by Dirk Ehnts, Econoblog101
Since the world seems to be interested in Alternative für Deutschland I have translated some of their demands into English. It’s all from the programme which they posted on their website. I selected only a few which I thought interesting:
- reduce (government) debt
- increase number of children
- family is nucleus of society
- introduce direct democracy like in Switzerland
- less Europe through more competition and responsibility (following David Cameron)
This programme recently prompted Jens Berger in the taz to describe the party as paleoliberal, which is to the right of normal liberal parties like the FDP in Germany. A quick check of Wikipedia reveals the following definition for the US (which is a quote):
Paleolibertarianism holds with Lord Acton that liberty is the highest political end of man, and that all forms of government intervention – economic, cultural, social, international – amount to an attack on prosperity, morals, and bourgeois civilization itself, and thus must be opposed at all levels and without compromise. It is ‘paleo’ because of its genesis in the work of Murray N. Rothbard and his predecessors, including Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and the entire interwar Old Right that opposed the New Deal and favored the Old Republic of property rights, freedom of association, and radical political decentralization.
In Germany, it would be a bit different from the historical perspective, but it seems fair to describe Alternative für Deutschland as a Teutonic Tea Party with ivory tower loftiness (many academics and educated bourgeoise, no astro turf) rather than another left-wing party, of which 3.5 already exist: Socialdemocrats, Greens, Die Linke and the Piraten (anybody ever heard of conservative pirates?).
