Very interesting times ahead for Germany

So are the EU not just better off trying to stop immigration by trying to sort out why people are leaving the countries for the EU?

What people are non EU and are trying to get into the EU?
Why are they trying to get into the EU?
How can we stop these people leaving their own countries to come to the EU?

Hungary is in stagnation and an inexorable decline. At least France and Germany have migrant workers to replace the missing kids as taxpayers to support the older generations. Hungary have neither

who cares about Hungary? its a small country , the French and Germans on the other hand are circling the drain and can only lead to a breakup of the EU in time. Maybe AI saves the day but the French at least with be very resistant to that

im not sure exactly what that means, the majority would agree on what "sensible" looks like ie legal good illegal send back or physically stop in the first place, if you cant turn around a dinghy mid channel you are not doing border security right its that simple

Something tells me they might not have been getting too many dinghies to Hungary even if they hadn't "open the door".

Ah yes - always just the poor idiots that voted for him - nothing else. Very ignorant response, cant say i am surprised at this stage.

Hitler and the nsdap never had a majority in Germany. It was a coup by a fascist dictator, based on populist and anti-jewish rethoric.

I never said socialism and democracy ruined germany, that's a stretch. Fascism absolutely ruined Germany, ultimately, you are right. There was no fascism in 1919, which was a separate issue - although linked, as the treaty caused in 1919 by the austria hungary local conflict gave a fertile breeding ground for anti semetic feelings, fascism, dictatorship as the impoverished german people looked for someone to blame for the economic disaster that was the weimar republic. It took 50+ years after the impact of fascism and ww2 to even get a German state united again, and here we are, over 75 years later and we still see the socio economic impacts on the east of germany.

you are putting words in my mouth ,ill keep it simple for you im against any illegal emigration , fly them back, turn the boats around its all the same to me, apply for a visa like normal people

They are looking to close down the plants because the Workers Council are highly antagonistic.

They had to end discussions with Renault on shared production of a new entry level electric car.

Volkswagen is a brand marketed worldwide and with barriers to trade in other parts of the world it is not in Volkswagen's interest to be building all cars in Germany.

If I can bring this back a bit more to the original topic of this thread, the AfD, I’m afraid you’re a bit too optimistic in that regard.

Many of the participants in this thread in general seem to believe that it is just a right wing europsceptic and anti-immigration party, and to be fair, when it got started in 2012, it was mostly that. However, in the years after its founding, especially from 2015 onwards, the party morphed into something far more sinister. This was when radicals such as Björn Höcke started making inroads into the party. It has effectively absorbed the openly neo-Nazi NPD, particularly in the traditional heartlands of the latter in east Germany, and now not only houses but amplifies ideologues and demagogues who are openly calling for foreigners and Jews to be expelled from Germany. The party has positioned itself not just as an opponent to the established democratic parties in Germany, but openly opposes the very basics of German society, including parliamentary democracy as such and the Grundgesetz, that is, the German constitution itself.

AfD members have been implicated in the planned coup of a group of right-wing extremists called Reichsbürger. This group, which claims that the Federal Republic of Germany is an illegitimate occupation regime and that the German Reich never ceased to exist, is in many ways similar to the “Freemen of the Land” that you sometimes see popping up here in Ireland. However, this particular group was highly organised and had already begun hoarding some truly worrying amounts of weapons. 27 of its members are currently facing trial for High Treason, which is something extremely rare in the German judicial system. Similarly, AfD party members and functionaries have been caught aiding and abetting arsonists that attacked refugee accommodation centres or similar attacks.

This is not just my assessment, by the way, that’s the assessment of the Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, which in itself hardly a hotbed of left-wing agitation, to put it mildly. This agency, together with its subsidiaries in a number of German states, has initiated close surveillance of the party with the aim of determining whether the AfD fulfils the criteria required to ban it. Some state chapters have already been determined to be extremist, as has the Flügel, an internal and radical wing of the AfD that only escaped being banned by dissolving itself beforehand. Needless to say, this is an extremely high bar to clear, only two political parties have ever been banned in post-war Germany, this being the SRP, which was a successor to the NSDAP, as well as the KPD, the communist party. For the Verfassungsschutz, either on the state or the federal level, to even initiate the type of surveillance that the AfD is being subjected to, is pretty rare.

In this context, it’s worth pointing out that the recent success of the AfD in east Germany is only partially due to supposed concerns about immigration. As I mentioned in my previous post, a lot of the areas where the party saw its highest share of votes have little to no immigration at all. Rather, the AfD has been able to play on the desires many East Germans have for as strong, authoritarian “strong man state” along the lines of the former GDR, exploiting the rather tepid acceptance for multi-party democracy in the east. A large scale study in 2022 showed that around 33% of the population in the east harboured some level of support for nationalist and antidemocratic ideologies, with support for extreme right wing beliefs strongest in the states of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. This study was conducted before the AfD scored its current successes, so it’s safe to assume that these numbers have only often worse since then.

How are they trying though?
What countries are most of the immigrants coming from?

That’s why I wrote this. There’s plenty of room to discuss the pros and cons of the immigration policies of the last decade or so, and whilst I consider myself pretty left wing in many regards, there’s no denying that some massive mistakes were made.

Having said that, there’s a difference between arguing for stricter immigration laws or giving law enforcement authorities more powers and openly attacking the very pillars of our modern society. For all their failings, parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, the rule of law, and a broadly liberal society are the crowning achievements of centuries of often bloody struggles throughout human history. Yet, as Fritz Bauer, German Public Prosecutor at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials I mentioned earlier in this thread, stated in a televised interview in the 1960s, this civilised appearance is no more than a thin veneer covering our animal nature, a veneer that can easily peel off.

Maybe, it’s my German upbringing coming through here, but I believe that, whatever our positions on the numerous hot button topics of our times might be, all of us, as citizens of liberal democracies, we have a responsibility, a duty, to stand up when we see efforts being made to undermine the rights and institutions that prop up our modern liberal democracy. I grew up surrounded by people who had witnessed the horrors of the Second World War. They were the kindly grey-haired aunts and uncles living next door, the grandmother that had spent her teenage years cowering in a school basement because of air raids; another aunt, highly educated, who’d had to spend much of her teenage years on the run first from the Gestapo and then from the Red Army. She never spoke of her experiences. But they were also the unrepentant old couple living somewhere in Upper Austria, him a Luftwaffe pilot and latterly a member of the SS, the neighbour that could never forget the deeds they’d done in the rugged hills of Yugoslavia. All these are living memories for me, just one generation removed, not some ancient history. I’ve seen the cruelty of Theresienstadt, seen the Stolpersteine , the golden stones set into the pavements of many German towns and cities marking the houses of people or families deported to the horrors of the extermination camps. And the ghosts of this past are still very much alive, and hungry for a comeback. Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch aus dem das kroch, as German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote, with quite a bit of involuntary prescience.

That is why it is so important to show the AfD for what it actually is, and that is why I wrote my previous post. It took less than two years to dismantle the constitutional and social framework of Weimar Germany, and no one should be under the illusion that this can’t happen again, whether in Germany or somewhere else.

Absolutely the point is to understand history and not make the same mistakes. And that's why it's so important people who support and idolise Hitler aren't let into power again so they can attempt to exterminate minorities they don't like.

How do you know that war criminals, rapists and murderers are not arriving in Dublin airport or in taxis from Northern Ireland?

You don’t.

The statistics on country of origins of immigrants is available so if you were interested in facts you could find out how many Russians have emigrated to the EU instead of insinuating that the only criminals migrating to the EU are Russians arriving via Hungary. You might find that a huge majority of Russian migrants are not “war criminals, rapists and murderers” as you say but ordinary people who want nothing to do with war but some believe they should be vilified and hated, not for the colour of their skin but for their nationality.