AY LMAOOOOO

"Germany's Merz falls short of majority in vote for chancellor"

Friedrich Merz needed 316 votes in the 630-seat Bundestag but only secured 310, in a significant blow to the Christian Democrat leader, two and a half months after winning Germany's federal elections.

His coalition with the centre-left has enough seats in parliament but it appears 18 MPs who had been expected to back him dissented. Merz's failure in the first vote is seen as unprecedented in modern German history.

The Bundestag will now have another 14 days to choose either Merz or another candidate as chancellor.

Under Germany's constitution, there is no limit to how many votes can be held, but ultimately if no absolute majority is reached then a candidate can be elected without one.

No candidate has failed in this way since 1949.

New greek political party "Course of Freedom" surging to 2nd place in a poll.

Guy who skimmed wikipedia said that they are:

• pro-Palestine
• pro-re-nationalisation of public services and public assets
• pro-LGBT marriage
• pro-refugee
• anti-EU
• anti-compulsary vaccination
• anti-Macedonia (dunno what this quite means I think it's something to do with the name)
• say "we look neither left nor right. we look forward"
• haven't joined any european parliamentary grouping (kke also hasn't)
• logo is a boat
• slogan is "We will change the world with Love"

And syriza polled below the old center-left and the communists. The rulling party also fell by a lot but greece has something where whoever ends up in 1st place gets a bunch of extra MPs so idk if that matters.

This is going to be controversial but imho about the "neither left nor right" position, in a party that is pretty clearly on the left, it's a smart move. It's one thing when you're an organization that has a history (and I don't advocate such organizations, like mine, to do this) but if you're starting a completely new political project there's really no reason to assume an identity on a left-right or a communism-capitalism that most people either don't care about or actively disdain. Not that many people think of themselves as "leftists" or "right-wingers", if anything most people probably consider themselves "centrists" even when they have a bunch of radical positions, so ditching the label and actively rejecting it in favor of more concrete political positions is a good way to past the skepticism of the masses about modern politics. And at the end of the day, any party or any smart politician will take positions considered to be left or right at different occasions, the point is whether they are the right position/policy.

However, the strategy creates its own tensions and down the line (like we've seen with italy's M5S) you DO have to affirm where you stand on the left-right axis or people will affirm it for you.

Of course anyone seasoned enough can tell whether your "neither left nor right" party is actually left or right, and this one seems to be left which is why it doesn't bother me. I'm also not greek so 0 stakes

To break with tariff news here's some funny drama around a portuguese socialist party MP.

So a black angolan-portuguese rapper (she's huge in Angola), activist, researcher and graduate of London's School of Oriental and African Studies called Eva RapDiva (not her legal name) showed up in 8th place on the socialist party's electoral list for the Lisbon district, which means she's certain to gain a seat, immediately right-wing trolls popped up questioning whether a rapper could be an MP along with other veiled racist remarks, with the party and generally pundits standing by her of course.

Then tragedy struck, when a video from 2023 of her in a hoodie and a beanie performing a freestyle about the Ukraine War resurfaced , these were the lyrics translated

I'm an African, I don't give a shit about the war in Ukraine.

Let those guys kill each other like we did. They don't care about us so we don't care about them.

I know that if this goes online, a lot of people will start complaining. But it's not my job to please everyone.

Not even Christ did this. If someone want's to criticize me I'll say 'Christ, go to the trash'

But this isn't about Christ, he's my divinity, I'm in the mic killing it with my creativity.

Because I'm a sweetheart, a woman of faith, but it's thanks to my work that til today I'm standing on my feet.

BARS!

Sadly this didn't go over well with the pro-ukraine socialist party electorate so now she started getting criticism from the center-left. However it's been resolved as she posted a video of herself in a suit saying that she's "completely on the side of the ukranian people". She explained her rap lyrics stating that "the creative liberty of an artist like me, improvising as it's done in rap (...) cannot be revealing of what is my political position" (boooooo), she stated she's against "putin's imperialism" and "trump's irrational policies".

She also said she's on the side of the palestinians which means that when the socialist party is back in power and votes against recognizing Palestine she'll be oddly quiet.

Portuguese parliament voted against recognizing the palestinian state today. Whole right wing voted against and whole left voted in favor, the only real new thing about this is that the socialist party voted in favor of recognizing palestine for the first time, since when they were actually in power they always voted against the motions to recognize palestine introduced by the communists.

So it's going to be pretty disgusting when they're back in power and this comes up again and they don't vote in favor.

We're also in the season when people are guessing who will run for president, it seems like a guy from the navy who was in charge of the covid vacine rollout a few years ago is scheduled to announce his run and probably win on a neither left nor right platform, marking a sad sad return of the military to civilian politics after bringing us a leftist revolution in the 70s

"Full year results of household survey for 2024 in China just posted. Real household income and consumption rose faster than overall GDP growth. Gains to rural households are significantly higher than urban households."

Psaki: I'm assuming he didn't bring up his intention to publicly say he was going to annex through economic means Canada

Trudeau: When I started to suggest there could be a trade for Vermont or California, he immediately decided that it was not not that funny anymore.

You know he's lying because Trump would 100% jokingly trade off California for Alberta or some shit

Saw this on twitter and I think it's an interesting point: "Arab states should carefully consider that the area is now defined by three main power brokers: Israel, Turkey, and what remains of the Iranian power, and none of them are Arab.

Feels like "the arab world" has been mostly successfully israelized, Egypt is totally dormant due to state repression and the most the saudi's have done to assert themselves was normalizing with Iran through China.

Also, good short article on NLR about Syria

Uyghur's in Syria found missiles and warn china that they're coming for them.

The sooner we find out what the new regime intends to with these guys the better, they gotta be crazy to let syria be a launching pad for terrorism into china. I don't even know if china would invade to stop it, this whole syria thing has probably further convinced china that foreign intervention is a grift. Probably would just try to get some UN resolutions passed to resolve the issue, it'd be interesting to see if the US would veto it.

Obviously these fellas can't launch these at china from syria but they could smuggle them out.

So now that the Assad government is gone do we all become Rojava guys? Is it time to send anarkiddies some flowers to let the tankies into the Abdullah Ocalan stan community?

On a serious note I've been peering though some portuguese language Rojava twitter accounts and they seem very scared of HTS, they're not buying into the reformed jihadist idea at all and seem to be expecting the rebel government to strike the kurds at the behest of turkey, also they've been reporting abuses of minorities in rebel territory.

Chapo just won the election in Mozambique! Let's see reddit ban the sub now

Also, at this point, it's fair to say that America just DOESN'T negotiate anything, they didn't negotiate with Putin to not invade Ukraine even though they knew he was gonna do it, they don't negotiate with China over Taiwan, the don't negotiate with Iran, they don't negotiate with Venezuela. It's an empire of maximalist positions, "do everything we want and we might leave you alone", and this is internally justified with american exceptionalism but the EU is behaving a lot like this too.

From the Wall Street Journal:

-Harris will meet 1v1 w/ Bibi, then skip his address. She's expected to tell him to stop the "war" & the "suffering of Palestinian civilians"

-She likely won't keep Sullivan, Blinken, or Austin

-Jim Zogby says she's shown "'far greater empathy' for Palestinians than Biden"

I assume she'd just replace Blinken and Sullivan with her own ghouls but holy shit would I love to never hear Blinken again.