Posted on 06/10/2024 8:49:27 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Can the “far right” still really be called the “far right” if it becomes the mainstream? That’s a question for political scientists to ponder as Sunday’s European Union elections results came tumbling in.
The right is winning in France, with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally will secure twice as many votes as President Macron’s Renaissance. Macron has already responded to the humiliation by calling for fresh national assembly elections to be held on June 30 and July 7.
In Germany, the AfD, despite a number of scandals, took 16 percent of the vote, making them the second most popular party, ahead of chancellor’s Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. More than a million people who had voted for the governing coalition have just cast their ballots for AfD, according to one pollster.
By contrast, the German Greens, who usually perform strongly, won just 12 percent of the vote. The center-right Christian Democratic bloc of EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen still came top with 30 percent (her EPP center-right group will be easily the largest in the European Parliament), but only after tacking right on immigration and softening its green policies.
The European Parliament elections are often dismissed as little more than an opinion poll — since the Parliament’s powers are limited and it is the EU Commission which makes the decisions that most affect people’s lives. But the general political direction of the continent is clear: parties that stand strongly against immigration, that embrace anti-globalist rhetoric and reject green ideology are doing well. The Greens are in retreat.
The once-unacceptable right is now in power in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia. It is part of governing coalitions in Sweden (where it is in retreat) and Finland and will be in the Netherlands shortly. It’s leading polls in Belgium and Austria too. After the weekend’s European results, which gave Flemish nationalists a victory, the Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo announced his resignation.
Britain doesn’t vote in the European Union elections, obviously, because they voted to leave. But their own general election on July 4 looks almost certain to make them an outlier — if Labour comes to power, Britain will move left as the continent goes in the other direction.
But it’s worth remembering that Keir Starmer has had to shift his party away from the left in order to make it acceptable to the masses. And the Conservative Party is being destroyed in no small part for its failure, despite lots of noise about boats and Rwanda, to bring legal and illegal immigration under control. If Nigel Farage’s Reform take over the Conservatives in the polls — which could be about to happen — the anti-establishment right will have triumphed in Britain too.
“Right is good,” said Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, as he voted this week. “To go right is always good. Go right!” In November, America might do exactly that.
The year 2016 will always be remembered for Trump and Brexit. But 2024 could go down as the year when the new right consolidated its power.
MAGA is sweeping the EU.
RE: MAGA is sweeping the EU.
But I don’t think any country in the EU has early voting, mail-in ballots, legal ballot harvesting, ranked choice voting and all the nonsense we now have to deal with.
But wait! There’s more.
With Europe, there is always one more election
before everything is fully decided.
Agreed. The consensus is that the Euro elections are more on the up and up than ours. Which is depressing as hell.
Ukraine and the Nord Stream pipeline is taking a heavy toll on the EU politicians.
But wait! There’s more.
With Europe, there is always one more election
before everything is fully decided.
******
True statement.
I’m not a fan of parliamentary systems & their multiple political party politics or their fragile governments that “fall on a whim.”
Oh look!.... a new governing coalition of weak parties...... Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
It was pointed out by Alexander today that EVERY PARTY that did well in the EU Elections opposes the Neocon War in Ukraine. He also pointed out that the media is TOTALLY SILENT regarding that fact.
[The night the right swept Europe:]
That’s the night the right swept Europe [bass line]
Sonny Bono said the song was trash but actually Cher would have done a good job, too
Nazi is anyone you disagree with and lost its meaning long ago. The primary policy being defined as "far right" in Europe today is "anti-immigration". Specifically anti-immigration from North Africa and Syria. Secondary (with significant overlap) is nationalist populism and tertiary is anti-globalist agenda. It's not all Make (insert country here) Great Again, but that is certainly the primary issue.
Democrats don’t want our elections on the up and up because they’re the cheaters.
The stupid MSM hasn’t been able to connect those dots.
(Because democrats feed the press insider information from the FBI and CIA via news packets)
You may be correct
The MSM no more want to connect the dots than Pravda was interested in connecting any dots in the old Soviet Union. At some point ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/MSNBC/NYT/WAPO became the media wing of the Democrat Party. Said sources were always liberal, but it’s hard to identify the tipping point where they totally abandoned any pretense of objectivity and decided that their principal raison d’etre was to promote the candidates and policies of the Democrat party while denigrating its opposition. Though things were trending that way for a long, long time (perhaps even going back to the media’s antipathy toward President Nixon ... which maybe even started long before as a result of his takedown of Alger Hiss), my gut feeling is that the final tipping point was the Obama candidacy in 2008... when the media finally cast off its last vestiges of neutrality and went “all in” on the Obama campaign and then presidency.
Calling normal 'far right' has worked for 50 years or more.
Very potent though subtle negation of our sanity, replacing it with their insanity.
The longest running and most effective slogan so far: McCarthyism!
It STILL WORKS!
And on our own people! I have heard conservatives use it 'McCarthyism' --the noun, the concept.
Very powerful Alinskiism that the devil has concocted.
Imagine how many years calling us 'the Far Right' has delayed the onset of MAGA and our great Reform now underway.
Having watched Monday’s after-election-chatter across Germany...I’ll offer this opinion.
There’s always been a EU-We-Gonna-Fix-It mentality existing, and marginal campaign efforts before each of these once-every-five-year elections.
For some odd reason...way more propaganda, political promises, and we-can-fix-it BS than normal. This election was the first to allow 16/17 year old kids to vote, and the belief was (all the parties felt this way)...that they would mostly vote left or left-of-center. Well...almost 50-percent of the ‘kid-vote’ went to far-right or right-of-center. Logic here....via TikTok and social media, the kids dove down into the BS, and said in some way...we don’t believe your promises. It freaked out the establishment parties.
Adding to this...lot of working-class people (France/Germany) are now asking hard questions about why things are permanently broke....why energy costs so much, and why inflation is so bad?
Just a lot of skepticism going on, and in Germany for the fall....three more state elections to occur...all in the eastern side of the country, and that worry about the far-right AfD winning 30-plus percent in each election is scaring folks.
You mean “far right-wing zealot extremists”.
Our media is bought and paid for.
Sounds like Europeans are finally waking up to the reality that borders can be a *good* thing.
I think strong signs of the media losing any hint of objectivity was when the journalism schools threw off objectivity and started selling “advocacy” journalism to their students, which in my day was called propaganda. The dirty little secret is they research nothing and just get quotes from political operatives of their favorite party and copy other clueless media sources before printing their narratives. The Cronkite School of Journalism here at ASU should be renamed the Goebbels School of Journalism.
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