I am not well-versed in German politics so I'm not going to pretend to understand what's going there, but there are some fascinating angles that I'm seeing.
1. East Germany: This is fascinating. First thing we note at this election is the rise of AfD, obviously. hey more than doubled their share of the votes, which is obviously alarming. But you look at the map, and you can see a glaring fact: AfD pretty much owns what used to be East Germany, you know, the part of Germany that did not enjoy post-WWII democracy until the 90s, a region that I assume is generally lower on the wealth scale, probably getting left behind by the new tech-driven economy. Yeah, I'm trying to have them fit into what I think is fertile grounds for the rise of fascist parties, so if anyone who actually knows the place should correct me.
The other thing that is noted by observers is the rise of The Left (= Die Linke), which when you start digging into, turns out to be a relatively new party (born 2007) through party mergers that trace their lineage to the East Germany's socialist party. When you look at the vote distribution map, they look like the second choice in East Germany more often than not, while in the west, you get the usual distribution of Social Democrats (= SPD) and The Greens following Christian Democrats. I don't know how long this has been the case (I'm guessing since forever) but there is a sharp alignment differences between the east and the west, and it looks like the old Eastern Germany is pulling some serious weight here.
Stating the obvious here, it looks like Germany has not done an excellent job in integrating the two halves of their nation after the unification.
2. Multi-party system: This is what I want to talk about, and people who know me know that this is one of my favorite topics. But this is what we have been observing in Europe: multi-party systems provide a much better guard against extremist take over of a nation than the kind of duopoly we see in the US. Multiple parties are free to shift alliances and form coalitions against perceived enemies, which is something that is not possible under our system. I know we would like to go on and on about the fascist informational ecosystem, FoxNews, compliance across the Republican Party, the role of Putin, etc, but I firmly believe all of these would have been countered effectively if (and only if) we had a multi-party system where the anti-Trump right could shift towards rather than feeling that they have to hold their nose and vote for Trump. Because political duopoly is all we've known in this country, it's ambient background that we don't even see anymore. I'm telling you, on the other hand, that is one of the major reasons we are where we are today.
The problem we have here is not money. Sanders and Obama campaigns showed us that the money is there in small donations. The reason we have a two party lock on the system is deeper than that. It's how we do our elections. "Winner takes all" is the reason we have a duopoly. The answer is proportional representation.
I know it's a losing battle for me, but I will make this point to my last breath. "Winner takes all", which in itself is a profoundly undemocratic way to run elections, is the freeway that fascism used to gain control of the nation. When, after a generation or two, we return to democracy, we need to ensure we have a more rational and democratic political system instead of duplicating what we had "because it worked so well until Trump came along". And the only way we can build a better, more resilient democracy down the line is if we all have a better grasp *today* of what went wrong and the structural faults we allowed to continue. We need to internalize the lessons *today* that there were better ways to build a democracy that we missed out on the first time around.
Our goal should not be "getting back to normal". That was Biden's approach and we can see how that failed miserably. Our goal should be "building back better", the thing that BIden talked about but was not able to execute on.