In Soviet Germany, the government protests YOU.
Alas, government-organised and state media-promoted protests are a great expense and they cannot go on forever. Yesterday Der Spiegel could still write that “tens of thousands are protesting against the AfD,” but even the inflated numbers they provided – 17,000 in Darmstadt! 5,000 in Heilbronn! 4,000 in Rottenburg! 2,500 in Schwerin! 1,500 in Greifswald! – were notably smaller than the massive actions reported days earlier in places like Hamburg and Munich. And today all is quiet, thanks in no small part to the rail strike, which makes it hard to pack the streets by shipping in extras from out of town.
The media want us to believe that all of this has really hurt the opposition, but the numbers belie the headlines. An INSA survey published on Monday has the AfD polling at 21.5% Germany-wide, which Welt hails as “the biggest decline in almost two years.” That is not really true,1 and anyway the AfD were polling even lower in November 2023, before the whole false Correctiv controversy ever began. It is a similar story with the latest Forsa survey published yesterday, which has AfD down two points to where they were last October. The press can wildly inflate ridiculously dishonest stories, the government and their affiliates can call for nationwide demonstrations against “the right,” and they can mobilise hundreds of thousands of their supporters, but all they get for their trouble are a few measly percentage points hardly beyond the error margin.
One way our establishment schoolmarms probably could hurt the AfD, is if they stopped delivering us tiresome lectures about the wrongness of our political preferences. Nothing makes me want to put the opposition in power more than reading the deluge of commentary about why it is a grave sin to want the Scholz Clown Car out of government. You could not devise a better pro-AfD guerilla publicity campaign if you tried.
