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"Them rich folks of the AfD keep telling me that democracy made me poor and jobless. They are also telling me that they'll bring back jobs, by removing all them immigrants. Guess I'll vote for them."

Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to "workers don't feel represented by socialists".

• The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I've had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I'm afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
• Conversely the "center-left" socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
• The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as "pro-immigration" during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn't matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
• Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

Fighting fascists with "but socialists good for proletariat" is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that's kind of the problem because they feel it hasn't helped. People don't have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.

Plenty would gladly vote socialist, this is the east we're talking about, you can see that by the stellar rise of the BSW: 15% in both Thuringia and Saxony, in their first elections. That's actually unprecedented in Germany I think. Why not Die Linke? Less infected by the New Labour bug than the SPD, still awful though barely managing to be SocDems as opposed to DemSocs. 150% fed up with liberals, have a look at the complete collapse of FDP and Greens. Something something making everyone install heat pumps instead of giving municipalities money to invest in district heating which would even have been cheaper overall.

Put bluntly, from a west German perspective, the issue in Thuringia is that people by and large think you can change shit by whining, complaining, and being nasty to politicians. Now that's a streak in all of Germany but Thuringia? Have a look at where their top politicians are from: Pretty much anywhere but Thuringia. MFs be like "rule better", never "Ok I'll do it". The "rule better" part is definitely amply justified in Thuringia, their whole political system is dysfunctional, the state parties a clown show approaching American conditions. There should've been new elections years ago because the government didn't have a proper working majority for important stuff, some CDU parliamentarians decided to ignore the health of the political system in favour of their own pensions and blocked those. CDU being corrupt is nothing new or specific to Thuringia, but this brazen? Sticking to "it's technically legal" while the whole fucking state is shouting at you? Goshdamnit.

They have been "relevant enough" for a very long time now.