Dutch elections

[Sheilbh]

No. But maybe Yes in Italy - and maybe Italy's just a little ahead of the rest of Europe

I think it's more that all over Europe traditional left and traditional right (and maybe the liberals) used to win something like 80-85% of the vote. That vote's fragmented - now they'll do well to win 60-65%. And that vote share might still be falling. But I don't think it's all happening at once everywhere.

More that all through the 2010s the talk was about the collapse of the centre-left across Europe. Which was a thing. And often the parties winning those votes were on the radical right in "left behind" areas. But not everywhere - there was SYRIZA, Podemos and, in the Netherlands, the Socialist Party. As well as the rise of the Greens which I think is another big story. And possibly another story could be the rise of a radical (and it is very radical) left with conservative social/cultural policies depending on how Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany does because I think others will look to follow that (not sure if they can).

In a lot of Europe I think that's stabilised and the centre left either has or is recovering. But I think that's still the frame of a lot of analysis. And it hasn't happened everywhere - tough to even imagine a route back for the mainstream left in France or Italy, and in Germany they're incumbents which is not great given everything. I think you could argue that maybe France and Italy are examples where it did happen all at once?

I've seen fewer analysis or explainers of the collapse of broadly Christian Democrat Europe than we did of the collapse of social democratic Europe. So I don't know if it's true but my theory is that it's because they're opening the door to them - which I think is a different challenge. So I think (but this is really just a guess) the response/challenge from the radical right is different for the mainstream left and right.

Practically I think a big part of it is just fragmentation (which is maybe irreversible?) and the radical right are now a force across Europe capable of winning 20-30% in an election.

Of course my explanation would be fundamentally material: "left behind" post-industrial communities have had bad results economically, in esteem, in education etc; immigration is challenging because it's not been accompanied by sufficient public investment (and I sort of do think Anglo-Saxon views on this are right/more likely to work); and I don't think people feel empowered from the way our democracies are working at the minute. None of those are easy issues to fix but I think if you do, then you undercut the material and political base of the radical right.

Edit: And I think stemming their growth is about delivering. I don't think you'll stem their growth by trying to "understand" or "empathise" or by trying to steal their clothes - I don't think it's a problem of rhetoric and style.  But I am a very crude materialist so...

[Josquius]

Thinking randomly about it. The rise of the populist far right is interesting in that it is specifically targeting an uneducated group.

Though the traditional left back in the days of mass industry gained a lot of their support from low education manual workers, the lack of education wasn't integral to their identity. Rather it was often a bone of contention :they had been denied all the opportunities of the elites afterall.

With the modern far right though... They're so desperate to be called stupid. They troll their opponents into hinting that's what is thought of them. They get off on it.

Where in the days of mass industry and the working class as a political force voting for the left you did get some well read and clever people as part of the group, indeed these people often rose to the top levels of politics, under the populist right it's the opposite - typical highly educated MPs dumbing themselves down to say the crazy shit your racist uncle comes out with. This is how they signal we are on your side.

Anyway. More relevant the recent rise of the far right in the Netherlands is linked to the shit with farmers being upset about the laws against not using quite so many chemicals right?

It does really make me wonder whether the future of politics not lie in the let it burn loony right vs the greens. Just when mainstream conservatives are becoming sane on the environment.

[Jacob]

...a radical (and it is very radical) left with conservative social/cultural policies

What does that look like? Radical left as in anti-capitalist, collectivist, and redistributionist? And conservative social/ cultural policies being anti-woke and anti-liberal-progess-since-the-60s (abortion, gay marriage, not beating your children)?

... or something else?

[Sheilbh]

What does that look like? Radical left as in anti-capitalist, collectivist, and redistributionist? And conservative social/ cultural policies being anti-woke and anti-liberal-progess-since-the-60s (abortion, gay marriage, not beating your children)?

... or something else?

It's not a million miles away. She was until now a senior figure in Die Linke.

She is very much from the genuine radical left. She is from East Germany, I believe she joined the party in the late 80s. I think I've read somewhere that she was a student in Berlin when the wall fell and basically locked herself in her room for several days - it was such a profound shock to her and her worldview. And I think went on to do her PhD (compulsory, I believe to enter German politics) in Hegel and Marx.

In unified Germany she moved into the post-communist party where she was on the hard, Marxist-Leninist left. She was controversial even at the start of her career for being fairly pro-Stalinism. And that party then became part of Die Linke (with the split of the SPD). She's now launching her own party which I think seems - like Melenchon or Macron in France - to be quite personalist and around her personality and leadership rather than a traditional formal party. I think Die Linke has now dispanded as a parliamentary party as she's taken 1/4 of their MPs with her and the rest are very internally divided. At the minute she's polling around 10-15% (hypothetically because she doesn't yet have a proper party).

To an extent she's doing what others have tried but most of those parties have ultimately come from the right and scratch the surface and there's just pure libertarian economic policies. But, while I think her economic views have moderated (although that's not difficult from doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism ) she does very much come from a radical left tradition. From an English language article on her (by former Economist Germany correspondent):

Much else about it remains uncertain, however. At the press conference Wagenknecht issued familiar criticisms of "unchecked migration", sanctions on Russia and ideological "eco-activism", but no finer detail on the party's platform. And she has launched an initiative on these lines before: a movement called "Rise Up" founded in 2018. I interviewed Wagenknecht around that time for the Economist. "If you concentrate more on hip, urban sorts of voters – on identity and lifestyle debates – you don't speak to the poorest in society," she told me in what even then was a clear criticism of her own Left party. "They no longer feel properly represented." Wagenknecht gave me a copy of her book Prosperity Without Greed, a 2016 treatise against the free market economy.

Her writings, including her 2021 book The Self-Righteous, provide perhaps the best early guide to the policies of any BSW party – and a sense of the barriers that stand before it. Reading them, it quickly becomes clear that there are two Sahra Wagenknechts – distinct, and mostly but not always aligned. The prospects of her political project lie somewhere in the interaction, synergies and tensions between the two.

First is Wagenknecht the Theorist, who sets out a broadly ideologically consistent vision of what she calls Linkskonservatismus (left-wing conservatism). This starts from an analysis of what she calls a "feudalisation of society", drawing on established left critiques of capitalism. Particularly influential is the French historian Fernand Braudel's idea of a fundamentally "unequal exchange", favouring big conglomerates over a swathe of groups ranging from workers and pensioners to artisans and small business owners. Wagenknecht writes, citing Braudel: "The early capitalist was a merchant who maintained trade relations with India, China or Arabia... not the shopkeeper in the centre of Madrid." She marries this with the American economist Mancur Olson's theories of how small elites entrench their interests in what he called an "exclusive distributional coalition".

This economic credo – which leads her to the conclusion that limited liability corporate structures should be abandoned in favour of alternatives such as cooperatives, forms of state capitalism and social enterprises – is mirrored in Wagenknecht's cultural-political vision. She sees political and societal power as working in a similar fashion: small Olson-esque elite coalitions wielding a sort of monopoly when it comes to setting and policing cultural codes and norms. In this related "unequal exchange" between the ruled and the rulers, that elite is the university-educated urban class forged by decades of globalisation and Europeanisation (and in Germany the contemporaneous process of reunification). Wagenknecht's cultural conservatism is closely entangled with her scepticism towards the Atlantic alliance and preference for alternative partners to the east, notably Russia and China. It all amounts to a soft Poujadisme, a 21st-century echo of Pierre Poujade's reactionary anti-establishment call to arms on behalf of the lower and lower-middle classes of 1950s France.

But her second political avatar is Wagenknecht the Opportunist, a more fluid and adaptive political player who follows the anti-establishment mood in Germany wherever it leads her. The last few years, and especially the double whammy of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine, have seen a flourishing of what is known as Querpolitik, "diagonalist" politics fusing elements of populist left and right, particularly prominent in German anti-establishment circles but echoed in the English-speaking world by YouTube stars such as Russell Brand and Joe Rogan. Thus Wagenknecht has made her own well-watched clips railing against lockdowns and cancel culture, as well as an array of other totems of Western policy orthodoxy – including net-zero provisions such as heat pumps, support for Nato and Ukraine, and Covid-19 vaccines.

Often this (one might say) more cynical Wagenknecht draws on her Theorist persona. For example, her apparently genuine belief in the affinity between Germany and Russia provides a natural platform for her to exploit discontent among her audience about increased energy prices since the invasion of Ukraine. It also allows her to rail against sanctions on Vladimir Putin's regime that she claims are motivated not by concern for the Ukrainian people but by American energy interests. Likewise, her argument about the "unfair exchange" of cultural power in 21st-century Western societies, to the benefit of "lifestyle leftists", is a Christmas tree on which she can hang all manner of flimsy jibes at political correctness.

But it is a cap on immigration, broad suspicion of the Atlantic Alliance and re-orienting Germany to Russia and China, but with not just higher socia spending and higher minimum wages, but also more of a state directed and organised (but not planned) economy. As I say my understanding is that she has moderated economically and is a little more pro-market nowadays.

It is great reading the left criticism of her as operating "within a nostalgic social-democratic and highly bourgeois framework that has nothing to do with a class orientation derived from the conflict between capital and labour [...] it's hard to believe that she was once a leading representative of the Communist Platform." Somethings never change

Edit: I should say - I totally disagree with the soft-Poujadism comparison. I think that's nonsense from my understanding.

[Josquius]

So... whats the word on the street then? PM Shitbag? Or could there still be a coalition that keeps him out?

[Richard Hakluyt]

My theory is that about 30% of any given human population are xenophobic bastards. The internet has given them a voice and helped them organise. This places great pressure on traditional centre-right and centre-left parties as they are fighting to get a majority when only 70% of the votes are in play.

[PJL]

My theory is that about 30% of any given human population are xenophobic bastards. The internet has given them a voice and helped them organise. This places great pressure on traditional centre-right and centre-left parties as they are fighting to get a majority when only 70% of the votes are in play.

This is pretty much my opinion too.

[Threviel]

Seeing as to how lots of muslims behave with regards to the war it's little wonder that a anti-muslim party gets a lot of votes.

The reasonable parties in the center need to find a solution to something that a lot of people see as a problem.

For myself in Sweden I have no party to vote for. I'm not racist, positive to immigration. I want to see religious extremism and integration handled better and there's no party ticking my boxes. No wonder lots of people turn to anti-immigration parties.

[Maladict]

So... whats the word on the street then? PM Shitbag? Or could there still be a coalition that keeps him out?

I think he might be able to pull it off. He's waited 20 years for this after all. He could offer loads of concessions to get there, he pretty much rules the party by himself so there are not many short term risks.
The only realistic alternative is a broad coalition without PVV, but that will only be explored if Wilders fails to build his own.

And then there's the option of a minority government, but I don't really see that working out for Wilders.

[Maladict]

Seeing as to how lots of muslims behave with regards to the war it's little wonder that a anti-muslim party gets a lot of votes.

Polls showed the Israel-Hamas war was not much of an issue at all. And even if the vote was about supporting Israel or Palestine, I'm not sure Israel would have won.

VVD made the election all about immigration, and the anti-immigration party won.

[Josquius]

Poor Dutchies

Seeing as to how lots of muslims behave with regards to the war it's little wonder that a anti-muslim party gets a lot of votes.

The reasonable parties in the center need to find a solution to something that a lot of people see as a problem.

For myself in Sweden I have no party to vote for. I'm not racist, positive to immigration. I want to see religious extremism and integration handled better and there's no party ticking my boxes. No wonder lots of people turn to anti-immigration parties.

The trouble is, nobody cares about facts or practical solutions on this issue.
Come up with a great workable plan to tackle illegal immigration and you'll just be met with glazed eyes as you're up against the guy shouting about how we need to just kick out the rape gangs. People want simple solutions to simple problems.
In the UK just look at how much attention asylum seekers get despite being such a tiny amount of immigration numbers.
For the group who really see immigration as the key issue there tends to be little room for nuance or reality. This is why moderates tend to just concentrate on other things.
I do believe that's where the key lies- getting people to give a shit about the serious problems.

[celedhring]

I presume this asshole is also pro-Kremlin? The Netherlands have been one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine within the EU, IIRC one of the largest donors relative to size.

[crazy canuck]

I presume this asshole is also pro-Kremlin? The Netherlands have been one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine within the EU, IIRC one of the largest donors relative to size.

Canadian media is reporting that one of his platform planks was stopping aid to Ukraine. It's not clear whether he's pro-Russian or that's just part of his Netherlands first isolationist policy.

But either way it puts a further question mark on whether Europe will actually support Ukraine if the US withdrawal support under a Trump presidency.

[Threviel]

The trouble is, nobody cares about facts or practical solutions on this issue.
Come up with a great workable plan to tackle illegal immigration and you'll just be met with glazed eyes as you're up against the guy shouting about how we need to just kick out the rape gangs. People want simple solutions to simple problems.
In the UK just look at how much attention asylum seekers get despite being such a tiny amount of immigration numbers.
For the group who really see immigration as the key issue there tends to be little room for nuance or reality. This is why moderates tend to just concentrate on other things.
I do believe that's where the key lies- getting people to give a shit about the serious problems.

Yeah, there are lots of problems with integration and they have all been taboo to talk about in Sweden until these last few years, and then our racist-party was already at 20%. If the centrist parties had talked about it and done something about the problems back in the 90's or early noughts they would probably still be a miniscule fringe party rather than soon party #1.

As it is now Sweden, and I presume all of western Europe, has a colour and religion coded poor/lower working class, where most criminals are immigrants since the poors are the ones committing lots of crime and the immigrants are the poor. No wonder racism grows for those that can't be bothered to read up.

[Maladict]

I presume this asshole is also pro-Kremlin? The Netherlands have been one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine within the EU, IIRC one of the largest donors relative to size.

Pro-Kremlin is probably too strong. But definitely in favour of cutting support for Ukraine, or any international support for that matter. Including, ironically, his buddy Orban.