If you live in Europe and think your democratic system is resistant to these things: it’s not.
Don’t wait until your version of Trump gets elected. Start organizing now.
far less trusts politicians
crazy thing is… that is the exact reason why trump is winning in the States. Someone comes along, crass, rude, claiming to be a layman and the people here ate that up, thinking “now here is a person like us, not like the established politician class” and despite the rhetoric, or due to it, along with suppression and disinformation, he got elected.
And yet the “blame everything on immigrants” strategy seems to work quite well here too.
Italy elected Berlusconi (a corrupted tycoon who had ties with the mafia and bribed his way to the top of the Italian broadcasting world) in 1994. Y’all just catching up.
Don’t wait until your version of Trump gets elected. Start organizing now.
No worries, he already has been elected last year!
Dick Schoof (yes, English speakers, that really is his legal name) is our Trump?
I’d say Geert Wilders matches that description, and he did not become PM…
Dick Schoof didn’t get elected though, at least not by the people… Wilders was
Absolutely, over here we’ve recently elected a horrible party as the biggest one, with 25% of the votes. Dark times.
The difference is that in many European countries the head of state is more of a ceremonial position (at least in practice) and the head of the government holds nowhere near the amount of power a US president does. With proportional representation, the biggest party often doesn’t have an absolute majority and needs to form a government together with other parties, or might even end up in the opposition. Together they agree on who’s going to be the head of government (usually the head of the largest party), who will be the ministers and what will be the policy. If it doesn’t work out because of disagreements, the government breaks up and new elections will be held.
My point is: the risk is real, populism is growing, policy is shifting, but the dynamics are different. Having a first past the post system and concentrating so much power into a single political position feels like an accelerator.
