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  • The mind boggles, doesn't it?

    Mind you, I have five words for you - Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. A serial adulterer and philanderer, habitual liar and a man for whom personal integrity and intellectual honesty are wholly alien concepts. Didn't stop him from getting elected to the highest office in the good old U of K with a thumping majority. It's not the same, but he's in the same bit of the Venn diagram of elected shitbags.

  • I forgot to add that the other guy with the issues is also old.

    Yes, all over the world we apparently get the politicians we deserve. Saying that as a Dutchman, which just voted the most persistent right wing populist in power, living in Germany, which is grappling with their own rise of the extreme right.

    Just as a sidebar, the European election posters of the AfD say "our country first" on the backdrop of a German flag. And that slogan draws around 20%..

    So to take the UK as an example, the rightwing crazies really need to fuck everything up till people get the message. Grim. And in the Netherlands the moderate right wing already destroyed enough in their last 14 years in power..

  • These parties are financed by Putin:

    https://archive.ph/R6Fzg

    While in Britain, Putin pursued his agenda of weakening Europe through 'Brexit' and launching politicians under his influence through the vulnerable FPTP system, in countries with proportional representation the strategy has been to build up these 'parties' by targeting groups previously comprised under the umbrella of other parties, which have accordingly lost influence. This hasn't been too difficult in countries in which social democracy was subverted by the likes of Schröder in the 1990s (also see Schröder's links to Putin now) and protest parties can now also attract votes from groups previously on the left.

    It's not totally different from the playbook in FPTP countries, e.g. Trump bizarrely portraying himself as a champion for working-class voters, and there's no doubt that this weakening of the left is highly significant for helping such parties pass crucial electoral milestones, just as it helped Trump and even Johnson.

    It may be that this agenda is currently dead in Britain, but we have yet to see the next generation of potential powerbrokers reveal their cards. In Germany, it will be interesting if Wagenknecht's new strategy (a leftwing anti-immigration party intended to take votes from the rightwing anti-immigration AfD, for those who don't know, while Rodolfo no doubt does) will have any impact.

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