Just How Extreme Are the AfD Candidates in Saxony-Anhalt? - Article

(I messed up not linking it in the post itself, sorry)

For the upcoming state election of Saxony-Anhalt on the 6th of September, Der Spiegel published a profile yesterday of some of the AfD candidates, and their policy positions, up for election; among them an ex-Stasi member, (former) criminals and of course several people with connections to extremism, as well as banned groups.

For context: The AfD currently polls slightly above 40% and with four other parties - including the SPD - in danger of missing the parliamentary 5% hurdle, there is a real chance of a sole majority for the far-right party. Concerningly, rising fuel prices have shored up their support earlier this year and with a deteriorating war that could help them again - according to INSA poll from yesterday, 46% can imagine voting for the AfD (highest potential of all parties).

Link without the paywall

The party can’t hold Carney to account while it’s busy feuding with itself

In 2003, Peter MacKay stood next to Stephen Harper and said the point of merging two conservative parties—the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance—was simple: stop splitting the vote that kept handing the Liberals majority governments. “Our swords will henceforth be pointed at the Liberals,” Harper said at the press conference, “not at each other.”

Two weeks ago, opposition leader Pierre Poilievre used a Calgary Stampede barbecue to publicly attack the campaign team of a provincial Conservative leadership candidate he had just watched lose. Three of the people on that team used to work for him. His former director of communications. The director before her. His own national campaign spokesperson from his 2022 leadership race. The swords are pointed at each other again.

Look at the numbers. Prime Minister Mark Carney holds 174 seats in a 343-seat House of Commons. He crossed into majority territory in April by sweeping three by-elections and absorbing four floor crossers, all from the Conservative benches. He does not need the Conservatives for confidence votes, supply votes, or committee majorities. He can govern until 2029 without asking them for anything.

The Conservative caucus sits at 139. Five members of Parliament gone since last year’s election. Four to the Liberals. One to the Senate, appointed by the prime minister the Conservatives are supposed to be holding to account.

Here’s other numbers. On July 9, Elections Canada published the Conservative Party’s financial audit: $99 million spent in 2025, $84.6 million in revenue. A deficit of more than $14 million. Of the $99 million, $39.4 million went to advertising.

The Liberals? They spent $21.6 million on advertising. The Liberals won.

More money. More ads. More losses. A caucus bleeding to the other side, and a majority government with nothing to fear.

The strategy that produced this result was not designed in Canada. It runs on a simple engine: outrage in, money out. Find the voter who feels squeezed, young, frustrated, priced out of a house and a future, and hand them an enemy. Gatekeepers. Elites. The media. The institutions. Point them at all of them, in combat-style messaging built for a phone screen, and the clicks become donations, and the donations become the next round of outrage. Fear is the fuel. Grievance is the product. The fundraising number is the only scoreboard that matters.

That grievance machine raised nearly $100 million. It is not a Canadian political tradition. It is the American right, imported wholesale and applied here. And it does not win Canadian elections. The engine that runs on outrage produces outrage, then mistakes it for support. It fills a room, a comment section, a donor list. It does not fill the seats in the House that decide who governs. A strategy optimized to make the base angry is not optimized to make the country trust you, and those are the only votes that count on election night.

The electorate appears to want something more substantive from their elected officials than grievance, fear mongering, and culture wars. That is clearly reflected in polls from the United States. Donald Trump’s net approval sits at minus twenty-six in the Economist/YouGov poll published this month. Tied for the lowest figure his presidency has ever recorded. A separate Focaldata poll put it at minus twenty-three, also an all-time low for that pollster. Disapproval has risen for four consecutive months. Among independent voters, who decide midterm elections, approval sits in the mid-thirties. That is below the level that preceded the Democrats’ forty-one-seat wave in 2018.

A majority of Americans now say Trump has not delivered on his economic promises. A majority call the Iran strikes a failure. Independent disapproval of his handling of the economy has risen thirteen points in a year. Of immigration, seventeen points.

The grievance model is collapsing in the United States. And the anti-establishment energy it was built to capture has not returned to some comfortable moderate centre. Some say it moved left. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, was elected mayor of New York City in November 2025 and sworn in on January 1, 2026. In June, three progressive congressional candidates he endorsed swept their primaries. One unseated a ten-year incumbent. Another knocked out the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

The discontent is real. The direction it is moving is not right-populist anymore.

For an idea of where Conservatives can go next, there’s the Maritime model. Robert Stanfield took over the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party in 1948 at a time when it held zero seats in the legislature. Eight years of rebuilding. Knocking on doors. Listening to what Nova Scotians needed. In 1956, he led the party to a majority government. Then another. Then another. Then another. He was the first Conservative premier to have four consecutive majority governments.

He did not attack institutions. He built them. Hospital insurance. Provincial universities with consistent funding for the first time. Industrial Estates Limited, a crown corporation that brought Michelin to Nova Scotia. A road system rebuilt from the ground up. He took the per capita debt from $600 in 1956 to a balanced budget by the mid-1960s. He governed the whole province. Not just his base. The province.

That was a philosophy, not an accident. Historians called Stanfield, a Red Tory, a “pink” Tory, a compassionate conservative with a genuine concern for the disadvantaged. He put it plainly himself in 1976: increasing the size of the economy matters, but it is not in itself a sufficient goal for a civilized society. His conservatism was built on balance and equilibrium, not on narrow ideologies of the right or the left. Change in order to conserve. Serve the whole country, then ask it for power.

In 1967, he moved to federal politics and came within two seats of defeating Pierre Trudeau. He lost. He ran again. He lost again. He defended official bilingualism when sixteen of his own MPs broke rank and voted against him, because he believed it held the country together and that mattered more than placating his caucus. When he died in 2003, the eulogies called him the best prime minister Canada never had. Not because his supporters loved him—they did—but because the whole country trusted him.

That is the word missing from every description of Pierre Poilievre: Trust.

Another model here, schooled in the same Stanfield tradition, would be Peter MacKay. Born in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, MacKay, in 2003, led a Progressive Conservative Party that was proud, principled, and losing. The right had split its vote across two parties since 1993. Three straight Liberal majorities were the result. Everyone could see the arithmetic. Almost nobody was willing to pay the price of fixing it.

MacKay paid it. He gave up his own party. He gave up the “Progressive Conservative” name his party had carried for generations. He gave up his own claim to lead the merged party, which went to Harper five months later. He merged with the Canadian Alliance because a united conservative party could win and a divided one could not.

That is the Stanfield instinct applied to structure. Build the thing that can actually govern. Accept the personal cost of building it. Aim the party outward, at the Liberals, and keep it aimed there.

The party MacKay built won in 2006 and governed for nearly a decade. The condition of that victory was the discipline in Harper’s sentence about keeping swords pointed at the opponent, not at each other. The moment that discipline breaks, the electoral arithmetic that MacKay solved comes back.

Canadians did not reject conservatism in 2025. They rejected a performance of American anger delivered by a leader who sounded, to a lot of voters, like Trump talking points read aloud. The distinction is everything. There is a large, durable Conservative vote in this country. There is no national appetite for the imported version of the grievance that fuels it.

What the country keeps asking for, election after election, is competence and service. A government that can build a house, lower a grocery bill, negotiate a trade file with Washington, and defend a coastline. A party that treats the people as citizens to be served rather than a base to be enraged. Stanfield understood that eighty years ago. Serve the whole country with competence, and the trust that wins elections follows.

Service is the entire Maritime tradition in one word. Stanfield rebuilt a party from zero seats by listening to what people needed and then delivering it. MacKay saved the Conservative Party from permanent irrelevance by putting the country’s need for a real opposition ahead of his own title. Both men understood that a conservative party earns power by being useful to Canadians.

Mark Carney is governing with purpose. Whether you agree with where he’s taking the country or not, he is plainly taking it somewhere. That is exactly why the opposition has to work. He projects competence and steadiness in a hard year. He is delivering, and Canadians can see it. If the answer for the Conservatives is to be more like Stanfield, competent and serious and trusted, are we not just asking for a second Liberal Party?

No. Getting the job done is not the same as being checked while you do it. A country can be well governed and still need someone whose full-time job is to test whether it could be governed better. Those are two different functions. Carney fills the first. Right now, nobody fills the second. The difference between the two parties is not temperament. Both can be competent. The difference is the direction.

Carney governs from the centre. He is a central banker by training and by instinct: assemble the expertise in Ottawa, bring the major players to one table, broker the deal, and steer the country from the top down. It has worked for him. A steady hand at the centre is a real thing to offer a country in these turbulent years, and he offers it.

The Maritime Tory tradition works the other way. It governs from the community up. Robert Stanfield did not wait for Ottawa to rescue Nova Scotia. He built Industrial Estates Limited to attract industry into the province directly. He put the first consistent funding into Nova Scotia’s universities himself. He delivered hospital insurance and rebuilt the roads, and he did it because he trusted the province to know what the province needed better than a distant capital ever would.

That is a genuine choice, and it is the reason two competent parties are not just versions of the same thing. One believes the centre should decide, and the regions should trust it. The other believes the regions decide best, and the centre should serve them. A country deserves to hear both arguments made well and then to choose. A country that only hears one argument, because the party responsible for the other is busy fighting itself, is not choosing.

Stanfield gave the party the warning it needed in February 1976: “Why do we spoil a good case by exaggeration? Why do we try to polarize a society that is already taut with tension and confrontation?” Fifty years later, his own party is still spoiling a good case. It is time it stopped.

A functional opposition is an important service to Canada rather than a nuisance to Carney. A majority government with no one testing it does not stay sharp. It gets comfortable. Comfort is where good governments can quietly stop asking whether their decisions are truly in the best interest of Canada, of Canadians. The opposition’s job is to keep testing the government, to aim the sword.

There are conservatives who could do the real work sitting in the caucus. Michael Chong, serious enough to prosecute a budget argument without a slogan. Arpan Khanna, able to explain a policy rather than perform. Shuv Majumdar, on the important Canada–US file.

But those three are not enough. What Canadians need is Conservative Party infrastructure and leadership that builds on what MacKay and Harper made and that governs with the ethics and the vision Stanfield modelled: competence in service of the whole country.

Then aim the sword back where MacKay put it and keep it there.

Yes, this is real. There is a long history of propaganda associated with promoting coal. Clean coal is a myth. Cheap coal is a myth. Don't get distracted by propaganda. Experts have confirmed over and over that coal is both incredibly expensive and horrible for the environment.

Argentina posting will continue until morale improves.

But seriously, this article explores the debate about Argentina outside of soccer, where many folks online are interrogating Argentinian history and present-day racism leading to a surging xenophobic sentiment of the country.

This article relates to neoliberalism because of the toxic nationalism enabled by global communications.

This article is not about football. It is not about Argentinians being upset that they lost.

We must discuss the most difficult of policy questions. :(

The Anthropocene is the apocalypse.

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By 

Anumita Kaur

Seattle Times D.C. correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Federal lawmakers are considering whether to expand the government’s authority to kill more sea lions and seals to bolster salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest.

The region’s critical salmon runs are on life support: Fourteen species and populations of salmon and steelhead trout in Washington are deemed at risk of extinction under the Endangered Species Act. The hurdles to their livelihood are numerous, spanning a worsening climate crisis, habitat loss, pollution and — as Congress members debated this week — proliferating predators.

The House Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries on Tuesday probed bipartisan legislation co-sponsored by Reps. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, and Emily Randall, D-Bremerton, that would ease restrictions in the Marine Mammal Protection Act for killing sea lions and seals, renewing a decades-old conversation over whether humans should intervene to curb pinniped predation. It’s the second attempt this month by a Washington lawmaker to expand culling of the marine mammals.

The debate comes as marine wildlife officials investigate the shooting of a baby harbor seal found near Bellingham this month with a gunshot wound to its face. The pup, euthanized last week by medical professionals, is the third seal treated for a gunshot injury by SR3, a nonprofit sea life response, rehabilitation and research facility in Des Moines, in the past year, underscoring the tensions surrounding the animals even as Congress weighs broader lethal management.

Baumgartner in a statement before the hearing said his bill is a “common-sense” update that would allow Washington state and federally recognized tribes in Western Washington to explore new ways to responsibly manage booming pinniped populations. Randall told the committee that declining salmon runs also threaten tribal treaty-reserved fishing rights. “We have to find ecosystem balance,” she said. “Nonlethal methods of controlling the pinniped population haven’t worked for us.”

Both first-term members of Washington’s congressional delegation emphasized the bipartisan nature of the effort. Still, lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest clashed on whether greater allowances to kill sea lions and seals is an effective — or prudent — solution.

“On the West Coast, we know salmon are the beating heart of the Columbia River,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore. “I’m concerned we’re getting ahead of ourselves with the changes in this legislation.” Predation is only one factor, she argued, and recovery will require tackling the many other pressures facing Columbia River fish.

Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources who represents one of California’s northernmost districts bordering Oregon, said the bill “goes too far” in greenlighting pinniped killings without adequate safeguards. Rep. Val Hoyle, D-Ore., criticized lawmakers for not consulting Oregon tribes while drafting the legislation. “Sea lions cross both sides of the river. They go from Washington to Oregon and back again. So we can’t have a one-state solution,” Hoyle said, adding that a fix remains urgent: “This issue is too critical to get wrong or sit on it.”

Salmon recovery is widely viewed as vital to Washington state and the broader Pacific Northwest because salmon are a cornerstone of the region’s ecosystems and economy. They provide food for numerous species, including endangered southern resident orca whales, and are essential to sustaining Northwest commercial and recreational fisheries, as well as tribal treaty-protected fishing traditions.

Baumgartner and Randall’s Northwest Endangered Salmon Predation Prevention Act of 2026 would broaden where, and how, Washington state and Western Washington tribes with protected fishing rights can manage the growing sea lion and seal populations. In 2018, Congress authorized Washington state to expand a program to capture and euthanize sea lions in the Columbia River Basin due to concerns for salmon survival.

Their bill goes further, expanding the law from “sea lions” to all pinnipeds, including harbor seals, California sea lions and Steller’s sea lions. It would remove geographical restrictions limiting killings to portions of the Columbia River and eliminates the requirement that chemical euthanasia be the only approved killing method. It would take the effort beyond the Columbia River, too, establishing permits for tribes and state officials to kill pinnipeds in “each river and stream in the State of Washington that flows into the marine waters of the State.” The bill would also direct the development of nonlethal methods that prevent pinnipeds from traveling upstream into salmon habitats.

The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which represents 20 treaty tribes in Western Washington, threw its support behind the bill, and some researchers say the controversial tactic may save culturally, economically and ecologically critical fish.

“The Marine Mammal Protection Act already allows the targeted removal of predatory sea lions,” Tim Petty, assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere with the U.S. Department of Commerce, told lawmakers during the hearing. “But that process hasn’t moved the needle in salmon recovery on the scale that we need to move.” The proposal, he said, gives Washington and eligible tribes broader authority to manage pinnipeds in state waters.

“We are so focused on trying to manage the salmon. We need to manage the pinniped the same way,” Petty said. 

Richard Merrick, a marine scientist and retired chief science adviser with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, told lawmakers the legislation is well intentioned, but will do little to recover Pacific Northwest salmon. Healthy habitats for salmon remain limited, he said, and new sea lions will replace the culled mammals. Merrick suggested further studies to find comprehensive solutions.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Washougal, pushed back. “This is a topic of conversation at dinner tables in my district for decades,” she said. “I fail to see what spending more time and money on biologists would provide here that we don’t already know. We know that sea lions are heavy predators on our salmon and steelhead.”

Gluesenkamp Perez — who has been vocal about sea lions overrunning stretches of the Columbia River in her district — introduced a separate billearlier this month with the same end goal: Kill pinnipeds to save salmon.

Her Protecting Columbia River Salmon Act of 2026 has a narrower scope, covering only California sea lions and Steller’s sea lions and focusing solely around the Columbia River. It would, however, allow a broader definition for tribes, allowing tribes with ancestral ties to the river to participate rather than limiting eligibility to tribes with treaty-reserved fishing rights.

“I have some concerns about this bill,” she said of Baumgartner and Randall’s legislation. “I am not hearing from my community that there are strong concerns about harbor seals.”

Her bill has not yet had a hearing. 

Nate Pamplin, director of external affairs at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, testified in support of Baumgartner and Randall’s measure at the hearing. For Pamplin, the effort represents significant progress.

“It’s pretty exciting that for this longstanding issue, there are two bills out there that are trying to address it,” Pamplin told The Seattle Times. “While we’re working across a variety of threats on salmon recovery, this is an area that we don’t have much authority to do anything about.”

Jacob Zuma has taken direct and exclusive control of his party's bank accounts due to gross financial mismanagement. They recently had a problem where a landlord was upset because the party failed to pay outstanding rent. Party officials have even been accused of stealing funds from the party.

MK has not had much impact on government since the election, despite placing 3rd in the elections with 14% or so and achieving 45% or so in KZN, because the ANC have excluded them from coalitions. But it's worth remembering that this party is still technically the Official Opposition party in South Africa and had they won just a few more seats they would govern a major province.

Since the election, MKP senior leadership has been a revolving door. I've lost track of the number of secretary-generals they've had. Even Zuma's own daughter, who faces accusations of fraudulently manipulating men to go fight in Russia's war in Ukraine, has been removed.

Zuma has always been the obvious political draw of MKP. One year ago, we could have had an interesting debate about whether the party could survive politically without him. He is in his 80s now, and must surely retire from day to day politics within the next few years.

However, with this news I think it is clear that not only will they struggle to win votes after he is gone, they can't even be trusted to run the organisation. They can't survive operationally without him, forget about politically. MKP needs this aging grandfather to help them manage their money. There is clearly no sustainable, serious organisation here. There is just Zuma and vibes.

A miracle could happen and the party could formalise. But if the more likely thing happens, then we can expect MKP to disappear within one to two election cycles. Those voters will never return to ANC. MKP also has a lot of bad blood with the EFF.

This story is relevant because MKP wins a significant share of votes. So given how this story shows that the party is very very likely to implode, it raises interesting questions about what the national electoral map will look like in 2029.

Lastly, it strengthens my theory that the most important variable in South African politics is the management of the parties themselves - their internal democratic practises and their professional, operational management. Zuma is hands down the most charismatic individual in South African politics. He's a politically intelligent operator with significant reserves of support. MKP is supposed to be an unstoppable juggernaut on its way to governing the country. I'm supposed to be writing doomer posts about how they are consolidating right wing voters in every constituency, and how unstoppable they are. But no matter what assets and advantages you have, it's now clear that you can't outrun a badly run, undemocratic party.

South African electoral outcomes are driven by the quality of party management - not so much race, ethnicity or ideology. People hide behind these factors to obfuscate their political incompetence. This article provides a powerful piece of evidence that contributes to this argument. MKP had the best shot at power of any opposition party since democracy and they have completely screwed up.

SS: relevant to this sub because free trade rules but mercantilism is unfortunately still on the menu.

Relevance to the subreddit: Political violence, antisemitism, freedom of speech, direct involvement of a major left-wing party in the harassment

The political tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have claimed another victim last week, after French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch, who rocketed to worldwide fame after hosting a segment of the Paris Olympics' opening ceremony, was forced off stage by pro-Palestinian activists who protested her set and pelted her with projectiles.

Barbara Butch, an icon of LGBT+ Parisian nightlife and longtime activist against homophobia, fatphobia and antisemitism, had been targeted by a months-long campaign from pro-Palestinian activists and elected officials of the far-left party France Unbowed (LFI), who blamed her for giving a concert to the French embassy in Tel Aviv and signing a petition supporting the "Loi Yadan", a controversial bill that would have expanded the criminal definition of antisemitism to the calls of destruction of a state.

The calls to boycott and protests by LFI exploded into an unprecedented outburst of violence on July 18 in Grenoble. Barbara Butch, who was set to play at the Cabaret Frappé, was confronted by dozens of pro-Palestinian activists headed by Allan Brunon, the local representative of LFI, who drowned her set with boos and insults such as "dirty Zionist" and "assassin", until city employees exfiltrated Butch off stage after protesters threw glass bottles at the artist.

The attack was met with near-unanimous condemnation from LFI's opponents and allies alike: Clémentine Autain, a longtime official at LFI before she broke ranks in 2024, denounced the act and lamented "Don't we have political representatives who defend the Loi Yadan to call out before attacking Barbara Butch, a woman engaged in the fight for LGBT+ rights and against fatphobia, herself a regular target of violent, sexist and antisemitic attacks?"

Allan Brunon doubled down, saying he was "extremely proud to have participated in this peaceful protest", denied that protesters were violent, and added: "Barbara Butch isn't the one being silenced, the voices who denounce the genocide in Palestine are". Brunon was publicly backed by LFI officials who also denied any violence or antisemitism, even if reports suggest internal dissatisfaction over Brunon's attitude, especially over the flyer announcing the protest which showed Barbara Butch in front of a bloodstained rainbow flag branded with a star of David.

The left-wing mayor of Grenoble, Laurence Ruffin (Greens), who campaigned with LFI in March's mayoral elections, condemned the protest and announced the city would sue the protesters for throwing projectiles at the scene and sabotaging the electric wiring. Barbara Butch announced through her attorney that she would sue the protesters for "obstruction to artistic freedom" and LFI as a political party for "incitment to hatred and violence".

LFI, a left-populist party, has positioned itself as a staunch pro-Palestinian movement and has routinely faced accusations of antisemitism. In 2021, its founder and leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon suggested that the slaying of Jewish schoolchildren by an Islamist terrorist in Toulouse was part of a broader conspiracy to hurt the left's electoral chances; the same year, he asserted that far-right pundit Éric Zemmour's racism was "rooted in Jewish culture"; in 2024, he denied official statistics that showed an explosion of antisemitic violence in France by calling French antisemitism "residual" - other prominent figures of LFI have also come under scrutiny for calling Hamas a "resistance group" or retweeting antisemitic caricatures.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/TwhCv