Free Bavaria!

It's election time here in Germany and I honestly haven't been keeping up on it-- far a start, I believe the actual voting begins in September, and being an American expat I cannot vote anyways. Like many European countries, Germany enjoys a healthy number of "third parties," usually single-issue campaigns whose candidates ultimately hope to influence the large parties into taking their position.

So here we have the poster of the Bayernpartei (Bavaria Party), a gang of loose nuts who want to secede from Germany. I can sort of see their tortured logic-- as a geographic area, Bavaria has uniquely distinct culture and traditions, its own dialect and the healthiest economy in all of Germany, yet tends to be treated by the high-falutin' northern German intelligentsia (Berliners and folks from Cologne) as a bunch of country bumpkins. Still, this is an idea and political party that is dead on arrival, though it's interesting to see the general reaction the party is receiving-- Northern Germans' attitude tends to be a "yeah whatever-- don't forget to take your horrible accent with you, ya hicks," while the locals view this with a sense of bemusement. The party does tap into Bavarian's inferiority complex, and maybe that's the idea. But just as Quebec finally got enough momentum to try and split from Canada some 15 years ago in a national referendum (defeated by the rest of that country by a fairly narrow vote as I recall) after decades of behind-the-scenes work and stirring up the population, this party and its ideas will likely be around for a while.