One insanity in the following years was how they thought people still wanted their next generation diesel.
I’ve been working for them in the 2010s with the department to organise the staff car fleet. We ordered many electric vehicles years ahead from production and planned it all around electric vehicles: Charging stations, operating distance, some hybrids for long distance, software to calculate trips etc.
Then a few months before we needed them, they said: We overproduced on the latest diesel generation and can’t keep up with the demand for electric vehicles, so we have to sell the ones you ordered. You can either go with a Tesla (for official Volkswagen business trips!) or have the diesel for free.
It felt like there was a hysteria: Decision makers got it in their heads that the “hype” for electric vehicles was ideology-driven and not something people with buying power actually wanted today or in the near future. Bit like the republican administration thinking that “woke” is our main problem. Meanwhile, huge research and development departments did come up with the electric vehicles they sell today (and fully working hydrogen prototypes you won’t see in a store, just to be safe) and must have been quite frustrated that so few were produced.
The far right doesn’t even need to win directly. Even within conservative parties, such as Germany’s CDU, the populists make it to the top. They have good people with real solutions up to a state level, maybe more than any other party, but the new chancellor and most of the ministers from his own party are populists.
Conservatives with a real vision and plan might soon suffer the same fate as McCain and Romney.
This has a whole chain of consequences. Problems are not solved and increase, the far right gains.
Also, the current government coalition of the two formerly major parties didn’t even get half of the votes, resulting in less acceptance of the democratic process and legitimacy of the government. Not a big difference to the electoral college problem in the USA.