You're saying that, but then you see the exact same behavior in places like France or the Netherlands.
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EU election
- Thread starter Satinavian
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While particularly the West likes to frame it as an East problem, most AfD votes came from the West, even if it is a lower percentage there.
The main difference is less that the East likes the AfD so much more and more that the other parties have a weaker foundation. They have no core voters reaching back to before the reunification. And every single one of them has been in power in the last 3 decades and the Easts problems continue with no improvement in sight.
If the mainstream parties want votes in the East they should campaign there and at least promise to do something to improve the situation.
People are shocked by 16% AfD.But can you really look at Melonis Italy or what is going on in France or the successes Austrias FPÖ had for some time or many others, really and still be particularly shocked by Germany ? 16% far right and populist is unfortunately not special or rare. Especially not with the least popular chancellor ever (Approval rating in the 20s) and a main opposition leader liked even less. The German mainstream parties are very very weak atm.
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I think the concern is that RN and Brothers of Italy, despite their iffy origins and still-present deeply unpalatable elements, have made a very conspicuous effort to move towards a respectable mainstream appearance, effectively trying to become the mainstream right. Meloni in particular looks co-operative and reasonable. AfD, however, seem to keep turning up very disturbing extremism to the point that many of these others keep it at arm's length lest it tarnish them by association. On the other hand, that might be why AfD is toiling away at 16% whilst the CDU still motors along successfully, rather than the 30% or so these others have achieved that have eclipsed their countries' old mainstream right parties.
Economic underdevelopment can be very persistent - if there's a place with a significant skills and education shortfall, plus any wider societal issues, it's an unattractive place for industries which rely on high skills (and pay high salaries) to develop into, plus that they are often already happily settled in the richer areas. The same sort of thing occurs in the UK - the southeast swallows a disproportionate chunk of the most valuable industrial growth because that's where the expertise and infrastructure for those industries already is.
Government funding can help correct this, but it might take a long time, and it requires a dedication many governments might not have. For instance in the UK why are the Tories, with their heartlands in the English south, going to pour money into the less developed north that barely votes for them? The Tory leadership made a loud noise about it over the last 10 years when they thought they could break through around Brexit, but then the money never really arrived - sabotaged from within by their own party.
True. But so far the AfD have never been in power anywhere. Because as long as they behave like they do, they can't get in any coalition.
Well, yes.
But voters don't accept "nothing can be done anyway" or "it is too difficult so we concentrate on other stuff instead and won't even try". One of the main attractions to the AfD in the East is that whenever they score a huge percentage, people start talking about the Easts problems.
The Tories at least promised money.
Well, yes. In many ways, this is one of the major failures of the political left in many countries: they have failed to effectively tackle a lot of these problems, and so are not trusted to resolve them.
They have further problems because many left parties do not, or only weakly, cater to social conservatism - thus a large chunk of voters where they might win the economic argument, but lose on the social. This leaves a fair chunk of those voters open to going elsewhere, and it's often the far right.
Disagree on the latter, if enough fuss is made about other stuff, it can be a distraction.
Well for that Germany has now the BSW (social conservative and economically hard left). This election was their first ever and they reached a respectable 6.2%. Unfortunately they are also somewhat populist and Putin lovers as well.
They're all fucking useless.
Sorry, but there really is something about the hard left which is astonishingly ineffectual: they're like the Judaean People's Front / People's Front of Judaea from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Some seeming ever-shifting group of parties and people churning over and jockeying against each other for supremacy over their small chunk of the electorate, full of massive egos and rivalries, splitting and merging, more content to perpetually dither around the margins fighting arcane ideological quibbles rather than achieve any real change. Pretty much everyone else has no respect for them and they don't seem to care, which tells you all you need to know given the only way they take power in the foreseeable future is through democracy.
I might not mind so much, but they often also suck a load of political oxygen out of the centre-left and condemn them to impotence, too.
Of course they are.
Honestly, i am still glad they split from the Left party. Before it was just endless infighting there over the direction. Now it is two different far left parties, each with a somewhat coherent vision. And they stopped attacking each other. Together they have already attracted more voters than before the split.
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@RnaudBertrand: These have undoubtedly been the wildest 72 hours in French politics in my lifetime. Pretty incredible stuff. A 🧵 So after losing big time in the EU elections to Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), ...…
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Never tried a thread reader on this website so this will be new. tl;dr, France is popcorn country as the right implodes and the left is looking a lot stronger than Macron probably hoped.
So how do you tackle the center "left" going out of their way to screw the left and cozy up to the right? How about that political oxygen?They're all fucking useless.
Sorry, but there really is something about the hard left which is astonishingly ineffectual: they're like the Judaean People's Front / People's Front of Judaea from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Some seeming ever-shifting group of parties and people churning over and jockeying against each other for supremacy over their small chunk of the electorate, full of massive egos and rivalries, splitting and merging, more content to perpetually dither around the margins fighting arcane ideological quibbles rather than achieve any real change. Pretty much everyone else has no respect for them and they don't seem to care, which tells you all you need to know given the only way they take power in the foreseeable future is through democracy.
I might not mind so much, but they often also suck a load of political oxygen out of the centre-left and condemn them to impotence, too.
Of course they are.
Ah, perhaps you are less familiar with the non-Anglophone world, and this is an EU thread.
In Europe, the further left have always had their own parties due to the gift of proportional representation, and so have been capable of fighting their own corner. Unfortunately, it is the case that not that many people are very left wing. It's always a battle over the centre, because the centre plus one wing wins. You can constantly fight for just your wing, and you can leave your opponents free to win nearly all the elections. Take France. In the ~80 years postwar, France has had a left-wing French president for... 21 years. West/unified Germany has done slightly better, just shy of 25 years worth of left-wing chancellors out of the last 80. Italy is about 15 years of left-wing PMs. (Scandinavia is the exception, of course, but Scandinavia has unusual social traditions compared to the rest of Europe.) That's what we're talking about for the mainstream left. How do you think it would have worked out for the Communists?
Oh, yes, by the way. The far left in Europe have often been Communists. Real, genuine, actual, thank-god-the-Soviets-rolled-the-tanks-into-Czechoslovakia/Hungary Communists. They didn't always mix well with social democrats, because they were a bit iffy on the whole democracy, social freedoms, independence from Moscow sort of thing. (Plenty of these hoary old Cold War dinosaurs and ideals are still rattling around the European left.) Obviously, the centre and right loathed them. Sure, a few parties like Syriza have attempted to face the real world as a modern party, not that the real world was very kind to Syriza. Anyway, there they all still are: the names have often changed, they're not quite so Communist, but they are still full of egos, squabbling, schisms, temporary alliances and sometimes pretty horrible views. Still shit, still useless, still hated by the other 80-90% of the country. Their only chance is if the mainstream right AND left completely fuck things up, and even then the evidence clearly suggests that far right wins, not them.
There is the reality that the world is capitalist, and it's not kind to the left, because capitalists don't tend to be leftists. If you want to look at the countries free to pursue agendas really inconvenient to capitalism, you're looking at the likes of Cuba, Venezuala and North Korea. Not... pretty. Part of some of the British left's hostility to the EU was the idea that freed from its neoliberal clutches, they'd be free to enact all sorts of EU-rule busting socialist practices. Unfortunately, leaving the EU has instead - predictably - heavily suppressed the economy, so now it's even harder to pay for socialistic basics like universal healthcare and other social services. The price of policy freedom, eh? Someone's got to invest in production, grease the wheels, etc. and if you want that to be the government, then someone's got to get taxed or buy government debt. In the current world, these people are capitalists. The middle classes get twitchy at the idea of alienating them. So, make some concessions to your voters (and thus the inexorable pressure of international business concerns), or hand the keys of power to the right.
I am perfectly aware EU politics allows for tankies and red/brown parties to exist in whatever numbers they can pull. But here we also have with Macron calling for a snap election, his political opponent of choice is apparently... Mélenchon and not Le Pen. And specifically using the right wing smears of "antisemitism", which isn't an economic attack but a social one.
I have no idea what you are talking about, I fear because you have no idea what you are talking about either.
I'm talking about Macron calling the left alliance antisemites and everyone who supports them antisemites. For all the existential threat the far right is, apparently it's not as much as the left.
To be fair Mélenchon is only barely less of a cretin than Le Pen is. He too is fiercely opposed to the EU and just as fiercely supportive of Russia. Any existential harm a Le Pen presidency would do to the continent would happen under him too.
That's highly doubtful. For starters, Melenchon/LFI is contesting the upcoming legislative elections with PS and the Greens-- he'd be reliant on more moderate leftist voices. Even LFI's own supporters support continued EU membership, which he will be very much aware of. Hence why he's not promising withdrawal, but treaty renegotiation-- which isn't such a bad idea.
On Russia, he did wave the flag for Russian annexation of Crimea. But he's changed tack since the full-scale Russian invasion and condemned it. His view seems to have changed with the ever-continuing aggression.
He's as center left as the center left I'm used to seeing. Transplant from the socialist party, taking others with him to sink leftist causes by stealing their oxygen, before blowing all his cred diving to the far right. He's right and cozy with Starmer and Biden.
He's centre. He explicitly founded his party on that basis.
Inasmuch as LREM may have drawn much of its support from the left, it tells you how many voting for the left aren't actually that left wing. The left as you want it doesn't win elections, demonstrated time after time after time. It can either make concessions to claim the centre or it can lose.