What is behind the rise parties/politicians like...

[JohnBrown1917]

More likely ungrounded fears and delusions about it.

The people voting for those parties/individuals are largely from areas where there is no mass immigration.

Our anti-immigration/NExit party has less than 10% of the seats at the moment.


People are really overestimating how popular they are in some EU countries.

[Kalis]

My bad, though the tories had been in power for longer.

The Tories have only been solely in power since 2015, though nobody is quite sure what the Liberal Democrats in the coalition were doing between 2010-2015, so effectively the Tories were in power then as well.

[PC2]

How exactly is she left-wing?

She wont deport migrants who walk into Germany. Allows them to get welfare without working first.

[JohnBrown1917]

The Tories have only been solely in power since 2015, though nobody is quite sure what the Liberal Democrats in the coalition were doing between 2010-2015, so effectively the Tories were in power then as well.

The same thing our labour party is doing our current government, I assume.

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]She wont deport migrants who walk into Germany.[/B] Allows them to get welfare without working first.

That does not make her left-wing.
Sorry, but you can't just shove all the problems on the left-wing even if the person herself is on the right.

[unbound]

Trump? AfD? UKIP? Front National? The far-right as a whole?

Why are people voting for them? What do they earn from them being in power? Do they think they will care about the average joe in the country? That they will fix everything they think is wrong with a country?

I know that about 20% of the people where I live are going to vote for a far-right party in the next election and I can't understand why they would ever do that. They preach inequality, intolerance and authoritarianism. Do they think they will be spared from that?

While they may be similar in many ways, there are different histories and motivations behind each.

For example, Trump's rise is a result of the cultivation of dog-whistle racism / white supremacy and evangelical Christians that the GOP has been tapping into for about 40 years now. Trump is simply not using the dog-whistle rhetoric and is instead speaking directly to the fears of whites and evangelical Christians in direct language (i.e. fear foreigners, blacks, liberals...aka fear change of any kind).

AfD, UKIP and Front National are speaking to the same fears, but is a more immediate reaction to the problem of refugees and news media focusing on that subject (e.g. they will report any problems with refugees while ignoring the same problems that happen nearly 10 times more often in the native population). Still largely pushing fears, but regarding a more immediate and specific issue.

Do they think their candidates will care for the average joe in their country? Some will believe that out of ignorance, some will believe that because they think the world is black and white (i.e. my candidate is an angel and the other candidate is a devil), but most simply don't care about the average joe in their country...they are only concerned with what benefits them.

With all that said, these groups (or their progenitors) have been around forever. The reason you see them more often now is that they have been able to establish platforms from which they can speak. Some of that is due to the rise of social media on the internet, and some of that was the establishment of extremist news programs and sites. These includes places like Fox News (established by Roger Ailes, former political consultant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush I), the 700 club (revamped starting in 1979, headed by Pat Robertson who tried running as a Republican in 1988, involved in at least one task force for Reagan, and founder of the Christian Coalition), and Breitbart (created by Andrew Breitbart who bases his politics and philosophies on Rush Limbaugh as well as the Drudge Report). Since these are now mainstream, so are the ideas that they champion...despite the reality that many of those ideas are heavily fact-challenged.

While there are certainly left-wing sites that are as extreme as those, they are typically smaller with the only notable exception of Huffington Post at this time. Since the left-wing extremists don't have as much access to a platform that the right-wing extremists enjoy, the RW has had to create the fictional notion that the mainstream news media is all part of a liberal conspiracy, despite the fact that most mainstream news media is neutral at best and actually slightly right leaning in most cases. This has resulted, over the past 4 decades, of the country being slowly pushed towards the right in general...so what is objectively neither right wing nor left wing, now appears to be left wing as a result. Hence, you see that our politicians are actually pretty firmly entrenched in RW ideology...just not all of them to the same degree. While Sanders was blasted by both mainstream Democrats and all Republicans as some extremist LW nut, he was, in reality, far closer to being a centrist than any of the main nominees.

[Dezerte]

Merkel is way left relative to the anti-migrant voters.

Maybe, or maybe the anti-immigrant voters are way too far on the right-wing scale. Politics is a lot more complex than just "left vs right", especially so in Europe where multiple parties generally sit in the government.

Merkel is the leader of the Christian Democratic Union, a center-right liberal-conservative party. Being anti-immigrant generally is considered anti-liberal (classical liberalism that is, i.e. the belief in maximum freedom and minimal government). It's really only nationalistic and religious parties (or other, more extreme versions) that tout the anti-immigrant stance, not the right-wing.

[PC2]

That does not make her left-wing.
Sorry, but you can't just shove all the problems on the left-wing even if the person herself is on the right.

It doesn't matter who the person is. The most far right candidate could be elected and if they support mass unskilled migration that is still left wing behavior, it is the opposite of conservative behavior.

[JohnBrown1917]

It doesn't matter who the person is. The most far right candidate could be elected and if they support mass unskilled migration that is still left wing behavior, it is the opposite of conservative behavior.

You make it sound like you have to be consertivate to be rigth-wing, that is not how this works.
You just want to blame everything you don't like on the left.

[Kalis]

AfD, UKIP and Front National are speaking to the same fears, but is a more immediate reaction to the problem of refugees and news media focusing on that subject (e.g. they will report any problems with refugees while ignoring the same problems that happen nearly 10 times more often in the native population). Still largely pushing fears, but regarding a more immediate and specific issue.

When you say that the native population are committing 10 times the number of incidents, that seems to completely ignore the relative sizes of the two groups.

For example, if you have 50,000 in one group committing 1,000 crimes, to compare it to a group of 1,000 committing 100 crimes is fudging the numbers. Yes the gross numbers of incidents are 10 times higher, but the rate is far higher in the smaller group.

[Aeula]

Yet the netherlands is doing fine.



Not that we have a lefty government... or Germany for that matter.

Germany doing 'fine' right... I take it you're forgetting about the migrant gangs going around raping women en masse?

[Vargrik]

Because of the excess of suicidal/hedonistic policies of the left (albeit they are created with good intentions).

[JohnBrown1917]

Germany doing 'fine' right... I take it you're forgetting about the migrant gangs going around raping women en masse?

I never said Germany was fine, but thanks for putting that up, Because from PoV, they are doing fine.

You have any crime statitics of 2015/2016 to back that up? How much have the increased over the 2000s?




And again, Germany does not have a left-wing government. Read the whole post next time.

[Draco-Onis]

Trump? AfD? UKIP? Front National? The far-right as a whole?

Why are people voting for them? What do they earn from them being in power? Do they think they will care about the average joe in the country? That they will fix everything they think is wrong with a country?

I know that about 20% of the people where I live are going to vote for a far-right party in the next election and I can't understand why they would ever do that. They preach inequality, intolerance and authoritarianism. Do they think they will be spared from that?

A star burns the brightest when it's about to die, this is the last desperate cry of the old who want so badly to go back to the old days. The hope in all of this is in a decade that generation will be dead and won't matter, the new generation has accepted diversity and globalism as a natural thing. In the United States especially the amount of children being born of mixed and minorities outpace anything else so any party that aligns itself with the Trumps of the world is dooming itself in the future.

[nextormento]

member when everything went smooth?
member when those happier times?.
member when politics were normal?

These things are not exclusive to one side (in fact, we do have pop-left governments in Europe).
Tapping on political disenchantment is fairly straightforward. The difficult part is generating that disenchantment. Sometimes it's the other going too far, or too fast for the population to adapt. Sometimes it's just boredom: we don't have wars to care for, so we may as well just see how far we can push politics.
Be what it may, we're all complicit in their rise, through failure to squelch, or otherwise domesticate them.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

A star burns the brightest when it's about to die, this is the last desperate cry of the old who want so badly to go back to the old days. The hope in all of this is in a decade that generation will be dead and won't matter, the new generation has accepted diversity and globalism as a natural thing. In the United States especially the amount of children being born of mixed and minorities outpace anything else so any party that aligns itself with the Trumps of the world is dooming itself in the future.

Not so much being born mixed or anything like that. It's people realizing what people call globalism means *corporate globalism* as in more profits.

[PC2]

You just want to blame everything you don't like on the left.

Yeah that is due to my experience where 100% of the people I see writing off anti-migrant voters are left wingers.

[Aeula]

I never said Germany was fine, but thanks for putting that up, Because from PoV, they are doing fine.

You have any crime statitics of 2015/2016 to back that up? How much have the increased over the 2000s?




And again, Germany does not have a left-wing government. Read the whole post next time.

Yeah right, like I could get accurate statistics considering how much police try to cover it up for fear of people retaliating.

Either way, Germans committing less crimes is what's bringing those statistics down. Migrants won't be helping that at all.

[Zazajin]

Because in some countries, the Left went too far (I.E. Europe). People don't just suddenly start voting for the opposite ideology unless irked by their current one. Thus, the pendulum keeps swinging. Once people are sick of the Right, they'll go back to the Left.

I'd argue in the UK the Right's had an uncontested dominance since 1979. Our left wing party, Labour until recently basically just aped the right wing party, The Conservatives from 1997 onwards.

[Draco-Onis]

Not so much being born mixed or anything like that. It's people realizing what people call globalism means *corporate globalism* as in more profits.

In the US a big drive behind the Trump movement has to do with hatred of immigrants, people of color, LGBT etc. it's much harder to hate when you get to know people of those demographics. As for globalism it is very different than reigning in corporate power, the internet, advances in travel are not going to vanish. Corporate power is another issue that can be dealt with easily in a global world but building walls and trying to be North Korea isn't going to put the genie back in the bottle.

[Rend Blackhand]

Regular people feel they have been left behind and traditional parties have failed them so more and more anti-establishment parties are popping up everywhere.