EPTEuropean Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 1360
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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maybenexttime
Poland5739 Posts
On April 11 2022 03:21 Nebuchad wrote: I'm skeptical that you'll find any country that has improved in any kind of significant way under neoliberalism. The US is worse than ever, the UK is trending down, France is at its low point... Maybe we have a different definition of what improving means, if you're talking about where you would love to live as a billionaire then sure they're all doing amazing. The whole Central/Eastern Europe made massive leap in terms of the quality of life. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12379 Posts
On April 11 2022 04:30 JimmiC wrote: Why is that the far right beating the left? Couldnt the left get ahead of the far right? My thought is because the right attacks "the left" which includes centerists to them and the left attacks centerests. Every democratic system is going to lead to compromise as people do not agree completely on much, but it would be a lot better (imo) if the center had to compromise with the left rather than far right. Indeed it would! That would break the system, and we would go back to the electoral split of social democracy, a different system, where the principal opposition is between leftists (left) and liberals (right), as we have in Switzerland for example. That was the whole point of voting Mélenchon in the first round, hoping that we could get France back to how it operated before Macron. Unfortunately a lot of forces are working against this happening, including Macron, who finds it very easy to campaign as the good guy vs the bad guys. On April 11 2022 04:34 maybenexttime wrote: The whole Central/Eastern Europe made massive leap in terms of the quality of life. Do you guys have neoliberalism? At least Poland I thought had a very conservative but economically leftist party as one of its main possibilities. | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5739 Posts
On April 11 2022 04:34 Nebuchad wrote: Do you guys have neoliberalism? At least Poland I thought had a very conservative but economically leftist party as one of its main possibilities. We did have neoliberalism for some 20-25 years after the collapse of the communist bloc. As did most post-communist countries. And PiS is not economically leftist. It's purely populist with no long-term plan. They did very little for worker rights. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12379 Posts
On April 11 2022 04:40 maybenexttime wrote: We did have neoliberalism for some 20 years after the collapse of the communist bloc. As did most post-communist countries. And PiS is not economically leftist. It's purely populist with no long-term plan. They did very little for worker rights. Fair enough, that is a good point then, thanks. Do you know what steps you took to escape it? | ||
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Sent.
Poland9267 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22038 Posts
On April 11 2022 04:56 JimmiC wrote: Because populism offers easy solutions to complex problems and that is very enticing to people. I think that is a fine strategy. I just would like to see more attack of the right or even the right policies of the centerists. Attacking the group seems to be pushing people right and not left. That being said I do not really understand why the right is gaining so much when much of the populist stuff is dumb and many of the people that I would consider "far right" do not consider themselves that. It seems more that they are angry at the elite much like the left, but instead of the elite being the wealthy it is the educated. A lot of the people around here that have money (100k plus incomes or more) but are blue collar whether that is farm, oil, or owning/working in the trades and they do not blame the rich or even the ultra rich but instead the ultra educated who they think are talking down to them and keeping them down. | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12379 Posts
For the average voter who gets convinced by this, I assume some of them don't understand that they are being lied to about the populism. But mostly conservatives aren't humanists, they just care about themselves, and they correctly deduce that in a society where other people are put down because of identity, they are better off. And they just want to be better off, so they want that. On April 11 2022 04:45 Sent. wrote: Moderate government trying to raise the retirement age to 67 aand maybe people being bored of having the same government for 8 years. Why didn't the far right win at that point? | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12379 Posts
On April 11 2022 05:28 JimmiC wrote: I disagree it is obviously good. Where is the proof? What populist goverment is actually doing well and not still losing to whatever scapegoat they were blaming in the first place? Right also blames "elites", just different ones. I don't know Jimmi | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On April 11 2022 05:18 Nebuchad wrote: Populism is obviously very good. Elites are engaged in a fight against us, it is good and logical that we fight back. The issue with the far right is of course that they don't hold any populist beliefs. They don't object to the elites because of any kind of class war, they object to the elites because those elites implement a liberal society, and they would rather have elites that implement a "conservative" (fascistic) society. For the average voter who gets convinced by this, I assume some of them don't understand that they are being lied to about the populism. But mostly conservatives aren't humanists, they just care about themselves, and they correctly deduce that in a society where other people are put down because of identity, they are better off. And they just want to be better off, so they want that. Why didn't the far right win at that point? I think fundamentally people tend like neoliberalism, but don’t like the negative aspects of neoliberalism. In as crude a framing as is almost possible. People will flirt with the far right to an extent if they’re pissed, because they’ll be throwing out bedcrumbs of critique there. But generally they’ll gravitate to the status quo neoliberal parties. Taken individually one can point to particular factors in electoral results in various countries as an attempt to explain x left wing party bombing. Be that a hostile media culture, a flawed leader, flawed messaging or indeed flawed policy prescriptions. But in aggregate, perhaps there’s some counter-examples, somewhere in Europe/the Anglosphere, I can’t think of anywhere the left has really meaningfully punched through in quite some time. At least on current trends anyway, people don’t seem to want genuine left alternatives, they want all of the benefits of neoliberalism but to be personally insulated from its effects, if even entirely artificially or arbitrarily. | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
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Sent.
Poland9267 Posts
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
On April 11 2022 06:18 Sent. wrote: Yes Damn, that's unfortunate, but it looks like Macron will win again if I am reading things correctly | ||
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Acrofales
Spain18180 Posts
On April 11 2022 05:15 plasmidghost wrote: Do y'all have any resources to share for the state of Belgian and EU politics? Moving there in August to the Flanders region and wanted to be aware of everything going on politically. Currently a bit nervous that the far-right party VB has decent support there The Vlaams Belang is fairly standard populist right for Europe; similar to Wilders in NL or Le Pen in France, but with the added twist of being anti-Walloon. That's their main thing and the main reason they get votes. That said, NVA is the main Flemish party, and have all of the anti-Walloon nonsense too. Due to the Belgian governmental system, VB is all but guaranteed to never ever govern at a national level (it's also the reason Belgian governments crash and burn so often, and take forever to find coalitions): constitutionally Wallonië and Vlaanderen have to share power. I don't understand all the details and it's a running joke in Belgium that absolutely nobody understands their system. I lived in Leuven for a few months and found life very similar to NL, but with a lower cost of living and better food (and beer). I cycled everywhere, as did everyone else, and public transport worked well too. Not sure how their healthcare system works, but I know for a while people on the border in NL used to visit Belgian hospitals because they had shorter waiting lists for a lot of care. That was a decade or two ago, though. Anyway, I would worry about VB a lot less than the far right in Belgium's neighbors. The NVA is boneheaded enough tho. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12379 Posts
On April 11 2022 06:09 WombaT wrote: I think fundamentally people tend like neoliberalism, but don’t like the negative aspects of neoliberalism. In as crude a framing as is almost possible. People will flirt with the far right to an extent if they’re pissed, because they’ll be throwing out bedcrumbs of critique there. But generally they’ll gravitate to the status quo neoliberal parties. Taken individually one can point to particular factors in electoral results in various countries as an attempt to explain x left wing party bombing. Be that a hostile media culture, a flawed leader, flawed messaging or indeed flawed policy prescriptions. But in aggregate, perhaps there’s some counter-examples, somewhere in Europe/the Anglosphere, I can’t think of anywhere the left has really meaningfully punched through in quite some time. At least on current trends anyway, people don’t seem to want genuine left alternatives, they want all of the benefits of neoliberalism but to be personally insulated from its effects, if even entirely artificially or arbitrarily. I think it's unlikely that a lot of people like liberalism in general, let alone neoliberalism. The main reason why I think that is because I live in Switzerland, where we often vote on policies rather than individuals. I work in a newspaper so sometimes I have to read things sent to us by liberal politicians that want to give arguments to vote for or against specific policies. The overwhelming majority of the time, the framing that they choose is to say that they are on the side of the leftist policy, but there is some sort of flaw that forces them to vote in the way that you would expect a liberal to vote. If liberalism was popular, you wouldn't need to do that shit. You would just state that you defend the liberal policy because liberalism is cool. Instead they always say "leftism is cool we love it but we can't do it because [some bullshit reason that changes for every vote]". You can see some of those effects on an international level, where liberals often dishonestly present as pragmatic and non-ideological. And when you see those maps of beliefs for voters in the States, most people who vote democrat are bottom left, squarely on the side of leftism, rather than bottom right where liberalism operates. | ||
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Acrofales
Spain18180 Posts
On April 11 2022 05:18 Nebuchad wrote: Populism is obviously very good. Elites are engaged in a fight against us, it is good and logical that we fight back. The issue with the far right is of course that they don't hold any populist beliefs. They don't object to the elites because of any kind of class war, they object to the elites because those elites implement a liberal society, and they would rather have elites that implement a "conservative" (fascistic) society. For the average voter who gets convinced by this, I assume some of them don't understand that they are being lied to about the populism. But mostly conservatives aren't humanists, they just care about themselves, and they correctly deduce that in a society where other people are put down because of identity, they are better off. And they just want to be better off, so they want that. Why didn't the far right win at that point? Real populists don't exist in modern European politics. You'd need to look to South America to see populists (Lula is a very obvious populist). In Europe we basically mean demagogue when we say populist, and those "populist" parties on the far right are rife with demagoguery. That said, Melenchon isn't a populist either. He is a socialist. I don't see populism as obviously very good. Mob rule is "populism", and it's definitely not good. Moreover, populist platforms tend to be an incoherent mess, because there's no clear ideology. That makes them completely unpredictable when a new situation arises while in power. | ||
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