attacked Trump after his controversial comments in 2015 about the Islamification of London. The Prime Minister, who attended Eton College before going on to study at Balliol College, Oxford, had earlier gained notoriety for insensitive and snobbish comments about the residents of Liverpool in 2004 that necessitated a public apology. Johnson’s slightly German appearance, without doubt, has its origins in his Bavarian ancestors of the von Pfeffel family some of whose members were ennobled in the nineteenth century. On the face of it, then, the former editor of the Spectator magazine would seem an improbable champion of Leave-voting Labour supporters outside the metropolitan bubble.

Realignment

The shift from the largely class-based politics of the twentieth century to a world marked by the new fault lines of patriotism vs. globalism and traditionalism vs. cosmopolitanism is, however, creating some strange bedfellows as doors open to politicians who can make this realignment work to their advantage. In December 2019 Johnson, following in the tracks of Donald Trump and others, proved particularly adept at superseding the old divisions of his country. A glance at the electoral map before and after 12 December makes this abundantly clear. What had become known as Labour’s red wall crumbled as Leave-voting seat after Leave-voting seat in the North, the Midlands and Wales fell to the Conservative Party.  The constituency of Wrexham in North East Wales, purely by way of example, had never delivered a Conservative member of parliament since the advent of universal suffrage in 1928, having been Liberal, Labour, Social Democrat and Labour. All in all the Conservatives gained 57 seats from Labour across the country.

Labour’s electoral base

In Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, political parties inevitably represent coalitions of views and sections of the electorate. To understand the outcome of the general election of 12 December 2019 it is necessary to understand the coalition that had been the Labour party before that date. At the risk of oversimplification: in the one corner stood the socially conservative patriotic white working class that are left-wing to the extent they support Britain’s free at point of delivery national health service, the welfare state, workers’ rights and, with varying degrees of intensity, the trade union movement; in the opposite corner stood middle-class progressives in the metropolitan areas, woke graduates, champagne socialists, ethnic minorities and Muslims. Ultimately, the gulf between the two different parts of the coalition proved impossible to bridge, especially given the large metropolitan middle-class leadership of the Labour Party.

Snobbery and the metropolitan elite

The widening cultural gap between Labour’s metropolitan leadership and its base was nicely exemplified by an episode that occurred during the Rochester by-election of 2014. As Labour MP Emily Thornberry was campaigning on an estate in the Kent town she noticed a house draped in English flags with a white van parked outside. The MP for Islington South in London tweeted an image of the scene. Accused of snobbery and condescension she resigned from the Labour Shadow Cabinet later in the day. During the 2019 election, Thornberry was again at the centre of controversy when she allegedly called Leave voters in a pro-Brexit colleague’s constituency “stupid”. Thornberry denied the allegations and brought legal action against the Labour MP who made them. These episodes had echoes of the notorious incident in the 2010 election campaign when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, called a Labour-supporting pensioner, who challenged him on the street about immigration in her home town of Rochdale, a “bigoted woman”. Brown was subsequently forced into a grovelling apology.

Somewheres and anywheres

Using the terminology of the British political scientist David Goodhart, the divisions within the Labour electoral base reflects the division of British society into the two camps of “Anywheres” and “Somewheres”. By “Anywheres” Goodhart means those individuals who are well-educated and value openness, fluidity and personal autonomy. They are mobile and have, or at least purport to have a cosmopolitan mindset. “Somewheres” on the other hand value rootedness, a sense of locality, familiarity, security and patriotism. Anywheres, according to Goodhart, are generally graduates and affluent people who make up around just a quarter of the population but this value block has in recent decades dominated political discourse through cultural hegemony in the education system, the civil service, the media and the arts. The two worlds collided in the Brexit debate.

One Nation Tory-ism

The chaos of the 2017-19 Remain dominated Parliament, the Labour Party’s shift towards support for a second referendum and the threat of the Brexit Party produced a seismic shift in the December 2019 election. Indeed, the election itself was in some ways reminiscent of the 2016 Leave Campaign as the Conservatives focused relentlessly on Brexit and funding for the National Health Service. For the moment at least Boris Johnson seems to have brought about a new settlement in British politics, bringing together an electoral coalition between the working class of Labour’s old industrial heartland and the Tory voting shires. Further, Johnson’s “One Nation” rhetoric alludes to the Disraelian conservatism of the 1860s and 1870s that sought to unite the country around social reform, patriotism and opposition to soulless utilitarianism.

The outlines of Johnson’s One Nation Toryism or what his detractors label as populist nationalism, then, are taking shape: Brexit, greater funding for the NHS, a substantial increase to the minimum wage, increased public spending in the north, a clampdown on foreign criminals, an extension of police stop and search powers and symbolic acts such as reducing the UK presence at globalist glamour events like the Davos World Economic Forum. Such measures may not please some on the corporatist-globalist wing of the Conservative Party but the prospect of a very long period in government thanks to the new dispensation may assuage their concerns.

L'articolo Boris Johnson and Blue-Collar Conservatism proviene da InsideOver.

Steve Bannon was a central figure in the Trump victory of 2016. Brought in to head the campaign team in the August of that year as Trump trailed in the polls and looked to be heading to electoral disaster, the former naval officer, investment banker and Breitbart executive chairman had a clear strategy: let Trump be Trump. For Bannon the key to electoral success was authenticity. Mitt Romney, likened by some to a 1950s department store mannequin, had failed abysmally in 2012 and a new straight-talking, gloves-off approach could be a game-changer.

Speaking at an event in Zurich organised by the Swiss weekly newspaper Die Weltwoche in 2018, Bannon argued that a Trump victory had been a “100% metaphysical certitude” provided that the campaign focused maniacally on three key verticals. Firstly, stop massive illegal immigration and limit legal immigration in order to protect American workers; secondly, bring back manufacturing jobs to the US; and thirdly keep out of pointless foreign wars. Above all, the Trump campaign compared and contrasted its candidate with Hillary Clinton, lambasting her as the representative of a corrupt and incompetent permanent political class. The rest is history.

Fast forward three years and what does the former White House Chief Strategist see as the key factor in the 2020 contest? In a nutshell: China.

Unrestricted Warfare and Davos Man

Bannon has for several years been fascinated by the rise of China, describing it as the defining event of our time and arguing that relations between the U.S. and China will set the framework for how the world economy will develop over the next few decades. The book Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Masterplan to destroy America written by two Chinese military officers in 1999 seems to have had a profound impact on Bannon’s thinking about China. The authors argue that China was not in a position to confront the US by conventional military methods and therefore should unleash economic and information warfare and wear the country down through long-term attrition rather than in direct confrontation.

In an interview with Kyle Bass in April 2019 Bannon admits that China has made heroic advances in the last three decades, moving 350 million people out of working poverty into the middle class and 400 million out of abject poverty into working poverty. Its startling rise has however also been facilitated and accentuated by an array of actors inside America’s, and indeed the West’s, political, financial, corporate and university elites who kowtowed to China, financed it and sold out their countries in doing so. In effect, he argues, the Chinese Communist Party has been in business with the globalists and the Party of Davos, the managerial, financial, technocratic and cultural elites emanating from the World Economic Forum and based in New York, Silicon Valley, London and Washington D.C. etc.

Bannon adds that when the World Trade Organisation admitted China into its ranks in 2001 the view was often expressed that economic growth and prosperity would turn China into a liberal free market society along more or less western lines but these forecasts have proven woefully wrong. China is in fact a protectionist mercantilist state with hegemonic ambitions that are frankly astounding. The One Belt and One Road Initiative, Made in China 2025, forced technology transfers, the military build-up, the actions in the South China Sea, predatory loans to vulnerable states and growing influence in many resource areas of the world are all symptoms of the country’s quest for global domination.

Claws of the Red Dragon

Bannon’s campaign against Chinese mercantilism extends to the world of film. In 2019 he signed on as executive producer of Claws of the Red Dragon, a 50 minute film about the arrest in Canada of the daughter of a founder of a powerful Chinese technology corporation called Huaxing Hi-Tech after it breached US sanctions against Iran. “Inspired” by Canada’s arrest of the Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the project reinforces Bannon’s calls for tough action to be taken against Chinese corporations which in his view are an arm of Xi’s regime and the People’s Liberation Army. Indeed, in an interview with the South China Morning Post in May 2019 Bannon called for all Chinese corporations to be shut out of US capital markets and that the expulsion of Huawei was “ten times more important than a trade deal”. He went on to criticise Trump’s decision to lift restrictions on ZTE, another Chinese telecommunications company, calling the President’s move a “mistake”.

Committee for the Current Danger

China’s Global Times has hit back at Bannon, accusing him of peddling “economic fascism” and holding views close to those of European neo-Nazis. The newspaper went on to brand him and the Committee on the Present Danger: China of which he is a member an “anti-China clique”. This version of the Committee was set up in March 2019 and follows three previous iterations that existed between the 1950s and 1980s that sought to counter the danger posed by the Soviet Union. Its website states that it is a “wholly-independent and non-partisan effort to educate and inform American citizens and policymakers about the existential threats presented from the Peoples Republic of China under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party”. Bannon would undoubtedly respond that the closer you fly to the target the more intense the flak becomes.

The 2020 Presidential Election

In his many interviews and speeches Bannon relentlessly rams home the message that it will be the relationship with China that will frame the 2020 contest, above all because it relates to America’s industrial and manufacturing base. In particular, he argued in Zurich in 2018, Chinese overcapacity and deflation has gutted America’s upper Midwest industrial heartland. Indeed, it was Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin that Trump managed to flip in 2016 and must retain in 2020. Bannon certainly has a point. According to a study by MIT economist Davis Autor the loss of nearly 1,000,000 manufacturing jobs in the US between 1999 and 2011 was down to increased competition from China. Further, Beijing’s economic war has also had collateral damage in societal terms. J.D. Vance, whose 2016 bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” is widely seen as one of the best accounts of the sociology of the Trump movement, sees a direct correlation between job losses through outsourcing and family breakdown, domestic violence and opioid use in the upper Midwest where he grew up.

For Bannon, the effectiveness of the President’s section 301 tariffs, the Phase One Trade Agreement and whether Trump can manage to bring back supply chains to those upper Midwest states will be the determining factor in the 2020 race for the White House. Chinese mercantilism is the boil that Trump must lance if he is to be re-elected in 2020.

L'articolo Steve Bannon, China and the 2020 Presidential Election proviene da InsideOver.

Finding a news story in the international media about the Alternative for Germany (AfD) where the terms “far-right” or “extreme right-wing” are not applied to the party is a difficult task. Media outlets such as the BBC, CNN, ABC and CBC use these epithets and the same pattern can be found amongst newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian, to name but a few. Also, Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-owned international broadcaster, does so as well of course. Virtually every article about the AfD on its website describes it as “far-right” or “anti-immigrant”. The Left Party, the successor of the SED, the former East German Communist Party (1946-89), gets a free pass and is generally referred to simply by its name. Environmentalist groups or pro-open borders NGOs being described as “extreme” or “radical” by such news organisations would be a novelty indeed.

Violence and intimidation

AfD stands accused of stirring up hatred but, on closer inspection, the party is very often the victim of hatred and indeed violence itself. According to information acquired by Bundestag member Martin Hess from the German Federal Government and reported in Die Junge Freiheit, AfD was the main victim of political violence and intimidation in Germany in the third quarter of 2019. The period saw 52 attacks against the offices or facilities of political parties and 26 of these were carried out against AfD; of the 278 attacks on representatives and members of political parties 127 of them were carried out against AfD members, with 113 of them being classified as having an extreme left-wing political motivation; and of the 905 election posters damaged or destroyed 406 belonged to AfD. Behind the statistics lie some unsettling events: politicians attacked on the street, cars being smashed up and set on fire, threats, offices ransacked and a house daubed with paint and graffiti describing the owner as a “Nazi Pig”.

Parliamentary personae non-gratae

According to AfD Parliamentarian René Springer in an interview with the Swiss weekly newspaper Die Weltwoche in April 2019, AfD members are shunned in the Bundestag. When Parliamentary joint leader Alice Weidel sat down to eat in the Bundestag restaurant other parliamentarians at the adjacent table stood up and walked out whilst the Left Party and SPD members simply refuse to speak to their AfD counterparts. Social ostracism is accompanied by institutional mischief. According to parliamentary rules of procedure, each parliamentary group is entitled to a seat on the Praesidium of the Bundestag but has to gain a majority of votes for its candidate.

Since October 2017 four AfD candidates have been rejected by the members of the other parliamentary groups in an unprecedented campaign to block a party that gained almost 13% of the vote in the 2017 general election and is now represented in all 16 of Germany’s regional Parliaments.

A threat to the constitutional order?

The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has intervened in respect of the AfD question. It announced in January 2019 that the AfD would be treated as a “Prüffall” (“test case”), meaning that there were indications of extremism within its membership. Junge Alternative (Young Alternative), the party’s youth organisation and der Flügel (the Wing), a national-conservative group led by the controversial leader of the Thuringian party, Björn Höcke, would, however, be treated as “Verdachtsfälle”, a more serious measure meaning that intelligence can be used to gather information about the two groups.

The Administrative Court of Cologne did however subsequently hold that the BfV must not use the term “Prüffall” in public as it would unfairly stigmatise AfD. The BfV has itself been at the centre of controversy in recent years. The former head of the agency, Hans-Georg Maaßen, publicly called into question media claims, backed by Merkel, that Germans had “hunted down” foreigners during the Chemnitz disturbances of 2018. Maaßen was subsequently moved to a different position and was eventually placed in early retirement after a controversial farewell speech.

Political programme

Does the AfD deserve such vitriol? A sober and rational analysis of the party’s Political Programme, however, indicates a patriotic centre-right party seeking to protect German state sovereignty, promote direct democracy on the model of Switzerland, bolster federalism, streamline the state and remove party political influence in the arts and culture.

The Programme does call, inter alia, for the defence of the Judeo-Christian and humanist culture of the West, measures to reverse Germany’s demographic decline, the safeguarding of the traditional family, the prohibition of gender and ethnic quotas, stricter controls on mosques and Imams, and also opposes government energy policy and some of the claims of the environmentalist movement. What the AfD is trying to do is shift the Overton Window by raising the legitimate and reasonable concerns of sections of the population that want a wider choice of political options than has been on offer from the established political parties in recent years. Such proposals are not “fascist”, “Nazi” or totalitarian. The Programme makes no mention of the Führer principle, the abolition of elections and political parties, the destruction of trade unions, the gagging of the press, the need for Lebensraum in the East or Aryan racial supremacy. True, there have been some unsavoury comments by individuals. One member who described Claus von Stauffenberg, the army officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, as a “coward” and a “traitor” was thrown out of the party. The party leadership is also seeking to expel another member over alleged antisemitism.

Alexander Gauland

The Saxon born journalist and historian, Alexander Gauland, had been a lifelong member of the CDU until in 2012 he and other conservative-minded members known as the Berlin Circle were told they had no future in the upper echelons of the party. This led them to set up the AfD in 2013. The CDU/CSU’s drift to the left opened up a gap on the right and they have filled it. In his book, Anleitung zum Konservativsein (Guide to Being Conservative) written some ten years earlier, Gauland bemoaned this leftwards shift. He argued that concepts such as Heimat (homeland), Leitkultur (leading or guiding culture) family, tradition and art had been discarded by the party. He lauded the English conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, as his model: a man of “moderation” and the “middle ground” who favoured organic and moderate reform to conserve what is worth conserving.

Gauland has himself admitted that AfD’s rise can in part be ascribed to the failings of the established parties, above all their unwillingness to address issues falling outside the narrow corridor of respectable opinion. AfD has on the other hand always been prepared to discuss openly and critically the difficulties of the Euro, the bailout of Greece, Merkel’s open-door migrant policy, migrant crime, Islam, multiculturalism, environmentalist hysteria and the threats to German identity posed by globalisation and globalism. The party brings a refreshing candour to political debate. This is surely the key to its rise.

The Brunswick party conference

Gauland has called AfD a “gäriger Haufen” (a group or a crowd in the process of fermentation) and, as we have seen, the party is not, as some would have us believe, a bunch of football hooligans brandishing the black, white and red flag of imperial Germany. At the federal party conference held in Brunswick in November 2019 co-chair Jörg Meuthen stated in his keynote speech that the party must now become “capable and willing to govern” and must be a “patriotic respectable middle-class party”. So far, of course, voices within the CDU/CSU calling for coalitions with AfD have been isolated but as the SPD swings to the left and the CDU/CSU runs adrift these voices may well begin to multiply.

L'articolo Is the Demonisation of Alternative for Germany (AfD) Justified? proviene da InsideOver.

Yet another less than generous comment on rural America. Mr. Jackson Kernion, a philosophy instructor at Berkeley University, recently tweeted: “I unironically embrace the bashing of rural Americans. They, as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions. Some, I assume are good people. But this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid and we should shame people who aren’t pro-city.” Mr. Kernion subsequently apologised for the tone of the comments, describing them as “crass” and “mean”. Such remarks are, however, no rarity and you could easily be forgiven for thinking that elements of the US elite hold rural and small-town Americans in contempt, considering them mired in ignorance, bigotry and backwardness. Speaking before an LGBT fundraising audience in New York during the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton notoriously commented “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it… Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America”. In 2008 presidential hopeful Barack Obama argued along similar lines concerning small-town voters in the Midwest: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. The recent furore over the (unreleased) movie called “The Hunt” in which rich liberals hunt down blue-collar Americans for sport until eventually the hunted turn on the hunters is indicative of the tense atmosphere.

“Hickville”

Disparaging “Hickville” did not start with Barack Obama in 2008. In 1920 Sinclair Lewis published “Main Street”, a yarn satirising a fictionalised version of the author’s home town in Minnesota that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. It is sometimes said that God made the village and the devil created the city but Lewis effectively flipped the adage, portraying small-town life as provincial, self-satisfied and dreary. The book struck a chord and was a pivotal moment in American cultural history.

In part, these attitudes are just plain old fashioned snobbery but in part, they also reflect liberal contempt for perceived backwardness that goes back to the very origins of the ideology. Liberal hatred and fear of backward reactionary Czarist Russia was a key factor in the Crimean War of 1853-56. In the 1870s the Kulturkampf in Germany saw Protestant liberals backing Bismarck in his struggle against the Catholic Church and its medievalism. In Britain, the Welsh who clung to their language rather than adopt English, the language of progress, were according to an infamous educational report of 1847 “ignorant, lazy and immoral”.

The coastal-interior divide

But hating the hicks also forms part of a very contemporary trend. Commentators have noted an increasing divide between well-educated urban elites who favour globalism, globalisation and the international lifestyle. As the American historian Christopher Lasch pointed out in “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy”, they feel more in common with their counterparts in foreign countries than their fellow countrymen out in the sticks who value patriotism and conservative social values. The division has arguably intensified since the election of Trump in 2016 as the east and west coast urban areas tended to vote for Hillary Clinton and the interior, the small town and the rural areas tended to back the real estate magnate and reality show star. Having to live with a President elected by people they consider rednecks and hillbillies has been no easy task for America’s liberal establishment.

Rednecks and hillbillies

There is debate about the exact origins of these terms. According to one theory Redneck has its origins in the Scottish Bishops Wars of 1639-40 when the Scottish Presbyterian Covenanters signed in their blood and wore red pieces of cloth around their necks as distinctive insignia. Indeed, Redneck seems to have first appeared in print in a travel book about the South published in the 1830s to denote Scottish Presbyterians in Georgia. According to another theory it simply derives from white agricultural labourers in the antebellum South getting their necks sunburned while working in the fields. The website of the US Congress library states the term gained currency in the early twentieth century on account of the red bandana worn by striking miners in West Virginia in 1921 who called themselves the Redneck Army. In any case, as William Safire points out in his “Political Dictionary” the term is used by urban progressives to disparage southern whites whom they deem insufficiently liberal. Yet at the same time, the victims of this abuse have often reclaimed the term for themselves, wearing it as a badge of honour to indicate authenticity, rootedness and steadfast adherence to American values.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a hillbilly is an “awkward or simple person especially from a small town or the country”. Antonyms are “cosmopolite” and “sophisticate”. More specifically, the term refers to people from Ulster, the lowlands of Scotland and the north of England who clustered in the Appalachians in the 1600s and 1700s. They must be distinguished from the WASPs who settled in the North-East. Again the precise etymology of the term is not clear. It may have originated with those Ulstermen who supported the Protestant King William “Billy” III of Orange who defeated the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Alternatively, the word may be a blend of “hill-folk” and “billy”, the latter being a Scottish word meaning fellow or companion.

Rebelling against the establishment

J.D. Vance, author of the 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy: Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” and a proud son of the Appalachians himself, has highlighted the issues facing his community: unemployment, welfare dependency, family breakdown, heroin and falling life expectancy. Feeling overlooked and ignored by the coastal elites, rural and small-town Americans tended to support Donald Trump in 2016. That decision was not born out of ignorance, bigotry or nostalgia for the Confederate States of America; it was a perfectly reasonable and rational choice. It has been cogently argued that the areas most exposed to globalisation, and free trade with China in particular, are precisely the areas that suffer from the type of problems described by Vance. But a vote for Trump in 2016 was not just a vote against Hillary Clinton; it was also a vote against the globalist and chamber of commerce brands of conservatism that has been espoused for decades by Republican Presidents and candidates. Indeed, whether and to what extent to which Trump can respond to the economic and political concerns aspirations of rural and small-town American and maintain their support will be a key factor in the outcome of the 2020 election. It is no surprise that “Hickville” has been drawing so much fire from the establishment in recent years. The targets of these insults and slights should wear them as a badge of honour.

L'articolo Hating the American Heartland proviene da InsideOver.

Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are constantly attacked as buffoons, racists and Islamophobes pandering to the lowest instincts of the populist masses. Johnson’s Brexit deal was attacked by the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, as a “Trump Brexit”. The US President himself has claimed that Johnson has been called “Britain’s Trump”. Both are indeed ebullient, raffish figures with colourful private lives but Johnson and Trump are quite different men. One a classically educated journalist with a penchant for reciting extracts from the Iliad, the other a straight-talking, transaction-oriented Manhattan real estate magnate. Johnson’s rhetoric, apart from the occasional snide about burqa-clad Muslim women resembling letterboxes, differs significantly from that of his counterpart across the Atlantic. In December 2015 when Trump made his controversial call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US, Johnson joined in the global cacophony of criticism, calling him “out of his mind”. As Mayor of London 2008-2016, Johnson was pro-immigration and even backed an amnesty for illegal immigrants who had been living in the UK for more than 15 years.

Johnson and Brexit

A glance at Johnson’s articles and statements about the EU over the years indicate mixed feelings and just before the beginning of the 2016 referendum campaign he wavered. In one article that was not published at the time, he backed David Cameron’s renegotiation deal with Brussels and called access to the single market a “boon”. Eventually, of course, he came down in favour of Brexit and became a key face in the Vote Leave campaign. Some, including Cameron in his recent memoirs and interviews, have suggested that Johnson believed that Remain would win but being on the patriotic romantic side of Brexit would bolster his chances in a future Tory leadership contest. It has been said that Theresa May simply wanted to be Prime Minister but that Boris Johnson wants to be a great Prime Minister. Delivering Brexit is the means to that end. Johnson’s latest book is called “The Churchill Factor”. The message is not particularly subliminal.

Johnson and Englishness

Scottish historian Neill Ferguson recently wrote that Johnson is the sort of bumbling upper-class Englishmen famously portrayed by P.G. Wodehouse, a man “belonging to the past, not the future”, a throwback to the 1920s and 1930s. Possibly. But that might be a reason for his popularity with certain sections of the public. He is Britain’s 55th Prime Minister and the twentieth to have attended Eton. The man who established the link between the school and the office was Robert Walpole who went attended Eton in the 1690s and became the first Prime Minister in 1721. Oligarchic and hardly meritocratic for sure but also reassuring for the deferential? Things have not changed that much after all and thank goodness for that, some might say. It would be no isolated phenomenon. Trump’s Make America Great Again, Recep Erdogan’s evocations of the golden age of the Ottoman Empire and Putin’s appropriation of the symbols of Czarist Russia and, beyond that, Byzantium indicate a world growing weary of post-1989 liberalism and globalism.

Johnson and Breaking the Mould

In the early 1990’s Christopher Lasch, an American history professor, penned a prescient essay called Revolt of the Elites: the Betrayal of Democracy. He argued, inter alia, that the business and professional elites in America no longer shared a common culture with their less affluent, less sophisticated fellow citizens. Huddled together in the coastal cities they felt more in common with their counterparts in Hong Kong, Korea and Japan than Middle America. What we would now call flyover country was dull and dowdy and, although Lasch does not use the word, “redneck”. The old elites endowed libraries and public buildings in their home areas whilst the new metropolitan elites were rootless, cosmopolitan and withdrawing from the national community.  The division between increasingly denationalised elites and the more rooted sections of the population that Lasch noted in the US in the 1990s was destined to deepen and become apparent elsewhere. With the West dogged by Islamic terrorism, financial crisis, economic stagnation and open borders chaos the 2016 the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the UK re-emphasised old divisions between Scotland and England and Unionists and Republicans in Ulster but also a chasm separating London and the university towns that voted Remain on the one hand and the rest of the country that voted Leave on the other.

Whether and to what extent Johnson will be able to break the mould of British party politics to reflect the new alignments in society will determine whether he stays Prime Minister after the upcoming election. A crucial element in the Trump-Bannon strategy of 2016 was the promise to stop massive illegal immigration, limit legal immigration, get back sovereignty and protect American workers and businesses. The strategy brought victory Trump with the forgotten people of previously Democrat voting states such as Wisconsin and Michigan abandoned by a political establishment comprising liberals concerned with faddish identity politics and mainstream conservatives concerned with capital gains taxes and other chamber of commerce concerns. If Johnson is to win he must similarly win over traditionally Labour areas in the Midlands, the North of England and Wales that voted Leave in 2016. But that will mean more than just delivering Brexit and ending free movement of workers. It will mean more public spending on the national health service and schools, a tough line on law and order, ending talk of amnesties for illegal immigrants and taking a distance from the fashionable metropolitan causes of the day. And he must do so without losing too much ground to the Liberal Democrats in the south of England and the Scottish nationalists. Achieving all this would be no mean feat.

L'articolo The Many Aspects of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson proviene da InsideOver.