Its amazing what happens when your erstwhile left-leaning parties spend more time playing footsie with billionaires then actually solving problems for regular people.
The political left has gotten too cosy with neoliberalism, and forgotten their roots, ceding kitchen-table issues to the right-wing.
Which is insane, because the right doesn't care about the poor except as grist for the mill, they're just better at faking empathy, or at least milking victimization
Definitely agree. Maybe you could argue that you'd just need to cut out former East Germany to make the post accurate, but even overall, germanys far right is definitely strong.
Do german not see the effects of climate change? Why would they not vote for green party? Germany has faced such harsh weather this year with all sorts of weirdness
Yes climate change all fine and well, but have you actually seen what they want us to do? Ride one of those gay bicycles to work and eat less beef. Next thing you know they want to put up renewable energy wind turbines in my neighborhood, that ruins the pretty landscape! No, I dont want to tighten ecological protections, why do you ask?
Well, if you put on a skimpy outfit that emphasises those muscles and smear yourself in oil before going out and self-transport using them, it might be a little bit gay ...
True: pure Transportation can't really be gay or not be gay as it's orthogonal to the subject of sexuality.
However, nothing stops people from mixing some Recreation into their Transportation if they're willing to lose some efficiency in the latter and I was just imagining how one could possibly do it for making it somehow "gay".
Nah, I got it. It's just that even referencing misconceptions (e.g. that cycling is for lycra-clad wannabe-racers) derisively helps spread them, and unlike my previous comment, I couldn't think of a way to rebut this one and be funny at the same time.
In other words, it was really more of a "me" problem: promoting utility cycling is kinda my pet issue. I didn't write it, but this pretty much captures the perspective I'm coming from and how strongly I feel about it.
In addition to the other comments: Germany has a lot of voters that are like 60+, some of which either don't care too much because they will die long before the worst of climate change happens, or simply don't want to change. Any policies that try to reduce carbon emissions are met with criticism by people not wanting to change their own behavior.
Can't speak for Europe, but Canadian green parties are an uncomfortable split between true-believers that are unfortunately spending more time on identity politics than environmentalism, and hucksters looking to make money off the green movement.
That's what happens in liberal democracys. Even the German social democrats are neoliberals. You can also see it in Great Britain with the "labour" party.
A coalition of the Green party and two others currently governs the country. The two bigger of those, Green party being one of them, lost a lot of votes, the small one (that's arguably the biggest issue for governing and publicity) didn't.
The green party had a huge success and increase in voters three years ago. But the way it went, the public communication and issues between the three parties, the inflation, and other energy cost increases presumably lead to voters now choosing to vote against them.
The central-right that governed for many years before received most votes. The far right, under institutional observation because of its danger to the constition/opposition to the constitution, had a big increase in voters too. Especially in the eastern states (previously eastern Germany) - traditionally more right-leaning.