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CDU - Black - Pre-MAGA Republicans
SPD - Red - Democrats with the same lack of Spine
Greens - Green - But apart from enviroment stuff not as progressive as one might think
FDP - Yellow - Libs
Linke - Red - Left
AFD - Blue - MAGA
Greens in BaWü - Dark Green - Because they are more like Republicans which arent opposed to renewables.
CDU/CSU (Union) I'd compare to the Rockefeller Republicans, though nowadays with an icky nationalistic tint.
SPD is what Bernie would claim to be, but doesn't encapsulate what Bernie is, having sold out sometimes to neolibs. Bernie is what the SPD would've been, had it held its head straight.
Linke can be comparable to the DSA (Democratic Socialists USA).
FDP - Establishment Democrats
AfD - what you said, MAGA
Bundnis - What MAGAhats think communists are
BSW is a weird thing. I mean, it's a populist one-woman show designed to keep that woman in the discussion so she keeps getting invited and can sell her talks, but what Wagenknecht argues for are a. tankie takes and cuddling with Putin, and b. kinda socialist takes but only for germans. If it was a term not loaded with such historic weight and meaning, you could call the party "national socialist".
Now, obviously actual national socialists, Nazis, were what they were, the absolute worst thing you could ever imagine. But without that context and taking the terms at face value, that would be BSW.
Call me stupid (and you'd be justified for calling me so!), but I feel like it's a good thing if BSW is there in that it snoops votes away from people who otherwise vote AfD. They're both terrible, but BSW at least tries to fight privatisation where AfD puts everything into the hands of unelected profit-motivated tech moguls.
That said, I'd take the SDP, Grünen and Linke over those anyday.
That doesn't quite work though, BSW doesn't attract many AfD voters.
Huh. Where does its voter base then come from?
From antivaxer idiots who don't vote Nazis and tankies who don't vote The Left.
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/charts/analyse-wanderung/chart_1873623.shtml
Here is a graph showing which party voters who voted BSW in the federal election of 2025 in the 2021 feseral election.
Interesting. Many more people who didn't vote before, I see. About 1,880,000 votes.
So, about ...
23.4% from SPD
21.3% who didn't vote before
18.6% from Linke
13.8% from FDP
11.7% from Union
8% from Grünen
3.2% from AfD
Interesting. So it mainly got votes from the "non-Green" Left and non-voters, with FDP, Union, and Grünen having less joiners, but nonetheless fairly evenly distributed, and AfD last.
How about AfD?
Because the AfD isn't voted for their political positions. People vote AfD for vibes, hatred and misdirected frustration.
The Republicans are full on Nazis today. The BaWü Greens are not even close to as far to the right. Probably more like Democrats with some green paint.
Yeah. You cant map the parties one to one either way. In some ways the Democrats are more right leaning than the CDU. But relative to each other it makes more or less sense considering how condensed and simplified i made it.
Interesting. I think that there's always been a tension between labor and environmentalists.
In the long term environmentally friendly policies help everyone, but in the short term they often inflict pain on someone, and often the workers (or farmers) bear the brunt of that, so they oppose the changes. Consider closing down factories that are polluting, or forcing farms to stop using pesticides.
If you do feelgood environmental policy aimed at the emotional wellbeing of upper middle class academics on the back of, or with utter disregard for the working class, while the rich get to pollute all they like, you'll get tensions with the working class.
If there now is no decent working class party, the working class voters will instead flock to whoever bashes the Greens the loudest. Guess who that is.