I was a pessimist, therefore the results have actually come out pretty good to me. Far right didn’t win Belgium, and Left party gained a lot of seats in Finland while right wing parties lost seats. Yeah Germany (eyes them suspiciously) and France turned out very right, but a lot of the other countries stayed about ideologically the same or gained left leaning seats.
Overall it seems it’s balanced enough to keep going with the corporate accountability / public convenience stuff we’ve been seeing here in the EU, especially related to tech.
i don’t remember a time France wasn’t reactionary (in my lifetime obviously). they were in the islamophobia business way before it was cool everywhere else.
As I’ve previously elaborated on in a comment in reply to a similar statement - this has less to do with being anti-islam and more to do with being anti-religion. The French have had a long history with organized religion.
The bigotry is not in “there are evil Muslims…”, the bigotry is in following it up with “… hence Muslims are evil”.
Whilst it’s still racism to think “this minority ethnicity are good people” (because it’s still generalising by etnicity and prejudice) like some neolibs cosplaying as lefties do, that doesn’t make the “some people who did bad deeds are from a specific ethnicity hence the whole ethnicity is bad” thinking of the far-right (who cosplay as facing of against those neolibs in identitarian wars) any less racist prejudice.
At this point, after seeing the reaction of the German political mainstream to the Zionist Genocide - of unwavering support very overtly because of the ethnicity of those doing the deeds - it should be no surprise at all that, just like the “judging and acting towards others first and foremost based on their ethnicity” taken to the extreme level of supporting Genocide if committed by the “good” ethnicity (in other words, extreme racism), other elements of hard Fascist thinking are alive and well in Germany - the moral distance from the mainstream endorsing extreme violence and child murder along ethnic lines if committed by people of a “good” ethnicity and traditional fascism is merelly the addition of “we’re a good ethnicity too”, since the moral “hard work” of justifying evil acts using the “superiority” of specific ethnicities over others is already done by the first part.
If the foundations of Fascism were simply given a new coat of paint and a new list of “good” etnicities, and then kept being used in Mainstream German politics, it’s hardly surprising that the overt Fascists quickly rose back up as soon as a large enough fraction of the locals was convince that they themselves were not being treated as a “good” ethnicity.
