With "idealist" faction, you probably mean the faction where people still care about any values at instead of going full centrist-conservative. The backlash about the Greens daring to insist on keeping discrimination of gay people out of a possible coalition is telling, and disgusting. Minority rights are not a bargaining chip.
Palmer is pure scum. He advocates letting refugees starve or drown or push them back at the border with violence. He likes to see himself in the media because he speculates about a bigger role on a federal level. He is the green KT zu Guttenberg, a photogenic, fundamentally empty and reactionary person looking out for advancing his career only.
Kretschmann is just a CDU guy who caves in to every single demand by the industry. Really, why the fuck do you want to Green Party to turn into a CDU 2.0? Caring about social justice and inequality is "Idealism"? Did you take a look at statistics about inequality, dependance of education on class background, about the horrible situation regarding room to live in every slightly bigger city, the lack of taxation on corporations and the rich class? Those classic green themes that completely abandoned in favor of spineless centrist garbage, which now rightfully bites them in the ass big time. There is no need to vote for them anymore, just vote CDU, it's the same.
By the way, there is no politics without ideology.
Yeah, the lack of knowledge regarding programs and policies of Merkel/CDU/FDP and their past governments is staggering. Their internet/digital policy alone is fucking incompetent, to be very gentle. Many people seem like "Well she isn't crazy as Trump and I guess did good on refugees so we should keep her?"
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It creates inherited poverty because your children get fucked too, especially if you are a single mom/father. You can barely afford to feed them and buy them needed things for school. Hartz4 set up a giant beureaucray having nothing to do but controll, punish and harass poor and unemployed people. Hartz4 and the Agenda2010 were built upon the neoliberal ideology of poor people being to blame for being poor, they just need to work harder or to pursue jobs more aggressively! It enabled employers and corporations to harass and oppress their workers because they were deathly afraid of losing their job and sliding into the Hartz4 system. They invented the frankly INSANE system of 1 euro-jobs, were unemployed people do jobs that could be done by regular workers and get paid basically nothing, so so they have work, because "work builds character". It's straight out of the 19th century. They constantly throw pointless programs for "further education" at you, where people sit in pointless seminars all day. The main purpose of those is to clean up the unemployment numbers, because people currently in those programs do not count.
The paperwork for Hartz4 and related things is insane. It's one of the reasons the rate of homeless people goes nothing but up, coupled with rising rents. People struggling with abduction and without friends or family fail to comply with the absurd demands of the system so they end up homeless. Sometimes just because the Jobcenter failed to pay the rent. Landlord doesn't care, throws tentant out on the street.
Hartz4, in general, is drastically lower than the former system because they just threw together basic social security for people who can't work anymore with the normal unemployement welfare. You can basically live under a roof and eat, if you are able to find a room, that's it. You are otherwise excluded from society. It's less worse for single people, but it's a catastrophe for families.
Being a recipient of "Hartz4" was and is basically synonymous with being a heroin-addicted criminal even though millions of people are on it. It's one of the most-often used insults in Germany. There is a whole industry of "Hartz4-TV" doing nothing but painting poor people as sort of halfwitted animals who sit on couches in dirty social housing apartments all day and drink beer so the middle class people who watch it can laugh about the stupid poor Hartz4-recipients. It's all fake documentaries. It basically created the German version of GOP voters who rather vote against their interests than those dirty poor getting a bite more from the share. Hating Hartz4-recipients, by the way, is today often coupled with racism because "They all just want our welfare, look at them, they do not want to work, it's just the way those orientals are..." etc.
Hartz4, by the way, is named after Peter Hartz, a former Volkswagen manager, who was a leading member of a commission out of the industry basically writing the neoliberal reform of the job market and welfare state for former chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his government. Yes, leading figures from business world wrote those laws. He was later convicted of corruption and other things. The Social Democrats, like Labour, did never recover from the damage Schröder and his cronies did to them (Schröder went on to be best buddy with Vlad Putin and work for Gazprom, by the way). Greens went centrist to conservative with a green pastiche, but SPD is flailing ever since, between centrism and trying to be a bit left but not really because the Left Party is already there.
People in this thread claiming "Germany is well off" talk about corporations and the upper class. Wages stagnated, inequality rises. Growth and GDP alone are completely pointless to describe how well off a society is. Many people from the poorer parts of society basically just went away and don't take part anymore. Some vote right-wing extremists, millions do not vote at all.
