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.
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.
Correction: Wilders received the most votes from the people, but could not become PM as his party needed to form coalitions to gain enough seats. Essentially, he did not get elected PM because most others did not want to work together with him.
Was our parliament filled with lunatics vehemently agreeing with him, we'd have Wilders as PM.
It's way more resistant than in US - society is far less polarized, far less trusts politicians, and also, far seems to be less prone to cult of personalities
Also importantly the opposite of true. Immigrants commit far fewer crimes than citizens. This thread was such a perfect example of the initial point it almost feels staged lol
Immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than citizens in the US. Probably because they're afraid of deportation, so they don't do anything to draw attention to themselves. Also because they want to be here and participate in society.
The overwhelming number of terrorist acts committed on US soil is done by white conservative men.
People don’t want to leave their homes to begin with, only to face people like you. Make sure you don’t vote for politicians who promote wars or instability if you don’t want anymore refugees. Your right wing politicians are pro-Israel so they will be causing more refugees to move to Europe and they probably don’t realize it.
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.
Tbf a bunch of racist, misogynist, homophobic, idiots saw a racist, misogynist, homophobic, idiot and went "he just like me fr." And they are probably right about that.