At some point in the last couple of weeks....seven German AfD Party members (the anti-immigration political folks) went off on a trip to Syria.
Yes, it is a bit shocking. Based on what has been said....they didn't ask anyone within the Bundestag, or let the German foreign office know about their intentions.
So they arrived in Damascus and had a brief day or two with the Assad crew. Some talks over different things, and then they came back.
Oddly, this has stirred up a bunch of hornets with the remaining 85-odd-percent of the Bundestag. Chief reason?
Well....things then to get scripted by the five other party-players, and no one was supposed to be going over to talk to Assad. In their mind, you can't just have unsophisticated non-intellectual types going and conducting a Q and A session with some foreign party....especially Assad.
What could play out? Well....you could see a AfD-Assad plan come up where peace has come out, and the AfD folks talking of some massive rebuilding plan.....if x-number of the Syrians in Germany were to return. You can imagine the SPD and CDU folks standing there and trying to explain via the public forums that they are against any kind of reconstruction plan and it's just plain 'evil' to suggest that Assad's government could rebuild the country.
The problem here is that Merkel held 'thunder and lightning in a bottle', and was an absolute magician at controlling the public topic here since 2013. Somewhere behind the AfD is someone or some group who've figured out the whole 'lightning-in-a-bottle' routine, and decided to test the magic act.
Maybe this goes nowhere, but I suspect that the Afd is going to produce some peace committee and start to build some public confidence in their ability. It may be all fake and done for various reasons, but that's the whole problem today with theater-politics.
2 comments:
This is an interesting development.
It would have been interesting to stand there when they briefed Merkel what the AfD guys did. It's a strategy that I don't think 95-percent of the AfD Party would have conceived, and I'd admit that it might go nowhere. But all of this is like some wrestling camp script....good guys and bad guys....scenes changing week by week. No German journalist has ever sat down with a hundred Syrians in Germany and asked the magic question...if peace were to come, and rebuilding were to occur....would you go back? Those over forty years old? I think most would go back. Those under 20 years old? They'd likely stay in Germany. The ones in the middle....I'm not sure about.
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