Back in our glory days, Germany was either made fun of, or there was a sense of hope that a sense of national identity would return to the Germans in the future. That National Populism would spark up in Germany and spread throughout Europe. That Europe would see a revival in a Christian identity with populist rhetoric bringing back Christian values across Europe. This, combined with Brexit weakening the EU at the time, seemed to give us hope that even the EU was going to fracture or devolve in some way.
This did not happen.
Populism seems to be merely contained in Hungary and Poland, which are not even close to influential world powers. They rely on the EU for many things, both of them still suffer from mass emigration and low birth rates, and Russia is waiting to gobble them up if given the chance. Which in itself is a paper tiger compared to NATO.
That little tangent aside, it’s interesting to see how little this has really shaken up Germany like we suspected it would a few years ago. Germany seems to even be doubling down in it’s efforts, and we’re not seeing any actual repercussions (as of this writing) of it. How is this happening you ask?
The Green Party in Germany is leading well with the Green Party’s throughout Europe. In the EU parliament, they did an interesting maneuver of allying with small progressive parties, and pirate parties. This in itself broke the stranglehold the two centrist parties had in the EU parliament. Which makes the Greens sudden kingmakers in Europe.
“But populist parties still hold more seats in the parliament!”
Yes, and they’re also much more divided and can’t actually vote on anything together. Meanwhile, the Greens are surprisingly holding themselves together well. We see this as a result of their sudden gains in the European Parliament. This may even grow in the future, as their main audience is actually young, new voters in Europe (cough itoldyouthiswouldhappenwithzoomers cough).
Now Germany is leading the charge with how successful their Green Party is looking. The German SPD is floundering around, and the Greens in response expanded their policy positions to not just being purely an environmental party, but a genuine left wing party. Annalena Baerbock, the current Green nominee for chancellor in Germany, has actually given the SPD and CSU/CDU alliance a serious run for their money. And if not the main party, they would without a doubt get an alliance with Die Linke or some SPD runaways to further their agenda. Supposedly the UK (despite not being in the EU), France, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Euroskeptics have seen a decline in the main capital hubs of Europe, and are likely to follow suit as the culture war spreads eastward.
Capitalism seems to just continue getting stronger and stronger. That’s a difficult blackpill I swallowed a while ago, and it still sits like a damn rock in my stomach.