#Feder btw im seeing all ur comments in the tags

[ask-dreambert-and-antasma]

Wow, Dreambert! It was really kind of you to have saved Antasma back then... I'm glad there's still kind and respectful people out there like you. Thank you for what you did that day!

*hands him a flower*

[evangelineartemiasamos]

hi im american (yikes i know) and im trying to learn more about other countries’ political systems, would you mind explaining the political stuff you blog? if no totally fine !! just curious to see what you think. thank u !! love ur blog !!

Thanks! I’m glad you enjoy my blog

Do you mean all my political posts about German stuff? Or a specific one? Let’s be honest, it’d be kinda hard to translate everything, and IDK if that even made them understandable, as there’re many inside jokes you only get when you’re aware of some details of German politicians and everyday politics …

EG, the Julia Klöckner post from yesterday is a variation of the alleged Marie Antoinette quote, “if they don’t have bread, let them eat cake”. It says, “if the German waters are polluted, people can buy water in the supermarket.” Now, Klöckner is the federal minister for agriculture and nutrition, and she’s known for rather siding with the nutrition industry and large scale farming instead of protecting consumers and the environment (note: there’s a minister for environment protection too, the natural rival of the minister for agriculture …. But she doesn’t seem to be as influential as Klöckner is …) Large scale farming creates masses of manure that are brought onto the fields and pollute the ground water by an increase of the nitrate concentration, and Klöckner’s ministry rather widens the limits for nitrate in the water than do anything that upsets farmers or the industry (among other things). That’s a classic CDU (=Chancellor Merkel’s conservative party) stance by the way …

But is this a highly known problem among people? IDK, I feel like I’m esp. aware of this because a) I live in the countryside of an agricultural state to smell the masses of manure and b) I worked in a water analytics lab for a few weeks.

And this is just one example. I’d have to explain every satirical German post in a similar manner, and where’s the joke when I have to explain it? Sorry -.-

Or was this my comment about “chaotic German federalism”? Well, that should be quicker: Federalism was introduced with the goal to make governing less effective, so evils like during the national socialism would have it harder to happen and spread as no central government would have enough authority. This seems to work for now, but as good as the intention is, the everyday chaos remains. The most known problem are educational politics which are exclusively controlled by the states, so every one of the 16 states creates its own guidelines in its schools, making it hard for students to move between states. The other problem is that state elections don’t take place all at once; their dates are all over the place, so we have a state election every few months and the leading politicians can always say, “oh no, we can’t do this or that or our party’s results in the state elections will decrease!”. Sigh.

PS: The next big election is the election of the European Parliament on May 26th (#europawahl), followed by several state elections later this year.

(btw I tag my posts in German with #german so people can block them if they want)