r/europe • u/chrischi3 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, EU • 2d ago
News Moritz Körner (German, FDP) replied to my e-mail
49
u/_-Oxym0ron-_ 2d ago
Don't know who he is, but I liked his spirit, and it's good to know someone is fighting it.
64
u/chrischi3 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, EU 2d ago
Well idk much about him either but if the FDP made their platform about that kinda thing and not about rich egomaniacs who tell the common people to drive Porsche if they can't afford public transit, they might actually have a chance of being the big party they imagine themselves as.
18
u/_-Oxym0ron-_ 2d ago
not about rich egomaniacs who tell the common people to drive Porsche if they can't afford public transit
That sounds insane. Where on the political spectrum are FDP?
52
u/Jarazz 2d ago
Actual explanation: Hyper neoliberals like Margaret Thatcher or Reagan who think if we just make all the corporations rich enough, surely eventually a bit of it will trickle down to the peasants in a golden shower of money. Which, as it turns out, never actually improves the common mans situation in the end, yet theres always some politicians who are very convinced by it, surely not due to the massive amounts of lobbyism gifts they get for such opinions
9
23
u/chrischi3 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, EU 2d ago
On paper, neoliberal.
In reality, whatever makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.
6
u/Silver_Ball_6219 2d ago
They are liberals in both meanings of that word (economic and social). Problem was that the social liberal positions have recently (like in the last 40 years) always been bargained away for their economic liberal positions. These have been defended, including playing political games in the last German coalition. People become quite cynical if the main focus that not up for negotiation is tax reduction / reduction of government spending on social programs.
But the answer is what I would expect when they are not at the steering wheel and therefore can argue both liberal sides5
u/TheBurgerflip 2d ago
They are liberal. As in market liberal and socially liberal. People on the left have a hate boner for market liberalism and hate them, People on the right hate them for their social liberalism. They are very much in the middle.
19
u/RidingRedHare 2d ago
The FDP has a tendency to forget about the social liberal positions when those get in the way of lower taxes for companies and the rich.
3
2
u/Alistair_Macbain 2d ago
Socially liberal is at this point mostly on paper. In the last years theymarket liberal part was way more important for them. They like to paint themselves as liberal overall but generally speaking in germany they were at this point mostly market liberal.
4
u/TheBurgerflip 2d ago
They were a driving force for the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. Or making weed legal. Against the will of the SPD btw but together with the greens. Name the social liberal policy in the last 4 Years they didnt support.
-6
2
10
u/bobjohndaviddick 2d ago
In the US the only response we get to congress are some ai "we'll look into" bullshit or trying to sell us their meme coin. I'm sipping some German beer now wondering if Germany is low key a better place to be a democracy fan.
7
u/Equitaurus 2d ago
It helps that the Bundestag has 630 seats for a population of 83 million. I visited Berlin and my tour guide casually mentioned that his wife had been a member of the Bundestag.
2
u/11160704 Germany 2d ago
I recently contacted a number of German MPs on a different issue and I was positively surprised how many personal answers I received (of course many of them probably written by their office staff). Made me feel better about the state of our democracy.
3
u/Pianist-Putrid 2d ago
Of course it is. Anything is better than the authoritarian shithole our country has become. Did you see that most recent cabinet meeting? Downright dystopian.
But good luck trying to emigrate from a wealthy “first-world” country like the United States. Unless you already have a job lined up, or a European spouse, getting a residency visa in any of the EEA (or Schengen area) countries is not easy.
2
u/kustos94 2d ago
I wrote to all my representatives on August 6 and have not received an answer yet.
It saddens me more than expected, to be ignored by the politicians that were elected to represent my interests in the EU Parliament.
2
u/pat6376 2d ago
FD...who?
5
u/chrischi3 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, EU 1d ago
FDP. Basically what you vote for if you are stinking rich or live on minimum wage under the illusion that the country's problems are the unemployed.
1
u/AverageMammonEnjoyer Germany 20h ago
Sorry never heard of that Party before must be some extremly small one
1
u/chrischi3 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, EU 18h ago
Yeah, honestly not sure why they are in the EU parliament, they aren't even in the Bundestag.
0
u/bigdoinkloverperson 2d ago
Did he chat gpt this email? I mean good on him for fighting the good Fight against chat control but the email has all the hall marks from, the em dashes to the bullet points to the overuse of adjectives and sentence length sequences.
22
u/Swampy1741 Andalusia (Spain) from USA 2d ago
No, this is just how politicians answer emails in my experience. They want to be formal and still come across as personable, which is also what ChatGPT is usually trying to do. But I guess it's possible.
10
u/Krostas 2d ago
I hate the FDP as much as every other sensible German voter, but his position in this mail is actually a good one and worth of support. The FDP as a party however has much to prove regarding individual rights being actually more important to them than economic liberalism.
As this is a German politician, this mail could very well be written in German and translated to English via GPT or some other AI service, introducing some hallmark AI characteristics.
The FDP is very "future technologies" friendly, though. So could entirely be possible that he used an AI tool to compose the mail in the first place.
2
1
u/LopsidedBottle 2d ago
I hate the FDP as much as every other sensible German voter,
The sensible German voters dislike Lindner, but like the FDP in general. They have a far better concept for the pension system than all parties represented in the Bundestag, their economic policies make a lot more sense than those of the left-leaning parties, and they are less sexist than the Greens.
1
u/bigdoinkloverperson 1d ago
I work in politics and have seen how emails shifted after chat gpt got introduced which is why I'm bringing it up as this really reads like it but it could be coincidence
4
u/FeiyaTK 2d ago
for us germans the dash is just a very expressive tool. Doesn't have to be ChatGPT to usi it in every sentence
2
u/bigdoinkloverperson 1d ago
It's not just the em dash my g it's the full context in terms of structure and so forth
1
u/Lutgardys Lower Silesia (Poland) 2d ago
I got three emails back when my husband and I sent out emails. One was about Gaza, which...thanks I guess, and I got this one and one from the AfD, which both were against chatcontrol so heres hoping.
1
1
u/autoit4you 1d ago
Never thought I would read that name here. I actually know his dad 😄
On topic: good that there are still people fighting for what is right
0
-39
2d ago
[deleted]
24
u/TrueRignak France 2d ago
"People who refuse age check when browsing Wikipedia are porn addicts" is not exactly a sound arguement in favor of Chat Control, which is the systematic spying of all messages people send.
13
u/Kurainuz 2d ago
The problem is not age checks, the problem is how they are implemented and their scope.
I would not be comfortable having to give reddit my face and id just because some topic is +18 even if not sexual
2
166
u/Stabile_Feldmaus Germany 2d ago
"Never thought I would die fighting side by side with an FDP politician"