The Stassi Quote

We are in the midst of a three state campaign effort in Germany.....with campaign rhetoric hyping up.  So, today....AfD's top player in one of the state elections made this comment:

"It feels again like in the GDR." 

--Björn Höcke, in referring hardening regulations and spy activity of the current German government, and comparing against the old East German government.

Here's the problem, when Hocke compares this way and identifies the Merkel government as a collection of modern Stassi thugs....some in these eastern regions of Germany (where the elections are occurring) are sitting there and contemplating the image of old East Germany, the Stassi, and this negative chatter by journalists.

In today's news, the public TV crowd tried to counter Hocke's statement by saying that the old Stassi (secret police) were NOT bound by the Constitution.  Well, that's not exactly correct. There's no doubt that a East German Constitution existed, but behind it were hundreds of pages of regulation that affected or enhanced the Constitution.  It's the same basic pattern of today's Germany where rights and the Constitution that exists....but regulations exist behind it, into the hundreds of pages.

The problem here is that thousands will center their mind on that quote, and start to think about what has been said by the various parties (the CDU, the Greens, the Linke Party, the SPD, etc).  Some may eventually agree with Hocke....that old East Germany has been attached to the new unified Germany, and there's some problems existing.

If you had predicted a decade ago that someone would go and make this accusation, and trigger people to think about the German government in this way?  I would have laughed.  But here we are.