"Decline is a choice"

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The voters of Austria seem poised to overthrow their ruling class, but we’ll see if that ruling class permits them to do so; France didn’t, nor did the EU itself.

In neighboring Germany, however, no problem: the sheeple, possibly because of some vague sense of collective guilt, have voted, again, for their own suicide. Reminds me of England, and residents of our own blue states.

Beege Welborn, HotAir:

Double Deutsch Down on Dummkopf

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…. Sometimes, it's the spectre of history years past and old habits that are the undoing of the voting public, out of obstinacy. When they completely move against their own obvious best interest in a baffling way.

It has happened in the local elections this past Sunday in Baden-Württemberg, known as Germany's 'Auto Heartland' - ah. Maybe you can see where I'm heading with this.

The area is legendary, and nearly on its knees.

Baden-Württemberg’s election is overshadowed by worries over deindustrialisation

... A vast Mercedes museum on Stuttgart’s outskirts, opened by Angela Merkel in 2006, testifies to the car’s role in building Baden-Württemberg’s wealth. But the sector may be facing “the greatest challenge in its history”, says Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut, the economy minister. Over 200,000 jobs in and around Stuttgart, the state capital, depend on it. Mercedes and Porsche are laying off workers. Bosch, one of the largest suppliers, will cut 22,000 jobs by 2030, many here in its home state.

Still more troubled are the smaller Mittelstand firms dotted around the state, many of which depend on the internal combustion engine, which faces obsolescence as cars electrify. Companies that might once have downsized are now being wound up, says Martin Mucha, a Stuttgart-based corporate lawyer. Firms’ travails are curbing tax revenues, forcing towns and cities to slash services. Stuttgart’s corporate-tax receipts have fallen by almost half in two years. Nearly half of voters tell pollsters the region could face the fate of Detroit, which fell into destitution and bankruptcy when its car sector crumbled.

… Baden-Württemberg’s rural spots are wealthy too, not at all like the ramshackle, depopulated areas of eastern Germany where the afd thrives. Take Hohenlohe, a region in the state’s north dotted with successful companies. Tim Breitkreuz, the energetic young candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats (cdu), is campaigning here. The houses are big and well kept. Unemployment is just 3.7%. Yet Mr Breitkreuz is locked in battle with an afd rival. A natural optimist, he says he has to dwell on problems to secure voters’ trust. At a cdu campaign event nearby, some party activists rage against what they regard as idiotic decisions imposed by lefties in Berlin, or dogmatic Eurocrats prematurely killing the combustion engine. 

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Welborn: “To someone watching from afar, it is inconceivable that the Greens, who have been so much at the forefront of the energy disaster that is Germany right now - the Green candidate for minister-president, Cem Özdemir, worked closely with Robert Halbeck, architect of much of the current energywoes besetting the country - should be leading the polling or anywhere near the top.

Once yesterday's votes were counted, however, it turns out they'd won the whole shebang.”

As German blogger eugyppius calls them:

 Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods

In 2011, Angela Merkel idiotically accelerated the German nuclear phase-out just a few months after her coalition passed legislation that would’ve slowed it down by twelve years. Because of an earthquake and a tsunami that happened 13,000 kilometers away in Japan, Merkel suddenly decided that Germany needed to abandon nuclear power as soon as possible, although the Federal Republic knows neither tsunamis nor earthquakes and not even the Japanese drew this drastic conclusion from the Fukushima disaster.

Merkel’s real motivations were, as always, tactical: She hoped to deny the surging Green Party a winning electoral issue in the Baden-Württemberg elections that year, and so we can call her move a twofold failure: The Greens won over 24% of the vote anyway, which was just enough to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and force the CDU into opposition. And today, citizens of a denuclearised Federal Republic must live with a declining economy and ongoing deindustrialisation, thanks in large part to having some of the highest electricity prices in continental Europe. It was a multi-dimensional fractal f**kup, what Merkel did in 2011. We’re still paying for it.

And yet, the voters voted to lather, rinse, repeat.

...Yesterday evening, the bill for all of this humdrum imbecility came due. The Greens emerged as the winners, if barely, with 30.2% of the vote – just a few points down from their historic high of 32.6% in 2021. The CDU improved over their last showing but managed to underperform even the most pessimistic forecasts, with a mere 29.7%.

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This was a predictable outcome, and nevertheless it is astounding. The Greens and the CDU are the undisputed architects of German decline, and yet the prosperous voters of this beautiful southern state have sent both of these terrible parties back into the Landtag with an enormous mandate to do more of the same. This is proof number 5,234,345 that deep and lasting prosperity has the power to do what few other forces can, namely turn millions of otherwise sensible intelligent people into walking retards. Alas, there seems to be no way to de-zombify the voters without making them massively poorer.

AND

 In order to keep this post short enough for even the limited attention span of our Irish readers, I won’t cite here the many, many warnings energy producers have fired off to California’s and New York’s governments, alert them to the disastrous results forthcoming if they continue with their green energy policies, but there’s no shortage of such warning, many of which I’ve posted here earlier. Still, when Armageddon does arrive, the vistims will be shocked to discover that they voted for it, repeatedly.