Far-right advances in EU election Far-right advances in EU election, France calls snap national vote | Reuters https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/european-parliament-poised-rightward-shift-after-final-voting-2024-06-09/ Immigration is a major issue for the EU voters. "While the centre, liberal and Socialist parties were set to retain a majority in the 720-seat parliament, the vote dealt a domestic blow to the leaders of both France and Germany, raising questions about how the European Union's major powers can drive policy in the bloc."
A good opinion essay in the New York Times: "The E.U. Is Revealing Its True Identity. Europeans Don’t Like It" by Christopher Caldwell Link: https://archive.is/ADFGB Quote: "Europeans are mostly not aware that they have been enlisted in a project that has as its end point the extinction of France, Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe’s historic nations as meaningful political units. Brussels has been able to win assent to its project only by concealing its nature. Europe’s younger generation appears to have seen through the dissembling. We are only at the beginning of the consequences." "To understand today’s discontent with the European Union, it may help to look at the recent elections generationally rather than ideologically. It has shocked some observers that in France, the National Rally, descended from the hard-line National Front that Jean-Marie Le Pen founded in 1972, drew so many votes from the young: 28 percent of those under 35, more than any other party. Among voters under 25, the National Rally took 25 percent, tying for the lead. In Germany the nationalist and anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany more than tripled its vote among voters under 25, to 16 percent from 5 percent, since the last E.U. election five years ago. Although at 46 a young leader by European standards, Mr. Macron is almost two decades older than the National Rally’s 28-year-old leader, Jordan Bardella. "When the modern European Union began with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, Mr. Bardella was not yet born. The world looks different to him and his contemporaries than it does to those who cling to fond memories of the early 1990s. Back then, Europeans embodied environmental advocacy, self-actualization, self-expression and other values described by the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart as “post-materialist.” Europeans actually used that term. They were proud of it. Today, European politics — and French politics above all — is crudely materialistic. The most explosive issues of the past few elections have been purchasing power, the price of diesel, the age of retirement and the shortage of housing (often taken by migrants awaiting asylum hearings). Europe’s preoccupations are closer to the 18th-century world of bread riots than to the 20th-century one of Save the Whales. Hard-line parties like the National Rally and Alternative for Germany, with their proposals to limit asylum rights, to stop favoring electric cars over burners and to claw back retirement benefits, cater to this reality. Like them or not, such proposals open up the situation to democratic debate. The European Union’s role is often to close off such debate, citing refugee-treaty obligations that migrants be prioritized or budget-deficit ceilings requiring that welfare benefits be kept lean. These propositions are sometimes sensible, but publics are less inclined to listen to them than they were in the boom years of the 1990s." "Europeans no longer take prosperity for granted. A decade after Maastricht, it seemed that E.U. companies like Nokia and Ericsson might do with cellphone hardware what the United States was doing with data. But that didn’t pan out. Today, by Forbes’s rankings, not one of the top 15 digital companies in the world is European. This is not just a humiliation. It also means that Europe has little to build a credible economic recovery out of." "Mr. Macron’s allies warn that with the rise of the anti-European National Rally, the dark days of France’s World War II collaboration with the Nazis are returning. His interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has even likened another party’s vote-sharing deals with Mr. Bardella to the Munich Agreement, the 1938 pact in which France, Britain and Italy vainly sought to avoid war by assenting to Hitler’s territorial demands in Czechoslovakia. Such comparisons used to make swing voters think twice." "But the National Rally does not today seem like a party that especially deserves exclusion or excommunication. You can add as many adverbs as you like to “extreme right,” but the definitions of right and left have grown hazy. Mr. Bardella attended a march against antisemitism after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. France Unbowed, a party of the left led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, chose not to. Serge Klarsfeld, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who made a career of bringing Nazis to justice, has said he would vote for Mr. Bardella’s right over Mr. Mélenchon’s left, should the two ever face each other in a runoff. A defining E.U. narrative — in which right-wing critics of Europe are cast as would-be Nazis — has been turned on its head."
Sweden has a new name. New Syria. The Nazi raise is mostly due to increase in foreigners, sense of lose of national identity in EU countries, the economic decline and increased Chineese dominance, failing to compete with China.
None of this is surprising. The more heterogeneous a country is, the less support it'll have for social welfare. People don't like to give their tax dollars to others who don't look like them. People have been pulling their hair out trying to understand why Americans support universal healthcare in polls, but their votes don't align with that view. The U.S. will not function like European countries, not only because it's large, but also because it's far more diverse.
My theory is that the pharmaceutical companies and medical industry buys off enough votes so the universal healthcare laws have difficulty passing. See how much trouble they had passing Obamacare. The Republicans and Trump still want to repel Obamacare! Even though it has gotten many more people healthcare. Watching propaganda videos on the Internet is definitely a global problem. People trying to get their news from unreliable sources has just gotten worse with social media.
Indeed, everyone is a reporter on social media. Sources can be reliable, unreliable and everything in-between..
