For several months here in Germany...leading up to the EU election (last Sunday), it was painfully obvious that an attempt by the other political parties and the news media (particularly public TV news)....to just say if you were trending toward AfD (the far-right-wing party).....you were stupid and Nazi-like.
Various demonstrations against right-wingism were mounted and hundreds of thousands of Germans participated.
At the time, I just kept thinking....this type of motivation and public criticism doesn't really work well, and in some cases....it might even galvanize the public to stand by their original stance.
In the 24 hours after the election? It seems like a lot of the opposition party chatter went to the standard....'how could these people be this stupid to vote for the AfD'. In their mind....the belief is if you heavily criticize party affiliation, that will be enough to cure 'stupid-voting'.
I would offer the more useful tactic, after you analyze AfD....they are a two-topic party....anti-migrant/asylum and pro-Russia (on the Ukraine war). That's it. They don't have 25-odd platform pieces like the Greens, SPD, CDU or FDP parties. The smart tactic is to examine the two topics, and find a way to take both away (convincing the public that you might turn to being totally neutral on Ukraine, and that you might find a way to deport problem-migrants actually out of the country).
I don't expect either to be considered, and the trend will continue to be the 'you-must-be-an-idiot' criticism to continue.
Odds of a wild national election in the fall of 2025? I would predict that the AfD....nationally...will get somewhere in the range of 16-to-20 percent of the vote. It's not enough to win, but it's enough to handcuff the eventual winners (the CDU/CSU) into accepting some coalition deal with both the SPD and Greens....to have 50-percent or more of a coalition.
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