{"id":4782,"date":"2017-05-16T10:09:25","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T08:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4782"},"modified":"2017-05-16T10:12:12","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T08:12:12","slug":"are-the-german-greens-suffering-the-same-fate-as-ukip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/4782\/","title":{"rendered":"Are the German Greens suffering the same fate as UKIP?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Staying on the subject of lunatic Greens, they are facing electoral gloom<\/a> in Germany:<\/p>\n

Germany’s once high-flying Green Party is foundering in many states. After a disastrous election result in North Rhine-Westphalia, the party is promising change, but it may come too late for September’s national poll.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole article is worth reading and gives some idea as to why the Greens, who were once a powerful political force in Germany’s coalition governments, are now in trouble:<\/p>\n

Following the widely publicized incidents on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, which saw widespread sexual assaults committed largely by asylum seekers, the party struggled to come up with a clear position on its refugee and security policies (they still aren’t even clear today).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems the Germans haven’t quite rejected populism, either.<\/p>\n

The party successfully helped block deportations of Afghan nationals whose asylum applications had been rejected, but it did little to communicate what the rest of its asylum policies might look like.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite how deluded one would need to be to do something like this and expect electoral success, even in Germany, is difficult to imagine.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, in a state that has undergone deep structural changes, with the end of coal mining and much heavy industry, the party could have benefited by positioning itself more strongly as an environmentalist party. Instead, the party placed its focus almost entirely on education — despite the fact that only 4 percent of voters in the state consider the Greens to be truly competent in this policy area.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that paragraph offers the best explanation, although the author doesn’t quite say it. The fact is, all mainstream political parties adopted the Greens’ more sensible environmental policies years ago, as well as too many of their idiotic ones. Germany has already agreed to close its nuclear power plants and impose the strictest environmental legislation in Europe on its industries and households. The same pattern is repeated across most of the developed world now: every major political party has signed up to the hysteria on climate change (even Trump has yet to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, as he promised he would), air pollution is a permanent hot-topic particularly now the results of pushing everyone to switch to diesel engines is becoming clear, recycling has been firmly adopted as the new religion in the west, and useless windmills are being built at an ever-increasing pace to meet ludicrous renewable energy targets.<\/p>\n

This has left the Greens outflanked on most environmental subjects. In order to differentiate themselves they’ve been forced to propose utterly insane policies (ban motor cars, stop eating meat, etc.) and to venture into other areas (e.g. education) where they are useless or social matters (e.g. immigration) where they are out of whack with the majority of the population. The mainstream parties have stolen their popular policies leaving them looking like a bunch of nutjobs on the fringe. Which they are, of course.<\/p>\n

A reasonable similarity may be drawn between the fate of the Greens in Germany and that of UKIP in Britain. UKIP have found their defining policy – Britain leaving the EU – adopted by the Conservatives, leaving little reason for voters to stick with them. Whenever UKIP have tried to branch out from their main policy into other areas they’ve proved themselves to be an\u00a0incoherent, squabbling mess which no sensible voter would go anywhere near. With Brexit underway, their\u00a0raison d’\u00eatre<\/em> has vanished and they lack the competence to transform themselves into a serious party. Perhaps the Greens in Germany and elsewhere are treading the same path. I certainly hope so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Staying on the subject of lunatic Greens, they are facing electoral gloom in Germany: Germany’s once high-flying Green Party is foundering in many states. After a disastrous election result in North Rhine-Westphalia, the party is promising change, but it may … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[80,88,20,42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4782"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4782"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4786,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4782\/revisions\/4786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}