European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 1143

The story goes like this: The Austrian social-democracy was very strong throughout the 70s and 80s, so they ruled alone and when they lost the 50% they carried on with the tiny FPÖ, which used to be some semi-liberal, semi-nationalist party at that time. A lot of this was due to the influence of the German FDP, which tried to establish them as a liberal party of their kind in Austria.
In 1986 young Jörg Haider revolted in the FPÖ which led to the social-democrats breaking up the coalition, because of Haiders Nazi-slang provocations, leading to the so-called Vranitzky doctrine, a party resolution (named after the SPÖ chancellor Vranitzky) which is valid to this day, which forbids the SPÖ to form a coalition with the FPÖ.
What followed were endless standstill coalitions in the 90s of the (leading) social-democrats with the conservatives and Haider pretty much inventing modern populism, eating through the conservative voter base, but also becoming popular with "the working man".

So in my eyes it's a mixture of the SPÖ-ÖVP standstill and the charismatic, opportunistic character Jörg Haider, that made the FPÖ grow big in the 90s.

In 1993 the liberals split from the Haider-FPÖ, founding their own party, which was eventually canibalized by the rise of the (back then) left-liberal Greens led by (the current president) Alexander Van der Bellen
In the 1999 election the FPÖ got second place in front of the ÖVP-conservatives (behind the social-democrats) and ÖVP/FPÖ formed a coalition under the leadership of ÖVP-party leader Wolfgang Schüssel and with Haider taking no government role. In the wake of Haider a lot of young opportunists, more liberal than nationalist, took over the leading government roles of the FPÖ. The party lost most of their voter base to the conservatives in the 2003 elections, but they formed another FPÖ/ÖVP government.
In 2005 Haider tried to get rid of the Nazi-parts of the party so he and the governing part of the FPÖ with all the opportunists founded a new party called BZÖ, leaving only the outmost Nazi scum in the FPÖ.
Turns out the Nazi scum had a lot of rich donors and a very fine strategist/propagandist (current interior minister Herbert Kickl) and they survived. After Haider died in a car accident, driving home from meeting with his secret gay lover in 2008 the BZÖ collapsed, with the FPÖ, now led by true and outright Nazis like Heinz-Christian Strache or Johann Gudenus and 50% German-nationalist fraternity members for members of parliament, taking all the right-wing voters.
With their march towards becoming the biggest party only stopped by Sebastian Kurz taking over the ÖVP and taking over all their positions without being an actual (or former) Nazi.

Alright, you want the skinny on UKIP *spits* and Nigel Farage *blesses ground with salt*, and why they've more or less vanished, and where they came from? Here goes, and god defend my soul.

We have a paper called the Daily Fail. Some mistakenly call it the Daily Mail. The Daily Fail hates... well, basically everyone, but especially immigrants. It hates most of you, because you're not English. You're okay if you're American. If your first language isn't English, there's a fair chance the Daily Fail hates you. The Daily Fail also hates the EU, because not only is the EU full of people that it hates (not being English and all that), it's also full of immigrants, and the big bad EU is making us accept immigrants. This is bad. The Daily Fail was deeply sad about this state of affairs.

SO

The solution is clearly to leave the EU! The Daily Fail had been blasting the EU for about... forever, but banging the war drums about leaving for five or ten years or so, only nobody listened because it's the Daily Fail and nobody listens to it when it comes to serious politics. Except for the Conservatives.

Enter He Who Shall No Longer Be Named. HWSNLBN is an arsehole who thought that we'd be better off outside the EU for... business reasons, I think? Honestly, he never had any solid argument. But he didn't like immigrants, you see. Except his wife. She's a good immigrant. Or something. But the Daily Fail saw an ally in HWSNLBN, and a dark pact was born. HWSNLBN became the Daily Fail's man of the people, an arsehole always PRed sat in a pub with a pint of guiness to show what a working man's man he is. Because the Daily Fail is popular mostly with idiots, this worked, and nobody thought it was odd that the man who inherited wads of cash and lives as a millionaire businessman seems to exclusively visit local village pubs to drink shitty guiness rather than actually good guiness like what the Irish have.

At the same time, the Conservative Party was going through a long hangover called THATCHER. After Big Mommy T, the Conservative Party suffered from a complete lack of charisma, due to Big Mommy T having apparently sucked all of the drive, energy, power, and charisma out of the entire party and channelled it all into her living bulldozer of a personality. This allowed THE BLAIR to take over England forever, to various degrees of success, until he thought 'I'm friends with America. We need to be friends with America. Let's help America with its war, because we're friends'. And everyone in England was sad. And then we kicked Blair out because actually we never liked the War in Iraq, and that was BEFORE we found out it was bullshit. (I believe we were about 50/50 on it, it was never popular)

During this period, the Conservatives went through a lot of personality shifts while trying to find an identity after Big Mommy T. This inevitably led some of them to go farther and farther to the right on the political spectrum. And those people agreed with the Daily Fail that the EU was evil. Unfortunately, these people also had a tendency to smell bad and be blatantly racist. This wasn't a problem before, because the whip pretty much pinned them down and declared 'thou shalt vote with the party, or thou shalt be hanged at dawn! And under no circumstances shalt thou hold a press conference where you can be a) seen or ESPECIALLY b) heard.'

Cue David Cameron, a youngish (not 60), floppy haired, non-flamboyant, but deceptively right-of-centre politician with energy, ideas, and a hidden well of charisma that he UNLEASHED UPON GORDON BROWN WITH UNEXPECTED FURY. Gordon Brown was Tony Blair's hand-picked successor, the court vizier waiting in the wings to stab him and steal his throne, if you will. His rise was considered so inevitable that people didn't think an election was even necessary. Here is a link to David Cameron's un-autocued, off the cuff speech after he'd been told just before going on stage that Labour were planning on a snap election since they were so far ahead in the polls:

https://conservative-speeches.sayit.mysociety.org/speech/599778 (it genuinely is worth reading; it's one of the more influential speeches in modern British politics since it almost singlehandedly won him the election)

And overnight the polls shifted, and he went on to thrash Gordon Brown, who suddenly went from arrogantly cocksure of victory to uncertain.

And the Tories were overjoyed. Right? RIGHT???

Well, not really. As you might have noticed in there, he's a bit right of centre, not a hard right Tory. He was supportive of a lot of things they don't like along with things they do like. And that made the anti-EU crowd SAD.

So, along comes He Who Shall No Longer Be Named and says 'tally ho, chums, I'm running a party called UKIP, and all we really do is talk about how much we hate immigrants and how they're murderous terrorist rapists. Want to join?' And they did, and the Tories were SAD. But also HAPPY, because they got rid of some utterly embarrassing fuckheads in the process. But those fuckheads were OVERJOYED, because now they could be SEEN, and HEARD, and this led to numerous embarrassments for UKIP, with 'well, every party has some idiots' being shorthand for 'UKIP is full of idiots' nationwide. But He Who Shall No Longer Be Named was untouched by all of this. The idiots were around him, being constantly told to shut the fuck up by him, much like the oppressive Tories they had fled from, because even he realised these idiots were idiots. But they did give UKIP more power, and that was what they needed to apply pressure on the Tories, even taking away some important areas of the UK at their height.

David Cameron had a plan. The Anti-EU wing of the Tories were growing more and more boisterous, bolstered by the Daily Fail's endless yammering on one hand, UKIP on another, and his own back benchers. The Tories were meant to be the hard immigration party, after all, even though David felt there were more important issues. So facing increasing pressure where the Daily Fail had whipped it up to such a degree that everyone was hammering this one point and the Tories were losing seats to UKIP, he pulled out what he thought would be his trump card. With the worst of the Conservatives gone to UKIP, but the UK still mostly pro EU, he promised a referendum. The one thing UKIP would. Not. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. About.

The plan was simple. Cut their legs out from under them, dispose of the worst of the Tory trash, and proceed. If he waited another few years, the tide would shift, a leave vote would be inevitable. But if he did it now, and Remain won? Well, the issue would be dead for decades.

However, the Tories fell back on an old principle of theirs: RELENTLESS OPPORTUNISTIC BACKSTABBING. Unfortunately, a pair of arseholes called Michael Gove and Boris Johnson were both a little too opportunistic, and dumb enough not to realise this was a serious vote. It is important to realise both of them campaigned for Leave because they were certain that Remain was going to win. The whole plan they had was to be the True Men of The People and make a run on leadership afterward. THEY DID NOT WANT THEIR OWN CAMPAIGNS TO SUCCEED.

But Leave won, due to a confluence of issues, and all that got royally shitted up. especially when David did the only thing a man betrayed by two of his friends could do: he quit and let them sort it the fuck out, since he didn't want the UK to leave and knew full well it was going to be a disaster. I'm sure he's SAD to this day.

And that is why UKIP is now irrelevant. It was a party of grievance, buoyed by the Daily Fail (who more or less stopped banging on about them immediately after the vote), staffed only by Tory refuse and political neophytes, whose grievance got dealt with. Without the Daily Fail's support, a cause to get votes, or any sort of plan beyond that, they had no identity and no role to fulfill in the political sphere of the UK, and so they rapidly ceased to exist. And kept saying racist things. And literally fighting each other in the street over the leadership.

You know, things that are anathema to UK politics, where we still hold leaders to some standards of dignity and expect them to at least look the part of being worthy to lead.


THERE YOU GO.

I'm just writing this post so everyone here has the full story on why Brexit happened and what happened with UKIP and He Who Shall No Longer Be Named, since I've noticed that both topics come up semi-frequently. It's not intended to be talk-downy or to assume you don't know any of it, just a full reference for anyone that happens to only be passingly familiar with UK politics and the names involved.