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.
The US is a huge cautionary tale that other countries would do well to heed. I see “Why don’t the Americans do something??” all the time, but meanwhile, your country is creeping towards the same conclusion. “We’ll do something to stop it if it gets too bad!” Yeah, that’s what we said while the far-right continued to gather support.
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale? I wasn’t present at the time, but i heard that Bad Things happened.
I also thought that after WWII, systems were put in place to ensure that it would not happen again. Where are these systems and why aren’t they working?
It was. We fucked up. Badly. Now we’re another cautionary tale.
Right after WW2 pretty much every European country that still had colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, and Asia went straight back to ruling them with a iron fist. Wars swept across the world outside of Europe and the Anglosphere. Wars of independence.
To that point I don’t think there were truly any safeguards put in place for minorities. Really it was just ban Nazi imagery and formation of European trade zones that would progressively include more governance cooperation eventually forming the EU.
The safeguards in place were done to prevent EU member states from waring with each other, not safeguards for minorities or anyone outside of EU member states. Solution for Jewish people wasn’t to make the EU safer for Jewish people, it was to take land elsewhere and make Israel. Anyone outside of EU member states including colonial holdings were fair game for mass destruction. A lot is made about the civil rights era in the US, European countries had there own versions of that too. The lesson of WW2 was that war sucks, wars should be fought on other continents, move the Jews to Israel. Modern civil rights in European countries had to be fought for as well post-WW2 but I think it was easier there because the minority groups were much smaller in number compared to the US so there was less racist blowback against social safety nets that non-whites could benefit from. Minorities were politically irrelevant until the past couple decades once the children grew up and population sizes grew and they started making it into significant political offices and corporate leadership positions. Now racists started feeling insecure a lot more regularly against the growing number of successful and visible minorities. People that were certain they weren’t racist are finding themselves racist as minority populations are now in their surroundings rather than just a passing mention
Colonialism largely collapsed after WW2, with the unwinding of the British Empire (what’s left largely consists of Gibraltar and the Falklands) and the end of French dominance in Algeria and Vietnam. It was US policy after WW2 to support decolonization.
Imperialism remained, but more as an arms-length interference in the politics of former colonies (especially by the French in Africa).
Like the Catalans, Basques and Galicians in Spain, who together comprise 13 million of Spain’s 48.7 million population? The same could be said of groups in a number of other European countries.
I think you’re specifically referring to immigrant-descended minorities. They’re not the only ethnic minority groups within a country-- almost all countries have long-term ethnic minority groups as well as descendants of relatively recent arrivals.