It's not just migration.
Many Germans I know are just not happy with the government.
And have not been for a while.
People feel like their lives are worse, they can't afford apartments or houses and feel like their wealth is slowly melting away.
They pay more and more taxes but feel the service they get in return is worse and worse. Cities are not kept clean, infrastructure from small too large is breaking apart.
On the other hand an expensive cluster fuck of a public broadcasting system is kept alive where recent scandals made it look like they are dishonest and try to teach moral lessons instead of neutrally informing the people.
Health care got worse, many doctors just not taking new patients and people having to wait for specialist appointments for months.
People that earn more are also desperate, because they usually live in larger cities where they cannot afford apartments or houses anymore.
Also retirement gets worse and worse every year. Why should someone work 45+ years in a low wage job only to then the same money as someone who always worked?
All this shines a particularly bad light on the fact that no politician takes the blame anymore.
There are scandals, people do a bad job...and then they end up leading the commission in Europe or some other large state agency (looking at you vdL and Nahles). They do not face any consequences anymore.
The people have the subconscious feeling that many things go wrong in Germany and the country needs bigger and radical changes but that those changes will not spawn within the current players.
Or shorter: whoever they vote for, it's always the same stupid faces and swamp.
And last but not least I'd say that for years and years voters for the right wing party have been called fascists and Nazis by the (mentioned above) public media , even if they were just conservatives. They were (maybe rightfully?) judged by who their peers are in those parties.
But this made many people being afraid to vote for those parties. Now they "had enough" and don't care about public opinion.
In my family there are some examples of definitely not racist people that will vote far right...
And I stopped judging them but started listening to them. And I think all of them are brought back by implementing the right policies.
This is a question I've been asking myself.
I honestly don't know.
The country feels...stuck.
You want more wind turbines? Nimbys will block it.
You want more infrastructure and build something? Someone's gonna find some rare protected lizard where you wanna build and this will take you years!
You want to shrink the public broadcasting stations?
Well there are pensions to be paid which is the biggest share of the cost so even if you shrink it you won't save much.
Personally, I'd start at digitalization and try to make processes more efficient.
Think of software, only adding features but never thinking about cleaning up or refactoring might break your framework.
In government, there was no cleanup. It grows monotonically and it feels like for every little thing ten Departments need to approve it.
Government is a good example of parkinson's law.
No one ever says they have enough people, every year when being asked for next year's resource needs they claim and use the max because having not used everything might make departments subjects to cuts...
An example: a family member worked in a company acquired by our town, so she became a public service worker. Some normal office stuff.
She has a great working attitude...basically her shit got done in half a workday and then she asked for more tasks. Instead of doing that she was told to not break the team spirit and atmosphere there...shed put everyone else in a bad light.
Also, political culture needs to change. If someone is bad...and obviously does a bad job...fire them, don't give them a promotion.
This is more to appease people.
Also, media culture needs to change. Media seem to fight a fight "us against the Nazis" and therefore end up supporting current politics too much.
Recently read an article that said "more than half of the 2015 surge immigrants are working! Yay!".
Turns out, it was SLIGHLTY more than 50%. After 8! years. Most women didn't work...because of culture. And out of those 50% a large part got state money to make a living. This is not a success. At first it was sold as refugees, then as workers we desperately need.
But to be honest, I don't think anything will be done and nothing of significance will change.
I try to work on my skill portfolio and think about jumping ship to some other European nation.
A very good question.
Switzerland? But I don't like their mentality too much.
Maybe the east will rise.
Maybe skip Europe and go to the US?
I have no clear answer.
My life will be ok. I'd be more worried about future generations.
People that earn more are also desperate, because they usually live in larger cities where they cannot afford apartments or houses anymore. Also retirement gets worse and worse every year. Why should someone work 45+ years in a low wage job only to then the same money as someone who always worked?
All this shines a particularly bad light on the fact that no politician takes the blame anymore. There are scandals, people do a bad job...and then they end up leading the commission in Europe or some other large state agency (looking at you vdL and Nahles). They do not face any consequences anymore.
The people have the subconscious feeling that many things go wrong in Germany and the country needs bigger and radical changes but that those changes will not spawn within the current players. Or shorter: whoever they vote for, it's always the same stupid faces and swamp.
And last but not least I'd say that for years and years voters for the right wing party have been called fascists and Nazis by the (mentioned above) public media , even if they were just conservatives. They were (maybe rightfully?) judged by who their peers are in those parties. But this made many people being afraid to vote for those parties. Now they "had enough" and don't care about public opinion.
In my family there are some examples of definitely not racist people that will vote far right... And I stopped judging them but started listening to them. And I think all of them are brought back by implementing the right policies.