European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 1056

The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, has ramped up his populist rhetoric ahead of April elections to claim that “dark clouds are gathering” and that his country is a last bastion in the fight against the “Islamisation” of Europe.

In his annual state of the nation speech, Orbán, who already appears set to win a third consecutive four-year term, made what are now familiar claims about his success in beating back threats to Hungary’s way of life from “Brussels, Berlin and Paris politicians”.

“We sent the muzzle back to Brussels and the leash back to the IMF,” he said early in his address on Sunday, praising the strength of the country’s economy.

The part of his speech which inevitably alighted on the threat of immigration will particularly concern Orbán’s many critics home and abroad.

He claimed the west had “opened the way for the decline of Christian culture and … Islamic expansion” while his administration had “prevented the Islamic world from flooding us from the south”.

Deploying a host of questionable statistics and apocalyptic visions, Orbán said: “We are those who think that Europe’s last hope is Christianity … If hundreds of millions of young people are allowed to move north, there will be enormous pressure on Europe. If all this continues, in the big cities of Europe there will be a Muslim majority.”

He said immigration was no more helpful for a country’s national development than influenza contributed to a human body’s health.

The rhetoric will strengthen the hand of those calling for Orbán’s rightwing populist party Fidesz to be ousted from the transnational European People’s party, of which Angela Merkel’s CDU is a member.

Orbán’s personal bete noire, the Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist George Soros, was also once again a target.

He accused Soros of having used his fortune not only to buy influence in Brussels and the west, but also at the UN. Further unspecified measures were floated as a response, building on legislation designed to crack down on foreign-funded organisations.

There was a conspiracy to create a “Homo sorosensus, the Soros type of man” that must be a rejected, he said.

“Hungary is not a country of troubled people, we understand that György Soros’s men were already in the UN,” Orbán told his audience at the Várkert Bazár, a restored neo-Renaissance building on the Danube, outside which hundreds of people protested.

Orbán pledged his government’s solidarity with “those western European people and leaders who want to save their country and their Christian culture”.

“We are waiting for the Italian elections, where Silvio Berlusconi can again occupy the government positions.”

Gyula Molnár, the president of the socialist MSZP, said of the speech: “It was the product of a medium-sized enterprise manager with some fake illusions.”

Fidesz has the support of more than 40% of decided voters in a country where the media is largely pliant and the opposition divided.

On February 19 2018 07:20 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
The rhetoric will strengthen the hand of those calling for Orbán’s rightwing populist party Fidesz to be ousted from the transnational European People’s party, of which Angela Merkel’s CDU is a member.

Shortly after midnight on Jan. 24, the home-made device David Puente built to catch fake Twitter accounts in the act started rumbling.

In just over a minute, more than 150 users sent out the same tweet extolling Italian anti-euro populist Matteo Salvini, a contender in next month’s presidential election. It was obvious to Puente, a computer programmer, that they were bots, or automated accounts that masquerade as real people and are used increasingly as a tool to sway political opinion.

“Monitoring the accounts of all the candidates is a civic duty for me," said Puente, 35, who often stays up until 3 a.m. tracking social-media activity from his home in northern Italy while his family sleeps.

Fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook that have lain dormant since a 2016 referendum campaign are springing back to life before the Italian ballot on March 4. Polls indicate no clear winner, leaving plenty of room for different factions to exploit social media to try to swing more votes their way.

Findings of the digital forensic research lab at Atlantic Council in Washington suggest the campaign could be vulnerable to manipulation using these robot accounts. Such concerns were validated just last week when U.S. special prosecutor Robert Mueller detailed a sweeping conspiracy orchestrated by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with social media a key to the effort. Bots -- which follow, tweet, re-tweet and like content -- can exaggerate the support for smaller factions and spread false or inadequate information.

The use of bots isn’t illegal, but they can have a real effect on voter intentions, according to Maks Czuperski, a director of at Atlantic Council lab who’s part of a team traveling to Italy next week to monitor internet activity in the run-up to the vote. “We are detecting an attempt to popularize the more extreme parties, both right and left," he said.

The council is keeping an eye on election-related activity on social media with the help of volunteers like Puente, who developed a program in his spare time that allows him to identify how a tweet is generated.

By analyzing the underlying code of the suspicious tweets sent in January, he traced them to the website of Salvini’s Northern League and linked to the party’s official Twitter feed, @LegaSalvini. Puente quickly posted his findings on his blog and then to his more than 7,000 followers on Twitter. He tagged Salvini in the tweet, which lamented the use of automated accounts to spew propaganda. It was re-tweeted almost 350 times.

Salvini’s press office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Salvini is a longshot to become Italy’s next prime minister, but his coalition with ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, head of the centrist Forza Italia party, gives his party more of a chance.

While Berlusconi has shot down ally’s views on the euro, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement also questions the benefit of European Union membership. That’s one reason some analysts suspect Russia may try to meddle in the vote to expose fissures in the EU.

A report by the U.S. Senate last month highlighted Italy as a potential target for the Kremlin, and the Atlantic Council found evidence tying Russian hackers to fake online activity leading up to Germany’s general election and Catalonia’s struggle for independence from Spain last year.

“Italian elections are crucial for Russia,” said Michael Carpenter, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary for defense, now senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy. “If Russia can help achieve its desired electoral outcome it will try.”

Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a research group that advises the Kremlin, slammed the allegations. “Everywhere there's an election, we're accused of intervening. In this case, there's no point at all because in Italy, traditionally all political forces are positively-minded toward Russia.”

The use of bots, which by one estimate account for 15 percent of Twitter’s approximately 330 million users, to further political agendas has been on the radar since the election of Donald Trump. Automated tweets accounted for 19 percent of election tweets leading up to his 2016 victory, according to findings of the University of Southern California.

Italians are worried about being duped. A poll published by La Stampa newspaper on Feb. 5 found about 80 percent of respondents believe that falsified reports have the power to swing the vote. About half said they’d been fooled by fake news over the last 12 months.

Facebook Inc. has taken out ads in Italian newspapers asking users to flag suspicious activity. Italian police are on alert, too, encouraging users to report suspicious posts – and there’s even an portal where users can submit dubious material for police checks.

"It is not all about changing voters’ minds,” said Carpenter, of the Penn Biden Center. “It is also about fomenting animosities and fueling political divisions.”

On February 19 2018 23:59 TheDwf wrote:
This "Russian meddling scenario" at each election is so boring...

Germany's far-right AfD overtakes Social Democrats in poll
The populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) has overtaken the Social Democrats (SPD) in a national opinion poll for the first time. The news comes as the SPD begins a crucial vote on a coalition with Angela Merkel.

A poll published on behalf of German tabloid Bild has found that 16 percent of voters would choose the right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), half-a-percent more than those who would vote for the Social Democrats (SPD).

The figures released by the INSA polling institute show the SPD in free fall. Germany's oldest political party has seen its polling figures plummet even further since it garnered just 20.5 percent of the vote in September's federal election, its worst result in the post-war era.

DW political correspondent Thomas Sparrow described the poll as a "bombshell," and part of a larger trend that sees traditional parties losing ground to the anti-immigrant AFD.

"Let's not forget that the AfD entered the German parliament for the first time in September, they became Germany's third most important force political in the parliament and they tap essentially into people's fears," Sparrow told DW television. "We are talking here about immigration, about their suspicions regarding the establishment, the established political parties, that's one of the reasons why they had been able to take some of those voters away from both the Conservatives and the Social Democrats."

The newspaper Bild described the survey "a bitter blow" for the SPD, while INSA chief Hermann Binkert said the poll showed that "the conservative bloc is currently the only truly mainstream party."

On February 21 2018 01:35 Big J wrote:
Meanwhile 'Bild' is using all their boulevard propaganda power to fuck up the SPD, by subscribing a dog as SPD member to show that everyone, and what bothers them most, in particular foreigners that are SPD members, is able to vote on party matters such as the coalition paper.

EUROPP – What Happened To Europe's Left?
Jan Rovny argues that while many commentators have linked the left's decline to the late-2000s financial crisis, the weakening of Europe's left reflects deep structural and technological changes that have reshaped European society, leaving left-wing parties out in the cold.

Together with workers' unions organising the work on factory floors, and later in offices, these organisations helped construct a working-class subculture that permeated the social as well as the political, and that ensured the electoral stability of the European left.

Second, the left's enabling of the search for rights allowed younger generations to seek personal liberation from traditional hierarchies, including those of the left.

The salience of this left and traditionalist political space, vacated by the mainstream left parties, would be boosted by another important structural development - the growth of transnational exchange.

Attracting a wide coalition of economic interests through its blurry economic proposals, as my earlier research shows, the radical right married its traditional petit bourgeois electorate to swaths of the new 'precariat', and outperformed the left as the dominant political voice of the contemporary working classes.

As my forthcoming work with Jonathan Polk, as well as with Bruno Palier and Allison Rovny demonstrates, in countries that experienced particularly drastic economic downturn during the economic recession, such as Greece and Spain, and where the 'precariat' consequently includes many young and educated citizens, the populist challengers are mostly radical left parties that call for a return to true - economically interventionist, and culturally liberal - left-wing politics.

Interestingly, in the context of this new political competition, the west resembles the east, and the mainstream left everywhere is left out in the cold.

On February 21 2018 04:17 Nyxisto wrote:
What happened to Europe's left?




topical article

The Netherlands is starting to resemble a narco-state with the police unable to combat the emergence of a parallel criminal economy, a report from the Dutch police association has warned.

Official figures suggest crime is on a downward trend but officers say many victims have stopped reporting incidents while organised crime syndicates have been given a free rein.

“Only one in nine criminal groups can be tackled with the current people and resources,” the report given to the De Telegraaf newspaper says. “Detectives see that small criminals develop into wealthy entrepreneurs who establish themselves in the hospitality industry, housing market, middle class, travel agencies.”

The paper from the Dutch police union, based on interviews with 400 detectives, adds: “The Netherlands fulfils many characteristics of a narco-state. Detectives see a parallel economy emerge.”

Critics of the Dutch gedoogbeleid (tolerance policy) towards the sale of cannabis in coffee shops, and the legal status of prostitution in the country, claim the Netherlands has been inadvertently promoted as a major hub for the trafficking of drugs and people.

A large majority of ecstasy taken in Europe and the US comes from labs in the south of the country, which are increasingly run by Moroccan gangs involved in the production of cannabis. Half of the €5.7bn a year of cocaine taken in Europe comes through the port of Rotterdam, according to Europol.

The Dutch police association wants an extra 2,000 officers to be recruited, and its hard-hitting claim about the rise of organised crime will be seen by critics as an attempt to squeeze more money from central government.

However, the findings chime with a leaked report drafted earlier this year by the office of the public prosecutor for the Dutch cabinet.

While there has been a 25% drop in the number of recorded crimes over the past nine years, to below 1m, the paper reported that 3.5m crimes go unregistered every year. The report also raised fears that the authorities were being put at “an insurmountable disadvantage”.

The mayor of Amsterdam, its local police force and the Dutch capital’s public prosecutor also publicly warned this month of a growth in organised crime and a shift towards more invisible forms of crime embedded in neighbourhoods and often out of the control and sight of the authorities.

Amsterdam’s police chief, Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, claimed his force was spending 60% to 70% of its time attempting to combat gang-related hit-jobs.

Young men were willing to carry out assassinations for as little as €3,000, he said in an interview this month. “In the 80s and 90s, professional hitmen from abroad came here for €50,000,” said Aalbersberg. “In recent years we see young boys from Amsterdam.”

With the police struggling to deal with the most high-profile crimes, it is claimed that officers are missing many others.

The Dutch police’s union’s report, published on Tuesday, warns that criminals who target the elderly and vulnerable are often going unpunished, with only an estimated 20% of such crimes reported to the police.

“The number of crimes against vulnerable people has increased due to the ageing population and more cutbacks in care,” the report says. “In particular, the theft, fraud and violence against the elderly and vulnerable people has increased enormously and insufficient attention is paid to this.”

The Dutch minister for justice and security, Ferd Grapperhaus, acknowledged he had received the police report warning of a “lack of capacity for the combat against organised crime”. He said: “It is a signal that we must take seriously. This government recognises that there is a need for investment in the police force.

“Therefore we are investing extra money in the coming years: an average of €267m every year. We also have fund for combating organised crime (€100m).

“However, the justice minister stresses that the Dutch police, together with the public prosecutor, are achieving effective results in the prosecution of drugs-related crime. Therefore the term ‘narco-state’ is not a qualification I would use.”

On February 21 2018 08:48 Nyxisto wrote:
Property buying prices rising isn't that big of a deal, because obviously if you buy the property and it appreciates in price you benefit from the price increase.

On February 21 2018 10:03 Nyxisto wrote:
owning property isn't really important because if all you wanted was to own a home you can buy one for scraps in one of the bazillion cities where property prices are dropping.

It's only relevant if you also have fast appreciating rents or living space in general, because then people get squeezed out of the cities. As Germany in this particular case is mostly a nation of renters and rents are stable it's not that big of a deal.