1. Brief thread about Germany's double-humped foreign policy-ideology curve, and what this means.

2. Normally, one expects political support for each issue to rise left-to-right, rise right-to-left, or sometimes peak in the center.

3. So with foreign policy, usually support for Atlanticism rises gently left-to-right, with the exception of the anti-regime extreme right.

4. Occasionally it is flat, and sometimes it's even flipped, as in Taiwan it's the pan-Blue right that's friendlier to the PRC nowadays.

5. But in Germany, it's none of these things. It's double-humped. This is really strange.

6. The mainline left is pro-NATO. Scholz runs as pro-NATO, our Green FM backed NATO re Serbia, left protesters say #Chinazi and #FreeHK.

7. The hard-but-not-extreme right is pro-NATO as well: Merz is hawkish and so is the editorial line at Die Welt and Bild.

8. Die Linke is tankie, and AfD is for whoever will replace the democratic republic with a Fourth Reich, but nobody cares what they think.

9. But the center-to-center-right is okay with Putin and Xi, backing gas deals and with Xinjiang slave labor camps. Laschet is pro-Assad.

10. Hence, a double-humped curve. I can't think of other countries like this; in Sweden, support for NATO rises left-to-mainline-right.

11. The business community in Germany is extremely pro-neutrality and likes business deals with Russia and China, inc. VW's Xinjiang plant.

12. It could be a random artifact, then - French and British firms don't have the same ties, perhaps, and do have stronger defense ties.

13. Or it could even be that the hard right is hawkish as a way of a) opposing Merkel, b) from the right, and c) without aligning with AfD.

14. On the left, likewise, opposition to Russia and China is widespread, as is solidarity with Hong Kong, here and in other democracies.

15. So it could be that SPD has space to be Atlanticist precisely because Merkel is so pro-appeasement it doesn't appear right-wing.

16. In contrast, a Labour that had the same line would be in alignment with the Tories and appear insufficiently-leftist to the hard left.

17. It's telling that younger leftists have SPD and the Greens' views; Greta Thunberg signal-boosts Joshua Wong.

18. My impression is also that people who vote Die Linke out of opposition to austerity rather than out of Ostalgie aren't tankies.

19. I bring all this up because usually one expects ideological alignment between similar parties and factions across countries.

20. But Germany re foreign policy has no such alignment with the rest of Europe, for weird reasons. /end