I’ve only lived in Germany for a year and a half so if some more experienced Germans could tell me what I’m missing and explain why things aren’t so bad that would be nice, but it seems like this country is shifting in a negative direction politically from this polling data and it scares me.
If AfD ends up being the second biggest party in the Bundestag next federal election I’ll be quite upset but that’s how it goes I guess.
To be fair, the Democrats would qualify as a right-wing party in most of Europe.
But that’s due to the general political landscape in the US, which is between far right and right extremists.
Even the most right-wing party here in Austria, the FPÖ, which is considered by many as a only-thinly-veiled Nazi party doesn’t want to discontinue public healthcare or gun control.
We’re all affected by how our respective governments were born, and grew up, or didn’t, or haven’t had the chance to.
Yeah, the US political system has the big problem that it is too old and never had to adapt.
The last major political earthquake in the US was the civil war, and even that did not lead to a new constitution.
So the US is limping along with a basic framework that’s almost 250 years old. It missed quite a few updates that most other countries got, and as such it’s slowly deteriorating.
Generally speaking: representative democratic systems tend to decay into undemocratic and hostile systems, unless there is a re-founding every few decades.
There isn’t really a way around that.
The biggest issue for the US democratic system is, that all the big wars in the last century happened outside of their borders. Most European nations where politically so torn up that they had the chance to seriously update their systems and reset to actual democracy. Many of them are decaying now into less and less democratic systems, but at least we got an update/reset 80 years ago, and not 234 years ago.
That is certainly one perspective.