Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

oh, my bad, sorry dan!

the chart i was about to post is still relevant, though:

https://i.imgur.com/GDEVQlz.png

i can't bear to post a GDP chart without grimacing, though. hey everyone in the US, wasn't it great how we all doubled our GDP from 1995 until now? we're all doing twice as well as 1995, right??

but it does suggest that perhaps living standards in russia are not quite as stable as some are suggesting.

The 2014 / 2015 rouble devaluation affects USD charts hugely. It doesn’t mean irl domestic spending has been affected so dramatically.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/austrian-state-may-limit-kosher-meat-sales-to-registered-jews-1.6289229

this beggars belief

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/sep/09/sweden-election-live

Fingers crossed!

Having to cross fingers at all is depressing enough.

can't believe there are fascists in Sweden

There's always been a lot of fascists in Sweden.

Probably because they stayed out of WWII, so they never got discredited quite the way fascists did in Denmark and Norway.

https://i.imgur.com/U7Ghu2s.gif?noredirect

Oh, sorry, mistook Noodle Vague for an American.

Exit-polls say SD get's between 16-19%, which is below expectations. But exit polls were wrong last time.

Oh, sorry, mistook Noodle Vague for an American.

― Frederik B, Sunday, September 9, 2018 7:16 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is... something. Field day for NV.

18% is below expectations, but crazy high all the same. I'd be perfectly comfortable with the hanging of every single one of these yung guns playing politics. With their smug ties. Fuck 'em.

Guillotine, hanging is barbaric.

I don't know, 18% is also the lowest out of any Nordic far-right party.

when peak UKIP were maintaining a steady 12% vote share, it was still enough to push our cuddly One Nation Tories way further to the right and give the legitimate concerns posse in Labour a license to talk casual racism. I don't know how this works in Sweden though, but I presume there will be a similar reaction.

Well, the interesting thing is that that is what happened in Norway and Denmark. When the populists hit double digits, they became perhaps the most influential parties in the country, and now everyone talks about 'legitimate concerns' and a broad understanding of a strict anti-immigration policy. The Social Democrats in Denmark has gone completely insane lately, and just tries to copy everything the populists said. Sweden has done it different, and even though Sweden Democrats hit 12% in the last election, the other parties refused to work with them. The assumption at least in Denmark was that that would only lead to much more people voting for them, and it might look like that is what has happened, but since it's lower than in other Nordic countries I don't think it works that well.

It's really hard to overestimate how much the political world in Denmark loves to contrast ourselves with Sweden. This election has been absolutely ridiculous, everyone seemed certain that SD would get at least 25% of the vote, and there were these completely fabricated stories about how nobody in the debates would talk about a wave of car burnings that happened - it was the very first thing they discussed, the journalists missed the first part of the debate.

So in a certain way to me it underlines how much more crazy Denmark is than Sweden.

was listening to Dimbleby hosted Danish QT panel yesterday. I don't know how representative of Danish society the crowd was, but every time that Henriksen was piping up about burkas or whatever there were boos and hisses.

xp to Calz, 't was the same in the Netherlands, and I imagine it to be the same everywhere. Every party wants a piece of the racist pie if it gets them some votes.

Martin Henriksen is such an... Yeah, even among the populists, he is particularly unlikable. Quite fittingly, he is the guy on the far right:
https://www.information.dk/sites/information.dk/files/styles/700x/public/media/2018/09/06/df2.png?itok=F-qkpM1c

Frederik, what can you tell me about the "ghetto plan" implemented in your country earlier this year? Where 22 areas or suburbs are placed under intense scrutiny and people from those areas can be punished more severely for an offense than people from outside those areas? This "Danish way" was posited and presented as an example by the Dutch conservatives all day. They are looking to Denmark and want to copy and implement this supposed "plan". No one really knows what they mean, though the left opposition called it "postal code racism", which seems otm.

How has this been working out? How is it even legal? I mean, how do you even find judicial grounds to punish person A more severely than person B, for the very same offense, just because person A is from a "ghetto"? (that word, thank god, hasn't entered our political vocabulary yet but I trust it won't be long)

It sounds illegal, ill-informed, abysmal. At best.

It's postal code racism, and it's even worse, because they've changed the definition of 'ghetto' to underline that it is a place with many immigrants. So even if it's poor and crime-riddled; if there are no immigrants, there's no tougher penalties. Yeah, it's abysmal.

That it's apparently technically legal says a lot about how toothless the EU court of human rights is.

the US has been finding judicial grounds for it for a long time, it just isn't codified*

* or codified anymore, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it used to be / is still on the books somewhere

Thanks for your response but I'd like to hear some more about the nitty gritty. Do you have squads going in these "ghettos"? Has a judge sentenced someone from one of those areas already, double the normal sentence? How does this *work*? It all sounds terrifying, but with the conservatives at the wheel here, no doubt it will happen.

And of course the EU court of human rights is toothless, but hey, you can't expect them to jump at every xenophobic instance any of the 27 member states has and act upon it within months. This is on the member states, not the HR court.

@Katherine, it not being codified or written into law is even scarier. But I can't say I'm surprised. Sorry to say but I've stopped questioning if the US has judicial grounds for anything when it allows cops to kill black people as a pastime. There's no codifying that.

It's very new and I don't think it has had consequences in court. It's part of a larger law, which also means that kids from the areas are being forced into kindergarten from age 1, public benefits are lower for inhabitants in these areas (they're already lower for immigrants, so that will only hurt Danish citizens). Lots of stuff like that.

Part of the law also says that the police are allowed to focus especially on these areas. There's been some kind of 'stop and frisk' going on for a while. It's not entirely like in the US since they don't carry weapons and the police squads don't rely on fines, but it's definitely inspired by it.

I'm obviously biased, being from Portugal and having Brazilian friends and so on, but this Bolsonaro guy feels like a special brand of hateful garbage even amongst our current crop of fascists.

Everything about him is in Portuguese.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-45579635

Racist, sexist, homophobic and bigoted in every other way you could think of, but also openly praises the military dictatorship era and advocates for torture. Has given props to a judge responsible for torturing Dilma Roussoff when she was fighting against said dictatorship and told a female political opponent "I wouldn't rape you because you're not good enough".

He is leading the polls to become Brazil's next president.

Yesssss I have a houseguest right now who heads up an LGBTQ advocacy org in Brazil and she told us some of that last night. He's apparently advocating for civil war that would kill tens of thousands of Brazilians as the preferred way forward.

Correction: Her current job is not in LGBTQ advocacy but her previous ones were, but she's still in policy/advocacy and Bolsonaro is still hateful garbage who might get elected.

I think Haddad should still win a run-off but, post Dilma/Lula, there isn’t necessarily a long-term correlation between being elected and running the country if you are on the left.

Especially since Bolsonaro, taking yet another leaf from the Trump playbook, has made it clear that if he loses the run-off it's because of voter fraud.

I was talking with my Brazilian friends abt Bolsonaro yesterday and while he def seems a very special breed of misogynist asshole, they did not find it very realistic that he could lead a military coup since his connections with the military are not good

but I guess "fascist" means populist conservative or smth these days

LBI and Frederik you can read the draft bill about "zones of increased penalization" here: https://www.ft.dk/samling/20171/almdel/REU/bilag/382/1928101/index.htm

It google translates quite well https://translate.google.pt/translate?hl=en&sl=da&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.dk%2Fsamling%2F20171%2Falmdel%2FREU%2Fbilag%2F382%2F1928101%2Findex.htm

It will most likely be put forward Tuesday when parliament opens, then goes through 3 treatments and will most likely be accepted without changes since there is a wide majority behind it

The change in the law will authorize the chief of police to instate a temporary zone of increased penalization in an area that experiences a sudden increase in violent crime leading if he/she believes such a zone would have a preventive effect on the crime. It's not about where the person is from or where he/she lives but where the crime is committed.

I was talking with my Brazilian friends abt Bolsonaro yesterday and while he def seems a very special breed of misogynist asshole, they did not find it very realistic that he could lead a military coup since his connections with the military are not good

but I guess "fascist" means populist conservative or smth these days

Went to an anti-Bolsonaro rally yesterday and what I heard from Brazilian people there reminds me of what I heard from French ppl at the last election about Le Pen: they don't actually think he'll get elected, what worries them is how far he's gotten.

He may not be in a good relationship with the military right now, but he's openly nostalgic about the military junta that ruled Brazil in the past, I don't think fascist is a misnomer here.

Yeah, he does flirt pretty hard with authoritarianism

I was surprised to find that he has support from upper middle class voters as well, one of my friends' dad is a doctor and will (to the endless frustration of my friend) probably to vote for the guy o_O

I guess the #elenao campaign and the fact that he's gotten so far (and could win) is symptomatic of the poor alternatives...

so is he the favorite to win now

I would say yeah. His opponent is handicapped by popular disillusion towards the party he hails from (how merited is a matter up for debate).

A backlash:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkels-bavarian-allies-tried-to-pander-to-the-far-right-now-theyre-paying-the-price/2018/10/12/cc1df1aa-c71d-11e8-9c0f-2ffaf6d422aa_story.html?__twitter_impression=true&noredirect=on&utm_term=.42a5fd445d28

The CSU was always "the party the nazis fled to after WWII" to my parents.

Polish president and PM set to join fascist march in Warsaw

Cool cool cool.

so the nazis' levelling of poland during wwii was just... the wrong type of fascism?

This is a better write-up of the situation:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/09/fears-of-violence-as-polish-state-intervenes-in-nationalist-march

It’s a mess and not as straightforward as the Freedom article presents it.

The original neo-Nazi March was banned by the Mayor of Warsaw and the government came in to replace it with a, supposedly more inclusive, alternative along the same route. The ban was overturned and the original march is back on - suggesting they might have two separately organised marches on the same day. It looks like the government has tried to negotiate with the Nazis to combine the marches but drop the Fascist trappings but it’s not clear whether that has been successful or how the two matches will engage each other. It is not simply a case of the PM marching in the explicitly Fascist one.

There is a big crossover between the far-right and the PiS vote but the march is also internationally embarrassing enough for them to want to squash it.

thanks!

I think the PM, Duda, did join in 2015 or 2016 tbf.

The march has become more explicitly Fascist over time as it has attracted more white nationalists from elsewhere. It was last year that it really came to the attention of the international press.