AfD Takes Top Spot in 4 New Polls, Germany’s President Seeks a Ban – MishTalk

Political desperation in Germany will backfire. It’s a warning to the US.

Poll Source: Polling for Next Federal Election

Since October 20, AfD has polled 26 percent in 10 of 12 polls. Those poll results put AfD in first place 8 of 12 times with two additional ties for first.

Political Desperation Sets In

Eurointelligence comments on Desperate in Berlin

Here at Eurointelligence, we have often used the expression: from complacency to panic. Complacency is the defining characteristic of many European politicians, and almost a prerequisite for political success in some European countries. The story gets interesting when that complacency hits limits of reality and logic. It is happening in Germany right now.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, has effectively called for a ban of the AfD. His old party, the SPD, is in terminal decline. Its decline is easy to see in electoral results, but in the centres of power in Berlin, it has been overshadowed by the party’s relative success. It had two chancellors in the last 25 years, and has been part of coalition government every year since 1998, except for four. The party is polling at 15%. It is the party of pensioners and welfare recipients. It is hard to see why it is declining.

The German establishment is not used to losing. What bad losers with a low IQ do everywhere is start to point fingers. The polls have the AfD at a firm level of 26%, up from 22% in the last elections. There are signs of a cyclical economic upswing, but none that will bring lasting joy.

The most likely consequence of Steinmeier’s comments is to drive more voters into the hands of the AfD. Once you go after your opponents through the legal system, this is when you start to lose. It happened in the US. It is happening in France. Vladimir Putin is a politician who bans opposition parties. But he controls the legal system. If you are trying to play this game in a country like Germany, you will fail.

A political ban is hard to do in Germany. The Constitutional Court only ever banned two parties: the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands in 1952, a Nazi party, and the Communist Party in 1956. In both of those cases the constitutional argument was clear cut. These were parties that would not have allowed free elections had they won power. The procedure to ban the far-right NPD failed, despite the fact that this party was de facto a neo-Nazi party. The AfD also has members with far-right views, but it does not meet the criteria for a ban. It’s not even close. The German constitutions sets a high bar. It is not enough to conclude that certain policies may violate the Constitution. What matters is that the party, once in power, respects constitutional rule.

So if you want to beat the AfD, you will have to do this yourself in elections. Politicians like Steinmeier do not know how to do this, and in their desperation end up driving more voters away.

US Warning

Here is the key paragraph:

Once you go after your opponents through the legal system, this is when you start to lose. It happened in the US. It is happening in France. Vladimir Putin is a politician who bans opposition parties. But he controls the legal system. If you are trying to play this game in a country like Germany, you will fail.

It happened in France and the US. Trump capitalized on a system that tried to rig the election against him.

Trump is now making the same mistake on his political enemies. He wants to control the US legal system but has not succeeded.

He blames an activist court for his losses. But he is the most activist president in US history.

Targeted Individuals

ABC News comments Here’s a list of the individuals, including John Bolton, targeted so far by the Trump administration

• John Bolton, former national security adviser
• James Comey, former FBI Director
• Letitia James, New York attorney general
• Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve governor
• Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor
• Adam Schiff, United States senator
• Jack Smith, former special counsel
• Miles Taylor, former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• Christopher Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

The security revocation list seems endless.

Pam Bondi to Prosecute Political Foes

The Wall Street Journal reports Trump Pushes Attorney General Pam Bondi to Prosecute Political Foes

President Trump all but ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political foes, in a series of weekend posts that questioned the lack of action and named one of his former personal attorneys as a new prosecutor to helm some of the investigations.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote in a social-media post, addressed to “Pam,” that called for cases against several of his adversaries: New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey and Sen. Adam Schiff.

Trump continued: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Trump’s demand came after he ousted a top federal prosecutor in Virginia who was pressured to bring criminal charges against James and Comey but hadn’t done so.

Later on Saturday night, Trump in a gaggle with reporters said, “I just want people to act. They have to act. And we want to act fast.”

The series of comments were Trump’s most explicit demand to date that Bondi target his enemies and showed how far he has gone in asserting control over the Justice Department’s traditionally independent decision-making in criminal investigations.

“There’s no hiding the political retaliation and weaponization,” Schiff (D., Calif.) wrote on X. “It’s all out in the open.”

Former federal prosecutor Jonathan Kravis said Trump’s stance was fundamentally at odds with the mission of the Justice Department, which “is supposed to be investigating and prosecuting federal crimes based on where the facts and the law take them, not based on the political preferences or the score-settling proclivities of the president. This is a core component of what we mean when we talk about the rule of law.”

Kravis, now a partner at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, said Trump’s comments also could backfire if the department brings the cases he wants, because they give defendants an avenue to argue that such prosecutions are driven by improper motivations. Normally that defense strategy doesn’t work, “but this is the one-in-a-million case where you’re probably going to get some traction,” he said.

Adam Schiff