Anxiety management
A year ago, I wrote about angst. Back then, Twitter was still going strong, and every day was “fighting against TERFs” day. I since switched exclusively to Mastodon as my only social network and it’s going great. Yes, Mastodon and the Fediverse have issues, but not having to deal with TERFs is so worth it. Also, the Fediverse isn’t owned by a right-wing neo-liberal asshole (aka Elon Musk). Please get off Twitter and give the Fediverse another try, it has come a long way since fall of 2022.
Anyway, even though I got rid of Twitter doesn’t mean the “outside world” is suddenly looking any better.
In Germany, the far-right nationalist party AfD is riding high in election surveys. 20 % would vote for them in the next federal election, making the AfD the second strongest party right after the other right-wing party CDU (28 %).
Up until now, the AfD was isolated, shunned by everyone else. There is (was?) an unspoken agreement that nobody will form a coalition with them. My prediction for the next federal election in 2025: This is probably going to change. The CDU is inching more and more towards the far-right, in an obvious attempt to get support from AfD voters.
A right to far-right coalition in 2025 would be devastating for any progress on social, queer, and climate crisis matters. Even worse, regressions won’t be unlikely:
- Any attempt at fixing the climate crisis will be stopped, instead continuing and intensifying our current planet-killing approach.
- Advancements in public transport and cycling infrastructure will be reversed, this is already happening in Berlin where a right-wing mayor replaced the mid-to-left government in early 2023.
- Hate towards queer, Black, and Brown people will not only be tolerated by the government, but actively encouraged.
This is of course hypothetical, lots can happen in the next two years. But federal elections are only one part of Germany’s republic system. The far-right is slowly but surely taking over from the bottom up. The CDU has been quite powerful in local politics since World War II, especially in rural areas (I’ve grown up in small villages, I know what it’s like).
Recently though the AfD is following suit, winning the district council election in Sonneberg in south-east Germany and the mayor election in Raguhn-Jeßnitz, a small town in east Germany. Both district and town aren’t important in the grand scheme when it comes to overall impact and power. But they set a concerning trend. For the first time, the AfD is not in the opposition anymore but part of the executive.
This brings me back to the headline: Anxiety management.
There’s not that much I can do to stop the right wing. They’re set on their racist, anti-progressive, anti-queer, white supremacist course. We need majority support for leftist ideas, something that apparently doesn’t exist at the moment.
As a queer and very much left person, the existential dread can become overpowering. It’s far too easy to give up. But the fact that countless queer, Black, and Brown people exist and keep on existing is a big win already.