All Labour has achieved by doing so is to alienate people who may have supported them and increase the salience of issues, such as trans individuals and migrants, for the likes of Reform to hammer them on. It is a lose/lose strategy from any way you look at it. 8/

Labour is currently making the choice to abandon the principles which led people to support them in favour of chasing the votes of those who never will. In practical terms, benefits cuts, increased deportations, permanent puberty blockers ban, they've already gone further than Conservatives did. 7/

That’s a wider issue in any case:

This is the SPD’s worst result ever.

It is the CDU’s second worst result.

It is the AfD’s best result so far and basically a doubling of their %

So really: no time at all for any kind of complacency; the far right was not defeated.

/endPS

PS: I should also have mentioned that many, many constituencies, especially in the east, have the AfD at well over 30%. I’ve also seen plenty of results at over 40% there. That trend is very likely to continue as results continue to come in. The east will be AfD-land, likely no other way to put it.

That doesn’t have to happen. Grown-up politics could certainly offer better.

But given Merz’s record, and how he has positioned the CDU, I certainly don’t think tonight offers a reason for any kind of celebration.

The wind has not been taken out of the far right sails.

/end

“Schlimmer geht immer”, we say in German—it can always be worse. Yes, sure. But seriously: if that’s what we have to feel grateful for, the bar is truly low

This outcome, the way it looks now, is bad.

The fact that the AfD didn’t do even better really isn’t a good way of looking at this.

So what I am saying is this:

The top three parties are either far right (AfD) or happy to let pandering to the far right determine at least some of their policy.

In so doing, they primarily just enable the original.

That’s not a win; it’s not a good outcome.

I do wonder how much we might start to see a backlash against the far right driven by disgust at Trump, Putin, etc in Europe.

People didn’t want to believe it could be this bad but now they get to see what the people who support the AFD like Musk are really about & overall we don’t want it.

Yet women are less likely to be in leadership positions than men.

Good article here countering the meritocracy myth. www.forbes.com/sites/tomasp...

Meritocracy means if you're a white man, you get the gig.

Just once, just *once*, I would love to see some interrogate the thought process which runs "BLM makes me uncomfortable. This is clearly a problem with the movement". Like, there's another possible explanation there guys?