Alternative for Germany has joined France’s National Rally and Reform U.K. in becoming the most popular party in its country, according to polls.
A poll Tuesday showed Alternative for Germany — which is under surveillance by the country’s intelligence services over suspected extremism — is now the most favored by voters. The survey by broadcaster RTL put the AfD at 26%, ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats at 24%.
This is a high watermark for the European far right, a once fringe movement whose virulently anti-immigration, anti-Islam and culture-war politics were shunned by the mainstream just a decade ago.
Today, these parties have developed deep ties with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, who openly cite nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as inspirations on policy and tactics.
Maybe if the left wing party that got in for the first time in 15 years actually behaved remotely like they should, this would not be happening in the UK
All Kier Starmer has managed to accomplish is vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same” and fuelling Reform’s populism.
His government’s current policy focus areas make Tony fucking Blair look like a socialist by comparison—and he earned the fucking red-tie Tory assessment of his policies.
vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same”
When a “left wing” party is still far right, the people who complain have a point. Yes, there is a difference between extreme right and far right, but in the absence of any meaningful leftist options, people will gravitate toward those they hope will implement actual change, even if the change is worse than every other alternative. This most often tends to be those who want to pull the world even further to the right.
Yeah. I naively thought that finally there might be some change now the fucking Tories have imploded, but no.
What a monumental turdpile.
Same thing is happening in Australia. It’s controlled opposition. The real leftists have been progressively out-capitaled from the center-left parties. Now their majority are corporate whore “centrist” neoliberals that continue to screw the workers, just slower than the center-right party, which is now a borderline fascist party.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism. The major difference is how much lube they apply before they fuck you.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism.
People having this realization and solidarity amongst the common folk are the only way to we have a hope of fighting this pile of shit back.
It’s still nowhere near a guarantee of a win, and it’s made monumentally more difficult by the oligarchs plotting to divide us up (using the politicians and social media platforms they own) but it’s the only chance we have.
Are people not paying attention to how destructive these parties are to democracy?
Nope and by design from the media to keep them distracted from it. Get people riled up about trans people in toilets and asylum seekers in small boats rather than the rich destroying the planet and causing horrendous inequality in basic living.
Tyrants are also usually to blame for the asylum seekers in small boats. The irony knifes me. They’re often seeking asylum because they’re fleeing a tyrant, and the response of the countries they try to find safe harbor in is to turn themselves into the very type of tyranny they were fleeing.
Most people are essentially animals. 50% of the population doesn’t have an inner monologue.
idk, this doesn’t mean they are more subtle to propaganda. There is currently no scientific evidence, that this would indicate that people are not able to self reflect or other things. Not having an inner monologue means that these people are using different techniques to accomplish these tasks. The reality is more complex than that.
You’d think what’s going on in what used to be the US (now a crater of burning shit) would have been a lesson for the rest of you.
Do Not Vote Con If You Don’t Want Life To Suck.
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Lol welcome to Lemmy tho
While it didnt kill the right wing populist parties, it did stall many of their efforts to get their chosen leaders into office. We shall see how the all shakes out.
Hey UK, they’re all being funded by Russia, just like to dipshits who told you brexit was a good idea. Don’t fall for it again
Narrator: They were going to fall for it again
King Farage pledged the UK’s loyalty to the Russian Empire.
UK has been on a dark path for a while now, Kier Starmer has done a great job of pushing the population down that dark path. When people say both sides are the same, Kier has made sure that everyone feels as though that is true.
So glad the liberals, both in government and voters, that always lead us to fascism are so invested in shit like “respectability politics”, politics “being boring” and being on their supposed intellectual high horse because “emotions are bad, you should never raise your voice when people are starving and being genocided, you’re just the same as the far right.” But then while saying this just doing mostly what the far right want, pretending it’s somehow their idea. It’s really working so well to stop them.
But then the liberals would happily throw us into fascism if it meant there was an “I told you so” they could somehow twist out of it to say to the left
I will give you that.
Although I hope you give me that taking this level of dissatisfaction and managing to get negligible gains while the populist far right turns it into an outright lead in the polls is a massive failure of the left.
I am pretty staggered at the absolute incapability to make a dent on this trend by anybody at this point. It takes some hardcore commitment to 20th, if not 19th century politics to suck this badly at this.
Human nature seems to be a huge part of it. Blaming someone else for all your troubles is such a winning concept, it’s really hard to fight against it. Plus actually having to acknowledge real issues and trying to fix them often comes with people having to change or sacrifice and that’s a hard sell compared to someone just pretending to have perfect solutions and that everything will be fine.
Sadly emotions win debates against facts almost every time.
That sounds good, but I’m going to need a bit more proof than just the premise that leftist politics are inherently a harder sell than race wars, genocidal urges and actively voting against one’s own interests.
It’s a cop out. An excuse. “It’s not that we suck at selling this, it’s that we’re right and it’s hard to do the right thing”.
Not buying it. Even discounting the places where they do have left-leaning governments holding back the far right, the obvious retort is “well, lie to them, then”. I mean, do you think the fascists have a plan for when they seize power and persecuting migrants and giving the rich control of most of society turns out to not fix everybody’s problems? If people are so emotional and dumb, then manipulate them for their own good.
Either the left has been bad at normal politics or they’ve been bad at populism. It’s abject failure either way.
Don’t ignore the media. A lot of money also means a lot of media attention which is skewed to the right and the whole social media, advertising industry and getting paid by clicks favors emotional content.
Right. So you’re telling me that these filthy liberals control the media and they’re still unable to stem the tide of extremist countercultural fascists about to unseat them from power all over Europe? What good is tilting the media to the right if you are entirely powerless to stop the fringes from kicking you out?
More to the point, where is the social media manipulation towards the left? How come the fascists can use social media to normalize an extreme but the left cannot?
I’m exhausted by the victimism. At least when the far right plays the victim card they have the common decency to do so in a call for rage-induced action. The left has become accustomed to the “what can you do” school of being a victim. It’s infuriating.
I say it again. Get good at old politics or get good at new politics. If Breitbart managed to become the acceptable template for what used to be centre-right conservative press the left has zero excuses.
Capital controls the media, not the left. The concept that the left controls the media is made up in order to justify pushing the goalpost to the right.
It is no different than the conservatives’ beef with colleges not giving their ideology safe spaces. This is most pronounced in law schools where conservatives are demanding their “constitutional originalism” reasoning be taught. The problem is, of course, there is no actual legal theory. They just made it up.
You seem to be upset that the left, which is not represented by any political party or corporation is not in control of the narrative. This is by design.
Listen, appealing to the dark side of human nature, othering people, blaming government is easy and works great. It is low hanging fruit stuff. It is effective for control and manipulation. It is also the opposite of what people on the left want.
They are not victims, they just don’t have any real power. The US has always been controlled by the wealthy and they are choosing the easy way out to stay in power. Giving the illusion of democracy takes a lot of work and even some occasional minor concessions. It is and always will be an illusion though in our current system.
We really need to form a government that is designed by nature to resist corruption instead of embracing it. Until we have something like that nothing meaningfully will change.
Eh… the left controls my government. There are plenty of leftist parties in Europe (which is what the thread is about).
I mean, last I checked France, Germany and the UK were not in the US, but I may have missed something in the news today.
Otherwise, I can´t stress enough how little I care about what happens to the US. Which is as little as possible but not zero, because I am not allowed to make it zero, which is what I’d really want.
Hey buddy. You’re talking real fast. I dont think you know what you’re talking about.
Commenter clearly said billionaire media outlets are right leaning and control discourse. Billionaires are all right leaning. Billionaires fund breitbart. How did breitbart become mainstream? Because they were funded by multiple fascist Billionaires to advance their agenda.
why doesn’t the left manipulate social media
Oh you mean on the nazi platform owned by a nazi billionaire? Or do you mean on Facebook, also owned by a billionaire? I guess you mean lemmy, because thats what “leftist” social media looks like. Oh wow we arent dictating discourse because our app doesn’t make anyone money, big fucking shocker. Not to mention every kamala voter on this app needs to make sure than anyone to the left of her is shouted down. The left is really making waves.
People feel this way because it is literally only regular people asking for left wing policy and all of the power to influence politics is in the money. Nobody has any money because it was stolen from them by these same people who control all the social media, the news, and all the politicians. So people say “theres nothing we can do” because none of the Billionaires are going to suddenly stop being Billionaires and then nuke the rest of them from orbit.
If its so easy to start communist breitbart then go do that shit dude, if you’ve got it so figured out then why are you here talking? You wont, because this is cope. Plenty of people are making left wing media and driving conversation towards socialism but they’re making no money from it and getting no reach because they’re principled socialists doing educational socialist advocacy. Read: nobody with money would ever in a million years fund them the way the right wing funds tim pool, benny johnson, ben shapiro, jordan peterson, joe rogan, matt walsh, and you get the point now? Billionaires OPPOSE our viewpoints. Our shit is in workshops and union halls, not on TV. Thats why this disconnect is so large, because you dont broadcast socialism into people the same way you do bigotry.
Build a cadre and start doing the work, we dont need a top down authority to direct us like the troglodytes on the right. The “what can you do” attitude is towards billionaires controlling media not social revolution.
See, that’s some more excuses.
Turns out that a) back when the centrist liberals were quite close with those billionaires and didn’t want to rock the boat the far right still managed to sway both the billionaires themselves and politics overall rightward straight from the fringes, which the left hasn’t been able to mirror then or now.
But, more importantly, b) why is your app so shitty? I mean, sure, the other guys were able to cozy up to money, create, fund or buy platforms and pull poltiical strings. So we were what? Developing open source communication protocols that didn’t manage to get people to stick around even when the nazi billionaire had multiple public breakdowns?
See, the problem with that is the “if you don’t like it fix it yourself” attitude works about as well in politics as it does in open source software. Which is to say, not at all. It’s… actually kinda scary how well those two things map together. Nobody is in charge, nobody is getting paid, nobody wants to do anything and if enough people get together to actually try without corporate sponsorship you end up with a bunch of identical forks, none of which work particulary well.
But hey, by all means, enjoy your artisanal socialism and lose with dignity. I’m sure the moral pangs will make the well organized fascists really regret steamrolling the loose smattering of well informed cadres in union halls.
I don’t have it “figured out”, but I can certainly tell you that small scale zero budget grassroots action splintered across a multitude of factions delineated by random purity tests is not going to do much. That’s also why I have zero interest in starting yet another useless splinter of any kind.
There is an opportunity to rally anger around an alternative and yes, it will take unification, a charismatic leader and plenty of top down authority to get it going. The left is dropping the ball massively on all of those fronts. Get me that and I won’t care if it aligns with my particular brand of leftism, I’ll vote for it and support it publicly.
I mean, I already do, I live in a country with a left-leaning government, at least for now, and I will continue to vote for leftist parties here regardless of what happens or what they do for the foreseeable future. But… you know, in places where they don’t have a functional left wing apparatus.
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Most importantly, they paint the liberals as the left option to pretend that left does not work.
We’re all in hell.
Nah, the human species is finally being honest. This is what we are. We are shit.
Well, maybe both of you are right, actually. We all suck so much and have been putting off a lot of responsibility for such a long time, and now it’s coming back to roost. Kinda nuts to think about, that it works that way.
We have and can be better. There is no excuse.
No, we can’t. It’s time we accept the truth. Humans are, at their core, evil, hateful, selfish creatures.
Idk I don’t think it’s so black and white - that’s a cognitive distortion. There are good/better people who work hard to help people. Or people who are kind and uplifting to others around them even if it’s not their job. What we’re seeing now is malignant greedy people taking advantage of multiple collapses: our governments, the sixth extinction, climate change, etc.
I’ve spent time thinking and learning about the worst parts of humans, and I’m no expert, but the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the shades of gray inbetween, are all things that humans have used to survive. Just some people, whether by nurture or nature or culture, skew to the worser traits and some to the better traits. I guess I’m telling you all of this because there are good people who aren’t evil at their core, there are good people who make life worth living and that should give you hope and maybe something to hang onto during these awful times.
What we’re seeing now is malignant greedy people taking advantage of multiple collapses: our governments, the sixth extinction, climate change, etc
And literally nobody is stopping them. Why is that? It’s because every human is a malignant greedy person.
I’ll leave the optimism to others. I’ve officially seen enough. We are beyond redemption.
So why are you commenting? Why not fuck off to your cave of misery?
I have, but you goddam humans have infested the entire planet.
I’m sorry that this is how you feel. There are good people fighting fascism right now. All is not lost yet.
It seems that democracy is beyond saving in the age of social media and all the misinformation that circulates there. I mean, you can’t be that incredibly stupid if you live even halfway in reality.
You only have to look at the US to see very clearly how corrupt the goddamn neo-Nazis are and that the promises they make to their ignorant voters are nothing but lies. It’s more than obvious that the US fascists are pursuing policies that are by no means in the interests of the people, but rather the work of a criminal syndicate, which is what they truly are. There is no difference between these barbarians and those in Europe – they are all agents of the power hungry billionaires and do nothing but pursue their interests, which is of course at the expense of the citizens.
Anyone who still doesn’t understand this is living entirely in the imaginary parallel world that the Nazis have built together with their financial backers.
Since this obviously affects so many people and these people cannot be convinced with rational arguments, it is probably hopeless.
Democracy has always been the beard for Fascism since the creation of the US. It was a good lie to sell the people while the wealthy did whatever the fuck they want. Once you come to realize this everything makes sense and falls into place.
That may be true for the US, but we’re talking about Europe here, where many countries have a welfare state, workers’ rights exist, and education is handled very differently. That’s precisely why I find it even more incomprehensible how people can be so incredibly stupid and vote for Nazis who are not only inhuman racists, but also want to create US-style conditions in Europe.
If Europe is such a great representation of idealism why are they marching lockstep to the right?
The truth is the wealthy, because of concentration of capital, have a disproportionate amount of representation. The wealth gap continues to get worse in all of Europe. This is not a coincidence!
The US doesn’t need to impose their shitty conditions on Europe because they are doing it to themselves. It is a race to the bottom and the wealthy are laughing the whole way.
What else can I say? Every thinking person is aware of the problem, but you’re not going to achieve anything with your propaganda slogans – on the contrary, you’re scaring off people who basically agree with you.
The truth is fucking terrifying and you have a lot of propaganda running around in your head like everyone, including me. This propaganda creates cognitive dissonance.
Every thinking person is not aware of this or even close. I studied communications with an emphasis on propaganda and persuasion. I learned a lot of disturbing things about humanity.
While we may agree on a few points I highly doubt you believe what I do. Perhaps you are right though, stranger things have happened.
Social media. They are disproportionately pushing right wing media. That’s it.
Please. Europe is a dozen times less stable than the US. You guys can’t stop from blowing each other up every 30 years.
If you add the words “liberal, capitalist” in front of democracy, I agree with you. But I believe that democracy as a whole is a worthy ideal worth striving towards, in all areas of public life.
Democracy is on it’s way out. Humanity is completely fucked on every fucking angle possible.
The US is a huge cautionary tale that other countries would do well to heed. I see “Why don’t the Americans do something??” all the time, but meanwhile, your country is creeping towards the same conclusion. “We’ll do something to stop it if it gets too bad!” Yeah, that’s what we said while the far-right continued to gather support.
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale? I wasn’t present at the time, but i heard that Bad Things happened.
I also thought that after WWII, systems were put in place to ensure that it would not happen again. Where are these systems and why aren’t they working?
Right after WW2 pretty much every European country that still had colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, and Asia went straight back to ruling them with a iron fist. Wars swept across the world outside of Europe and the Anglosphere. Wars of independence.
To that point I don’t think there were truly any safeguards put in place for minorities. Really it was just ban Nazi imagery and formation of European trade zones that would progressively include more governance cooperation eventually forming the EU.
The safeguards in place were done to prevent EU member states from waring with each other, not safeguards for minorities or anyone outside of EU member states. Solution for Jewish people wasn’t to make the EU safer for Jewish people, it was to take land elsewhere and make Israel. Anyone outside of EU member states including colonial holdings were fair game for mass destruction. A lot is made about the civil rights era in the US, European countries had there own versions of that too. The lesson of WW2 was that war sucks, wars should be fought on other continents, move the Jews to Israel. Modern civil rights in European countries had to be fought for as well post-WW2 but I think it was easier there because the minority groups were much smaller in number compared to the US so there was less racist blowback against social safety nets that non-whites could benefit from. Minorities were politically irrelevant until the past couple decades once the children grew up and population sizes grew and they started making it into significant political offices and corporate leadership positions. Now racists started feeling insecure a lot more regularly against the growing number of successful and visible minorities. People that were certain they weren’t racist are finding themselves racist as minority populations are now in their surroundings rather than just a passing mention
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale?
It was. We fucked up. Badly. Now we’re another cautionary tale.
This is bewildering. As an American citizen who has no idea how the actual fuck we wound up with another Trump presidency, all I have to say is, if you live in any other country and think the answer is to import this bullshit into your own country, I have no sympathy for you.
As an American citizen who has no idea how the actual fuck we wound up with another Trump presidency,
I can help you, here.
We skipped the primary and coronated Liz Cheney as our party leader.
It’s not as simple as “Europeans are also voting for Trump-like parties”. You have multi-party system in Europe and the far-right parties are mostly anti establishment movements. People are mad at lack of action from the governments when it comes to housing, climate, crime, immigration and social services issues. They are tired of both left and right wing parties so they voting for the alternatives now. It’s not exactly some anti-intellectual, extreme conservative, anti-democratic movements like MAGA. Yes, it’s still bad but most people support EU and democracy. While MAGA is a purely fascist movement trying to regain their dominant position over the minorities in EU it’s more about frustration with the ruling class.
As an American, thank you for explaining this. It’s still not great because it echoes what happened here. We are also stuck in a duopoly that was slowly being cranked to the right over decades. A lot of people were initially drawn to Trump because of his ideas of “draining the swamp” and sounding anti-establishment. I think the duopoly and the sense of anti-establishment under a capitalist economy (that turned into hypercapitalism) is where fascism really dug it’s claws in and when things really started to accelerate. I have hope that this will result in something better after whatever happens happens, but I’m deeply worried about my family, my friends, my self with whatever comes next. I don’t want people to die and suffer but that’s already happening and has been happening. I feel powerless and it’s awful.
Everyone everywhere is worried now. I really hope EU as a whole will survive and guard basic human rights (at least internally) but who knows?
I’m not sure how corrupt the politicians are in your country, but they are here. We’ve had laws repealed one by one so politicians can get bought off like by oil companies, health insurance, war profiteers, housing investment companies (renting out homes to people instead of people owning), etc. That seems to be a major issue for us in why no progress was made in terms of climate change and other issues too. Although our democrats made progress on social issues, which honestly democrats won’t lose much with some policies and laws for some social progress, they’re still protecting corporate interests because they want their slice. I’m not sure if there’s a good future for us or not, but I’ve been reading that getting involved in one’s community and grassroots helps. Best of luck to you and yours from across the pond.
Social media plays a big role in this. People have been inoculated with a state of mind that allows this kind of ideas to succeed.
That’s the thing. We have a foresight Americans don’t necessarily have and we’re still making a mess. It’s an even more damming reflection of our society.
Thanks Elon, for your financial support of Hitler acolytes worldwide. Also, get fucked you Boer-reject piece of shit
Holy hell, what a comment section. I’m seeing Americans calling out Europeans for being all talk about what America is supposed to do, several people lamenting impending doom, and more blame targeting the ultra wealthy.
Our future needs to be Solarpunk and have class mobility. Do something for your community this week. The answers lie with the people that think differently than you. De-propagandize your neighbor by giving them a shared enemy. Nothing binds people together like conflict. While we’re at it, encourage boxing matches between government officials. Mabne then we’ll keep younger, highly motivated individuals in office.
It’s easy to blame Russia and China, but it’s not really that. It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong, and that is stagnating or worsening living conditions, unhappiness with how society operates and people hearing that turn to reaction.
Left doesn’t have an answer given how marginalized they are, all you get are center-lib parties that pretend everything is okay or that focus on liberal middle class issues. It’s no surprise
Schizo rant about media manipulation
We are isolated from the right wing side of it here but propaganda is dominating most media. Its really sophisticated and resourced by different states and groups.
On mainstream platforms open Nazi imagery and ideas go viral in hyper specific pockets. Its targeted at groups they think will be suspectable then those groups adopt it, wash it and then spread it. At this point its several stages in and most of the work is done by actual people for free.
They compile emotional imagery, videos and stories and blast them in the face of average people and it baits them hook line and sinker. If you can show a 35 year old white women clips of vicious attacks on women from refugees of the course of the year she will internalise it and become radical. These dont have to be recent she just needs to see them regularly. Strip context, make up different narratives for the same clip it doesnt matter.
With the lovely invention of social media and targeted advertising you can get your message put in front of these average people. People dont choose what they see, they just view what comes across their feed.
This – people determine themselves by consuming media. If you consume media with algorithms, then you are determining yourself even more, because you are not in charge of what you are consuming next. It doesn’t matter what you will publish against this, because the algorithms decide if your peaceful living is more “viewable” than the right wing propaganda.
The dangerous blend of political funding, ideological media, and the power held by those who design and control algorithmic behavior – combined with insights from modern psychology – is part of what’s driving us toward the dystopian future we’re now living in.
