The decline of the CDU under Angela Merkel has now reached quite a surprising level, with one poll this week putting them at only 28.5% of popular support nationally; the CDU/CSU's historical support (actual vote totals) from the 1950s to 1990s was 45-50%.
I believe
this points to a serious weakening of the force of Holocaust-Politics in Germany, which few would have predicted four years ago (pre Migrant Crisis). The Holocaust still has cultural dominance and will, I assume, for some time to come, in the way that Communist ideology still did in 1985-1988, before the challenges of 1989 brought it all down. (This is not a prediction of the imminent fall of Holocaust ideology or 1989-like spontaneous demonstrations to get rid of Holocaust memorials across the West; I would stop the analogy at early 1989; how exactly the Holocaust gets unraveled and its iron grip loosened and then removed, I do not yet know.)
The reasons for the decline of the CDU (and the SPD, polling now at a truly pathetic 16-18%) lean towards being off topic for this forum, but certainly the refugee crisis (August 2015 to spring 2016) is central to it; in turn, the Holocaust political-apparatus was central to the political conditions that allowed for the refugee crisis. Politics is complicated and easy answers are probably not fully accurate ones, but the Holocaust's relation to this is, as I see it, pretty certain.
Hektor wrote:Sannhet wrote:So my little mental experiment can yield this way to conceptualize the likely election result:
Aggressive Holocaust-Pushers (overt): 35% of seats
Opponents of Holocaust Cult-ism (tacit): 15% of seats (of whom only a minority will speak out)
Neutrals and those passively obedient to 'Big H.' cultural hegemony: 50%
Your assessment seems to be in the ball park. However in the general population, it may look differently again. As I said, people get fed up with the subject. They get "Holocaust fatigue" and actually try to avoid the subject. But they're not left alone, Hitler seems to be still omnipresent on television. And the media makers know how to diversify the subject.
One year after the election, polls now put public opinion (party support) on the Right as definitely shifting towards the only party with seats at the national level that has known "Holocaust Opponents" in it (AfD). On the Left, the picture is less clear, as the Holocaust-pushing Greens now have almost as much polled support as the SPD, which leans towards being more Holocaust-neutral.
I want to get an updated estimate of current levels of Holocaust-pusher support and opposition in late 2018 using the framework I proposed last year. I would propose the following, and am curious to hear how much others who follow German domestic politics would agree with this rating system:
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Position of each German party on the Holocaust
Party: [Holocaust Pushers] - [Neutrals] - [Opponents of the Holocaust]
AfD: 0 - 40 - 60
CDU: 10 - 75 - 15
FDP: 0 - 100 - 0
SPD: 65 - 25 - 10
Green: 90 - 10 - 0
Linke: 70 - 30 - 0
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For the SPD, I had to include a '10' for Holocaust Opponents just for Herr Sarrazin alone (poetically born on Feb. 12, 1945; one day before Dresden). (There is also a historical component of the SPD from the 1960s and 1970s, that I discuss
in this thread ("How much support is there in Germany for abolishing "Holocaust Enforcement" laws?" [May 2017]). It is unclear how much of that anti-Holocaust subcurrent of the SPD survives into the 2010s, 2020s, and beyond.) Sarazzin is now out with a new book, eight years after his
Germany Abolishes Itself, which touches at the margins on Holocaust themes and indirectly with Holocaust Cultism. Sarrazin does not deal directly with the Holocaust in either that book or in the new book, which is about political Islam in Europe/Germany.
For the CDU, I had to include a '10' for Holocaust Pushers just for Angela Merkel alone now, who, although she isn't a crazed Holocaust-maniac like Joschka Fischer, does seem clearly motivated by the Holocaust and Holocaust-politics, given her actions. I also reduced the estimate of Holocaust Opponents from what I proposed last year (I proposed 0 - 80 - 20), from 20 to 15, as some of the Holocaust Opponents will by now have defected to the AfD. It may even by now be 10 - 80 - 10 or even 15 - 75 - 10, following years of the Merkel Cult of Personality in the CDU.
For
Linke, the '30' Neutral score represents a core constituency for this party, which is working-class ex-East German older people, especially those who did not grow up with Holocaust training. However, this party will not have any actual Holocaust opponents, because anyone like this who actually cares about t he issue and is a conscious (even if secret) opponent of the Holocaust would have gone to AfD by now. I have read that think many eastern
Linke voters have done this, replaced by some ex-SPDers and others; in the West, more and more by foreigners. Politics is always shfiting, and the image of the
Linke as old communist-loyalists may soon need updating.
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Current Polling for each German partymid-September 2018 (see
here)
AfD: Up to 20%*
CDU/CSU: 28-30%
FDP: 8-10%
SPD: 16-18%
Green: 13-15%
Linke: 8-10%
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(* - Note that for AfD, 17.5% is highest result [Aug. 2018], but AfD support is always known to be underestimated in polling; the chance that their true support now exceeds 20% seems high, to me.)
Now as we multiply the first table by the second, we get a very rough estimate of Holocaust support in German politics:
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% of Voters, by Party and Position on Holocaust
Party: [Holocaust Pushers] - [Neutrals] - [Opponents of the Holocaust]
AfD: 0 - 8% - 12%
CDU: 3% - 22% - 4%
FDP: 0 - 9% - 0
SPD: 11% - 4% - 2%
Green: 13% - 1% - 0
Linke: 6% - 3% - 0
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This gives us a support, society wide, including many now in Germany whose ancestors were not in 1940s-Germany:
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German Political Situation re: the Holocaust Question Grand Total, for Sept. 2018
- 33%: [Holocaust Pushers]
- 47%: [Neutrals]
- 18%: [Opponents of the Holocaust]
Note: This is a composite estimate of political parties' internal positions on the Holocaust, multiplied by party support and added together. Total does not add up to 100 due to rounding and <5% support nationally going to another specific party, not one of the six here analyzed and too small for pollsters to count.
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SummaryDespite the AfD's steady gains over the past three years, and especially in the past one year in which a purported "protest party that would surely break apart soon" has added healthily to its support base, the overall picture remains unfavorable for opponents of the Holocaust. It stands today roughly similar to what it was last year (my estimate for the election was it would be 35 - 50 - 15), except that there has probably been a sifting of Holocaust Opponents on the Right to the AfD, which is now Germany's first-ever major party
defacto opposed to the Holocaust, but a strengthening of Holocaust-pushers on the left with the continued fading of the SPD with its lingering Holocaust-neutral faction.
The ideal, and most realistic, scenario for Holocaust Liberation, given this analysis, would be:
(1) the AfD holding together, and
(2) the CDU ejecting Merkel, and over the next few years pushing its party numbers on Holocaust Politics (on my scale proposed above) towards 0 - 65 - 35, which means eliminating the Holocaust Pusher influence that has come in with Merkel. I suspect 0 - 65 - 35 to be CDU's realistic limit before it would really begin to split apart. If CDU wants to prevent more CDUers from defecting to AfD, or win some back, it will need to move away from the influence of Holocaust Pushers and their agenda, as conservative and rightist-nationalist voters are not attracted to Holocaust-pushers.