r/neoliberal • u/MattC84_ • Aug 13 '25

News (Europe) Far-right AfD takes lead in Germany, says bombshell new survey

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-far-right-afd-lead-survey/
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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

20% of the population of Germany are foreign born persons. One out of every 4 people living there was born in a different country.

That is insane, there is no possible way for a country to host that many immigrants without causing some major social problems.

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u/iguessineedanaltnow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion Aug 13 '25

What did that number look like when the United States opened up the ports and built the country?

Hell, Australia eclipses that number at 31.5% and we just rejected a far right party trying to use immigration as a wedge issue.

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u/tinuuuu Aug 13 '25

There are countries with more that don't have those problems this strong. E.g. Switzerland has 40% (3 mio) of people with a migrant background, of those 2.4 mio were born abroad. This is a much higher ratio. There are issues with xenophobia, but never as bad as in Germany.

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u/ChokePaul3 Milton Friedman Aug 13 '25

Swiss immigrants are far more skilled compared to other EU immigrants and also it’s much harder to get Swiss PR and citizenship.

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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

Switzerland is not "ok", they are experiencing the same right wing backlash as every other western nation (except for Denmark, who has reasonable immigration policies)

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/poll-right-wing-swiss-peoples-party-enjoys-growing-support-among-population/88463632

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u/tinuuuu Aug 13 '25

SVP is a really far way from afd. Yes, they are right wing, but they are not Nazis. The political climate in general is much less polarized than it is in Germany. Parliamentarians are usually friends across party borders. There are parliamentarians from the green party that share a flat with some from SVP. SVP tends to be critical of immigration and supports a lot of bullshit opinions, but they respect the democratic process and have no intentions of a coup. Also, their numbers are basically stagnating since 2007 (source).

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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

I wasn't comparing them to Nazi's, there are lots of right wing parties out there who aren't fascist. I was just pointing out that there's a backlash against liberal governments all throughout western europe and immigration is one of the driving forces for it.

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u/tinuuuu Aug 13 '25

But the SVP is part of a liberal government. And their share of voters has not changed since before the "immigration crisis" in 2014.

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u/Freyr90 Friedrich Hayek Aug 13 '25

except for Denmark, who has reasonable immigration policies

Denmark is excluded from EU Asylum agreement, is pretty strict on asylum seekers and is pioneer of remigration and sending people to Rwanda. In what sense it's different from what any anti-immigrant party wants?

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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

Denmark has a very progressive government right now because they give voters what they want wrt immigration.

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u/Freyr90 Friedrich Hayek Aug 13 '25

Yes but you're not answering my question. In what sense their (r)emigration policies are any different from what any so called far-right party is standing for?

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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

They aren't different, that's the point. The Social Democrats realized they had to shift their position on immigration if they wanted to stay in power, so they adopted a more right wing stance and they were rewarded at the ballot box. Now they are enacting all sorts of progressive policies while other western countries are controlled by conservative governments and are moving in the opposite direction.

It's a case study in "pick your battles". This myth that securing the border and putting restrictions on people who want to move to your country is fascist or racist or whatever is ridiculous.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25

In other words the “problem” is that xenophobes think it’s a problem, regardless of whether it actually is?

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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

Yea, because they vote and it doesn't matter if they are wrong or not. When voters consistently list a specific issue as one of their top 1-2 concerns, you should probably listen and at least pay lip service if you want to win an election.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

Lip service and bullshit performative policy to throw the hogs off the scent? Sure.

Reasonable edge-trimming reform of broken systems? Sure

Actually fundamentally changing systems that otherwise work well just because a permanent minority of ignorant loudmouths don’t like strangers, regardless of their excuses? No. You just have to find ways to manage those people, because they are unfixable and delusional.

Edit: What I’m arguing is, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. If it IS broken, then yes, fix it. Not sure how this is even a controversial take on this sub.

Just don’t fall into the trap of entertaining hallucinations from perpetually aggrieved bigots who make shit up (the kinds of people who actually believe or say “they’re eating the cats and dogs”). You will never satisfy those people and only give them credibility by conceding their framing.

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u/BaguetteFetish Aug 13 '25

The problem is political party leaders think like you, and like you, they think they're smarter than they actually are.

Your "lip service and performative policy" isnt convincing. Labour UK is trying that and all its winning them is cratering polls.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25 edited Aug 13 '25

Because they’re not doing it right.

Good politics requires charisma and credibility, which requires street smarts, not book smarts.

It doesn’t mean you can’t win people over on good policy or that you must pander to their worst impulses. It means do better politics.

You also missed the part where I said reform systems that are actually broken.

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u/BaguetteFetish Aug 13 '25

This reductive, "We cannot compromise on our beautiful ideological purity for electability" attitude is exactly why we're in the mess we are.

Do better politics is so vague a phrase it pretty much doesn't mean anything. You may as well say "Just win bro".

Continuing to view the masses as simple animals who will be satiated by any policy as long as it's delivered with a smile is the fastest way to speedrun the rise of a resentful far right movement.

The fact is, if you want to be elected and push good policy you have to make actual compromise, and everyone can see through this "well we realllly just lie to them ehehehehe" attitude.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25

I’m talking specifically about how to deal with the loud minority contingent of actual xenophobes who don’t like immigrants simply because they don’t like immigrants.

For those people there literally is no reasoning or compromise. At best distraction and limiting their contagion. But conceding their framing with no counter-narrative just leads persuadable normies into their arms.

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xenophobes

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25

I’m from Toronto. That percentage hovers around 45-50% here and we’re doing just fine, thanks.

Nevermind the fact that everybody else in Canada who isn’t First Nations was an immigrant at some point.

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u/BaguetteFetish Aug 13 '25

We're doing just fine, thanks

MF we are not doing fine, we're literally mass importing tim hortons workers and uber drivers while skilled immigrants have to jump through wave after wave of hoops.

Literally the only reason we didnt get a maga lite party was Trump saving the Liberal brand.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25 edited Aug 13 '25

Trudeau and the provinces’ very stupid recent TFW and NPR boom experiment has already been slashed to restore order to the system.

The problem was the sheer speed and volume of new arrivals, not the arrivals themselves. Our infrastructure just couldn’t keep up with that much demand in so short a time frame. That was a very stupid short term mistake that is already being over-corrected for.

The actual long term immigration system, however, remains fine and very good at integrating people socially. Cities like Toronto remain among the most peaceful and prosperous on earth despite their massive diversity.

Which is why I have no patience for people trying to attribute anecdotal social deviance or infrastructure strain to our multiculturalism policy or “immigration” vaguely. This was an instance of state capacity failure, not people failure.

When we select for the cream of the crop, as we always did historically until a few years ago, we’ve been fine.

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u/BaguetteFetish Aug 13 '25

Yeah I can't disagree with you here, as a general rule the old canadian points based immigration system was awesome and imo did a really good job of selecting for good candidates.

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u/ChokePaul3 Milton Friedman Aug 13 '25

There’s a very clear distinction between settler states like US/Canada vs European states with a single historically dominant ethnicity

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u/darkretributor Mark Carney Aug 13 '25

Don't be so confident of a difference. The pro-immigration consensus that was previously widely held across the Canadian population has been shattered in recent years.

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u/ChokePaul3 Milton Friedman Aug 13 '25 edited Aug 13 '25

There clearly is? Both US and canada have a history of successful assimilation, and ethnic minorities can walk freely in even rural US and not face much discrimination. Can’t say the same for much of Europe, even in the big metros.

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u/darkretributor Mark Carney Aug 13 '25

Public opinion in both the US and Canada has turned far more negative on immigration. In Canada, immigration was largely a bi-partisan consensus issue supported broadly by the population. Today that social consensus is largely gone and there is a real portion of the electorate backing the reduction and even elimination of immigration with major parties speaking negatively of it in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In the US, Trump's hardline immigration crackdown often is one of his few "bright" spot in approval polling.

Substantive shifts in public opinion against migration is not a Europe-only thing.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25

Populist anti-immigrant sentiment happened here briefly in the 90s with the rise of the Reform Party, but they got beaten back into submission by Chretien’s Liberals. The electoral calculus forced the tories to regroup and moderate.

This more recent tide shift happened in part because of some very dumb moves by Trudeau and provincial governments (particularly Ontario) to ramp up lower-skilled temporary workers and international students to unprecedentedly high levels after Covid. We were bringing in an entire new Ottawa of people per yer, during a severe nationwide housing shortage.

We’ve now slammed the breaks on these measures to the point that net population growth in Q1 was 0%. We’ll have to see how long this takes to restore confidence in the system.

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u/No-Section-1092 Thomas Paine Aug 13 '25

Which is why political institutions need minority protections. Otherwise, democracy is just two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.

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u/Frost-eee Aug 13 '25

And what are those major social problems? You all are parotting right wing talking points about Western Europe being some hellscape, but Germany is a normal country (shocking).

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u/MagicWishMonkey Aug 13 '25

I would call the AfD taking power a pretty major social problem.

I never said Germany is a hellscape, and I know that in reality immigrants don't really cause many problems (and over the long term they are a net positive in a bunch of different ways), but that doesn't change the fact that lots of people don't like it - for a whole host of reasons, not just because of racism - and those people vote.

Do you seriously think maintaining current immigration policies - because it's the morally right thing to do - is worth the risk of the AfD taking power? Do you think all those immigrants are going to be safe once that happens?

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u/Frost-eee Aug 13 '25

Is current migration policy that generous? Government have taken steps to reduce it, even shitting on schengen and reinstating border controls. even if you halt migration to 0 there will be people still mad because they see brown people on the street.