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.
Europeans have a legitimate brain rot issue. There’s so much information that their little brains get a stack overflow.
Every time I go back to Europe I’m blow away by quality of life improvements as well as the endless whining and just the insanity of the information landscape. It’s just tabloid after tabloid creating problems where there aren’t any.
How is this any different to the US?
Quality of life
Please, don’t follow these “brain rot” narratives. But yes, a lot of problems are artificial made ups or strawmens, made by political powers to empower themselves even more.
POC around the world just took a deep breath.
Queer folks too
Man it’s the 1920s all over again!
This is so depressing. I remember 10 years ago seeing how the world was changing, I was full of hope for the future, we were slowly becoming more socially accepting of minorities and it seemed to be slightly getting better. Now the progress didn’t stop, it fucking reversed and shit is so much worse than it was. This makes me really sad.
We are speedrunning robber-barrons through WW-II in one shot this time. What a ride. Can I get off, please?
That’s why it’s a called a “reaction”
The people pretending they cared about the gays and the minorities ignored people’s basic human needs.
That’s how we got here.
Who got all the new wealth from increased productivity post 1980? The gays and minorities?
The billionaires who are scapegoating gays and minorities just like they almost always do.
I don’t think they’re saying helping gays and minorities was the problem. I think probably more that rich and powerful for a while learned they could get votes while enacting predatory economic policies by marketing social issues where the government doesn’t actually do a ton there but put minority groups into marketing campaigns for what public programs there are out there and advertise non-governmental things minorities can seek. So minorities and LGBQT were really good marketing for politicians and the rich while they were pushing privatization, lower taxes, austerity, higher surveillance/police state, etc
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“My wage-slaves are getting a bit too comfortable. Here’s a bunch of money. Go fuck with them.”
- Sociopathic Oligarchs
Now the progress didn’t stop, it fucking reversed
It didn’t reverse itself. Huge amounts of effort and organization went into that reversal.
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.
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.
election was rigged like 3 times, plus Dems wont do anything, they are afraid of being labed the riggers by the conservative. at least the old guard is very complicit with the gop(they benefit from his tax cuts, and many are Dinos themselves)
Nah, fuck that. I plan to blow my head off anyway. Might as well stick an axe in some nazi as well.
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.
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.
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.
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The US could certainly do with a factory reset.
welp time to get a rifle and move to the woods.
Oh no …
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.
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Problem: Idiots calling women men when they are, in fact, women.
Pro-tip: Someone elses gender identity is none of your fucking business.
Moral purity testing on the left has reached exhausting and reality defying levels.
I get the impression that feminist movements in the late 2000s got the impression that they’d no longer “need men” and that they could safely dispose of them. that’s why you see so many comments talking badly about “men”.
surprise, 2020 election saw 25% of young men (aged 18 - 30) vote for far-right politicians. and so-called feminists really have the audacity to ask “how could this happen?” duh.
It’s a bit more complicated than feminists bad. What happened is that they were successful in many ways for example education is now dominated by women and girls have better grades and achieve higher than boys. Boys have fallen by the wayside. Boys only institutions that catered to their needs have shrunk, ceased to exist, or been replaced by mixed. Men’s issues like higher mental health issues, more homeless, more incarceration, more suicide, loneliness, addiction, etc. don’t get much attention. That’s not the feminists’ fault. Blaming men and patriarchy for every ill in society is of course an easy scapegoat and makes men feel guilty.
The far right caters to this feeling, telling men that they are okay, important, and accepted. They explicitly try to deepen the gap, not bridge it.
A better future and society is possible when we overcome the division.
How do you intend to fix the divide?
It’s not as if you can just make men earn more and have more prestige in society that easily. Who would do that? Also, wouldn’t that be countered by feminism?
How do you realistically solve the men loneliness problem? Do you have any approach to making women less biased against dating men that they “don’t need”? But if women need men, doesn’t that counter feminism? How do you solve this problem?
Helping men is possible in many ways that are totally independent of women. Better education from child level on how to process, express, and handle emotions. More spaces for boys and men to bond and do things as a group away from screens. Non commercial third spaces have almost vanished and are needed direly.
making women less biased against dating men that they “don’t need”?
Sounds like a typical incel meme. Almost all (hetero) women want a man as a partner. Even if they don’t necessarily need one to have a career, children, a bank account, live their own lives, and so on. The desire to share their life with a man is certainly there and strong. Maybe not in the basement you retreated to. The outside world is packed full of women looking for a suitable man as a partner.
Sexuality, procreation, and pair bonding are hardwired instincts in humans and still there.
Spend some time in places where actual real women are and listen to them to get a reality check.
There are so many mid 30s to early 40s women desperately looking for a husband to have a family with. That’s when those who thought they didn’t need a man, realize their deeper desire.
i mean i don’t think what you just said is true, because i see a lot of women in their 20s and 30s without partners, and they don’t seem set on getting one either. idk why that is, but the phenomenon is there. not having partners is on the rise objectively, i’m quite sure, though i should go check for better statistics about this, actually.
also please don’t be so insulting. “Maybe not in the basement you retreated to”. this is exactly why the left doesn’t have traction. because they insult their audiences instead of listening to them and taking their concerns seriously.
–ended up writing a rambling rant of ways the left are really bad communicators and single minded in their activist interests–
I thought this would happen but you get ostracized, at least scolded, if you tried to bring up the risk that not providing men the same outreach that women get for expanding career field interests and mental health counseling would possibly end up with a generation(s) of men falling behind and feeling isolated and attacked
Bring it up now and you’ll still get an incredulous reaction like it’s impossible for men to have struggles that aren’t their fault and should be mitigated.
Two areas where I see it as mind blowingly dumb. Guy grows up in an abusive environment or possibly came from extreme poverty domestically or as an asylum seeker/refugee - they get lumped into the stereotypical male/female culture war and are encouraged to be supportive of these culture wars and eventually they’ll have their time. Anyone with experience know men and women that are traumatized take time to get them to open up. With women patience is expected. With men spit it out or get out of the way to open the stage for VP of whatever company making 300k a year to tell you how if they were a different demographic they’d have made that 10 years earlier and be CEO now, maybe president of the country.
It’s been decades in my opinion since poverty and income inequality has been at the forefront of leftist social communities. At least not when it’s targeting straight guys that grew up in terrible circumstances
The other is say a married couples, male and female couple, child dies - pretty much everyone is going to be consoling the mother and ignoring the father. Maybe telling the father they have to be strong and supportive of their wife. Both need support. Homeless beds at like soup kitchens or elsewhere. I understand women are more vulnerable, but it’s pretty messed up how much more resources there seems to be to prevent homelessness of women compared to men
Rates of depression especially with boys have been going up for a long time now but I feel like we’ve been heads in the sanding it for a while now because for some reason being mindful for boys and mens mental health is the patriarchy and that’s those a part of the patriarchys responsibility
Still though rates of depression has skyrocketed with women too especially teenage girls but we’re in some state of no introspection currently certain that our leftist behavior and rhetoric must be true, we read the literature
But on that literature we read it doesn’t mean we interpret well and choose the correct action. And in speech we overuse academic jargon and get mad at people when they misinterpret our academic jargon and instead of speaking in a more consumable fashion, we say we won’t dumb things down (which is disrespectful speech to always calling it dumbing down) and spend years arguing with people that they just don’t get it, read the literature
Ehhhh. I feel like us on the left are charisma and speech deficient, people who see poor and non-college educated people and get the ick, really bad interpreters of data. Like rising depression and isolation from guys have been a thing for over a decade. Same with women. 2020 demographic voting data should have been a huge siren but somehow 2024 everyone was still like, if you’re a minority or woman, you default to never Trump and care more about social issues than safety and finances. Shock of his demographic gains that showed up increasingly since 2016
I regularly hear mocking of people in poor neighborhoods who place security as their highest or like top 2 concern along with jobs because don’t they know crime rates since the 90s are way down. Damn, think. Poor people live in the high crime rate areas. High crime rate areas are just shrinking but it’s still bad for those that live in them.
Same with how going to them and praising the wanton graffiti as culture and art and not understanding why community members paint over them and really dislike graffiti taggers who are often gang affiliated (where do suburban people think taggers get their start along with the money for spray paint and who’s permission to tag up peoples property?). Like data. It’s not new data about crime rates before and after painting over graffiti but on the left and it’s obsession with art and performance, got to communicate with poor communities with art they see like graffiti. Of course it falls flat
Fantastic post!
Elite champagne socialists looking down on the actual desires of the poor and working class.
women dominate in health and bio, something like representing 60% of bio degrees alone, and many get grad degrees and actually get jobs in them. while men struggle alot more even in the fields they dominate.
i posted another comment, they pretty much make a large amount of biotech employees, comparetively to men as well. Only the old school people in (scientist/phd)biotech are men (that had the job like 20-30+years ago), and when i was UNIversity, they made up a a majority of lab volunteers too. probably because bio-health is a safe degree for jobs, and not something like PSYCH or a stem that has no jobs at the bachelors level.
i dont think thats real feminism lol, you might be thinking the few talking heads that profess ultra-feminism(we dont need men anymore) which is conservative in nature, same how men want a patriarchal society. also people like rowling doesnt count as feminists, they are transphobes.
you probably getting signals from certain medias(women are always cleaning up the mess of men), yes this was a real qoute by j lawrence in x-men movie.
at this point it’s quite different to say what is feminism? i.e. you say that’s not real feminism, but what even is real feminism? i am getting less sure every year. what are the goals? what are the methods?
Ooof. That’s 50% of people who are CDU or AfD voters. As an immigrant in Germany, that’s terrifying.
Trans American, i fucking feel that pain and it only gets worse. If you can, please, not just vote, make sure everything is above board, hold everyone’s hand you know to the fire. You are not hysterical, you are having a balanced sensible reaction to the fucking insane
My fellow Europeans, fight! Keep fighting until we drive them back to their basements!
Honestly, this is way past that point now.
I know an otherwise perfectly normal middle-aged woman who has booked herself train tickets to a pro-Tommy Robinson protest march in London next month.
It’s not National Front skinheads with dog whistle tattoos any more. It’s hit the normies. If they want the normies back, the ruling parties are going to have to stop putting asylum seekers in local hotels in shithole towns like mine, because it’s just going to take a spark to set this whole country ablaze right now. They need to get processing people to an insane level, build actual accommodation to house them (because this isn’t stopping any time soon).
The whole asylum process needs a radical overhaul, like being able to apply for it without having to trek across the world (go to an embassy for example, and then get distributed to countries according to their means). If they carry on with this “we have to take them in because they made it to our country and it’s the law” routine, the whole continent will fall to fascism. If sane rulers do not listen to the people, they will turn to monsters to fix their perceived problems.
I’m sorry, but the fact our peoppes are doing fascism because immigrants and trans people just goes to show how much we suck. We SHOULD be able to just do it and not collapse
100% agree. With climate change, folks are not going to stop coming, not going to just stay at home and die. We have to urgently reform the whole immigration system with an emphasis on integration.
And by integration I don’t mean giving up their own cultures or language, but rather that life is better for people when they are comfortable in their environment. You won’t get comfortable if no one shows you how the culture works, which, it’s been my experience, they don’t.
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.
Spot on
Labour has been a joke of a party for the past 3 decades. The only reason they are in power right now is that the Tories actually managed to completely destroy the UK. Labour and the Tories are going to go the way of the Whigs the nezt election and will be replaced by Reform UK and Corbyn’s new leftist party.
All these leftists become conservatives when their wealth is threatened.
Are people not paying attention to how destructive these parties are to democracy?
That’s the whole point. Look to the now infamous Jubilee video of the man proudly claiming that he is indeed a fascist and he wants an authoritarian ethnostate.
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.
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
The problem is simply humanity. At any given moment in time, there are a lot of these ugly, angry, nasty, unhappy people, and they want control of everything so they can take their anger out on those they hate. This is a natural human archetype. They are with us now, and they have ALWAYS been with us. The are the MAGAs and the European far right, they are the warlords that run various small nations, they are the Vikings, the Huns, the Mongols, the Romans, etc.
It was the Nazis in the 20th century, it’s the MAGAs in the 21st. It’s not that MAGA is copying the Nazis, they are both the same sort of people following the agenda that those people always follow - just generally making life miserable for as many innocent people as possible.
The archetype includes being arrogant and demanding, but that doesn’t mean we have to allow it. Most of the time, a strong moral leader can keep the assholes at bay, but every now and then, someone drops the ball, and they gain power, and start fucking with the world. The 21st century Dems dropped the ball badly, over and over, and did nothing to prepare for the MAGA onslaught.
Even after decades of the worst possible election behavior, the Dems instantaneously defended MAGA, and declared the 2024 election “fair & square,” before even waiting to see if there had been any review of the election at all. These people are treasonous criminals who will do literally anything. This election was the ONLY thing keeping him from getting a life sentence, how could anyone believe that this is the first election that he didn’t cheat on?
We aren’t going to defeat these people by appealing to their better nature, they have none. It’s who they are, and who these people have always been. We tend to forget from generation to generation that we have to hold the line against the worst people in the world, because they are out there, and they are ALWAYS planning to take control. It’s important to remember that, and fight them every single step of the way. We can’t accept any excuses like we have to let them do it because we don’t really know that the outcome will be bad until we do it. Yes we do, because we’ve let these people have their way over and over, and they ALWAYS kick us in the nuts.
We need to stop trying to kick the football that our enemy is holding.
Depends on, the outer rings often have better nature that is being slowly eroded by hate fed from the inner rings.
They get these people by trying to appeal to things liberals at least seem to glimpse over, then they give you scapegoats instead of real solutions. Then slowly they feed you even more “problems” that don’t affect you, with scapegoats to get rid off, often with a web of conspiracies tying it all together.
I was a Fidesz voter in 2010. They told me the previous government were radical communists, who will kick me out of college, then force my disabled ass to work in underpaid factory jobs, with mandatory overtimes that may not get paid for a while. I saw a lot of my girl classmates getting groomed as teens, and thanks to the fucked up laws of Hungary, it was all legal. I got targets to hate for it; feminists, who forced these girls to “marry rich guys ASAP”; and LGBTQ+ people as MSZP did not raise the AoC to match it to homosexual relationships, but lowered it for everyone.
Then after 2010, my face got eaten by the leopards. On the day Fidesz added a “close in age” exception to our fucked up AoC laws to allow 17 year olds to prey on 12 year olds, I was so angry I couldn’t sleep. I also was a young atheist who just didn’t believe in a “Stalinist form of persecution of religion” (of which I got a horribly distorted description), but after how strongly religion got pushed by Fidesz, I started to gravitate towards stronger forms of secularism. And lastly the widely criticized implementation of mandatory internships only got solved for those in vocational education, meaning as a college student I would have had to paid a used car’s price to a HR personnel to hire me, especially due to my autism, which at leas in one place thought was actually “intellectual disability, like in Forrest Gump”.
So interesting to read a perspective from another country dealing with much of the same issues.
The feeling of not being able to sleep, of impotent outrage? Yeah, that’s how I felt when he started that family separation policy, and they started stealing children from their parents. It was the most egregious thing they’d done to that point, and it was beyond belief that this was happening in my country. There was nothing I could do except call and email my elected representatives, most of whom agreed with it.
I FEEL your frustration.
Congratulations, you’ve written probably the most hitlerite comment I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, and I’m genuinely concerned.
Instead of investigating what makes people act this way in terms of material conditions, incentives and values that are promoted, maybe the way power is organized and how it leads to inevitable opportunism or this being an inevitability of a class dictatorship that we have now, you instead go for the “undesirables” angle.
People didn’t vote for the candidate you wanted because they were irredeemably evil. What do we do, kill all MAGA voters now for having the wrong human archetype? Prohibit them from voting? That only seems the natural conclusion from everything you wrote.
Yep, your kind of thinking is the problem. No sense of history, or the people who have consistently rampaged through it. People have been people for as long as there have been people, and we’ve ALL seen the variations between humans. To PRETEND that somehow everybody is born exactly the same is contrary to everybody’s experience, especially anyone who had siblings raised in the same situations.
Some people are born with wiring to be decent people, and some people are just born to be evil. There are videos of Stephen “Pee Wee Himmler” Miller in high school arrogantly defending highly racist concepts, illustrating that this psychopath has been a bad seed his entire life.
It’s time to stop pretending these are normal people for whom we have a normal philosophical disagreement. By definition, MAGA supports a POLICY of treason, pedophilia, rape, racism, intolerance, corruption, slavery, hate, and more, and they aren’t novel. People with these same sorts of philosophical leanings have emerged over and over throughout history. Pointing that out, and telling people like you that it is your responsibility to hold the line against that sort of oppression, is not “hitlerite,” it’s patriotic. If you can’t see that, you’re either MAGA, or one of those weak, spineless Democrats who allowed all this to happen with your political weeniness.
“Pee Wee Himmler”
Fuckin’ lmao. Absolutely cannot explain to my coworker why I’m laughing in my office.
Happy to provide the giggles. I have declared it public domain, so feel free to steal it and use it as much as possible.
RFK, Jr is Great Value Mengele.
It’s not that MAGA is copying the Nazis
Oh, they very much are, though.
The problem is simply humanity
No, the problem is a set of very specific political conditions that derive from geopolitical power struggles.
We need to stop trying to kick the football that our enemy is holding.
If you’re implying that we should kick the enemy instead, I agree.
Our specific political issues aren’t really causing this. These people have ALWAYS been with us, throughout human history. Sometimes we have rulers strong enough to resist them, sometimes we don’t, but the problem with evil humanity is that they are infinitely patient, and they never give up. So if this generation manages to resist them, they’ll make what progress they can, and wait for the next generation. That’s what they’ve been doing since Reagan and Rush took over the American political scene in the 80s, and have been mucking it up ever since, until they finally saw their chance, and grabbed it.
My point is that no matter what the political situation is, good or bad, these people are always waiting in the shadows, organizing, planning, and getting into position. We can never forget who they really are, and what they really want, so that when they emerge, we can tell them that we know they are liars, and shove them back into their hole. Evil people don’t deserve the privilege of walking among us with their hate on full demonstration mode.
It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong
The “something” that’s wrong has been wrong for multiple generations, but it has only flared up now, when Russia and China started interfering. Surely that’s a coincidence.
