only talking about what I know (France)
it absolutely is
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Merci Vincent, merci Manu !
Wait, didn't you just elect a very left-wing parliament?
Watching the video would help. Basically, it's a barely-held-together coalition that won't last for very long. Meanwhile the far-right has massively risen in popularity over the last few years.
hard leftists + fake leftists(Hollande, etc.) + environmentalists make up only 30% of the parliament
😬 ok that truly seems like a hard starting place for any sort of coalition
macron is doing everything in his power to diminish that election as much as possible; he's literally started talking to the far right coalition while ignoring the left-wing one; despite the left-wing one winning the most votes.
Fascism doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, like some virulent meme. Fascism is what the capitalist class falls back on when liberal democracy starts to fail them. Fascism is when the capitalist class goes mask off. That’s what Lenin meant by “fascism is capitalism in decay.”
The neoliberalism that was baked into the Eurozone from its inception made this fascist turn almost inevitable. Michael Hudson: Financial Predators v. Labor, Industry and Democracy
The Eurozone lacks a central bank to do what most central banks are supposed to do: finance government deficits. To make matters worse, the Lisbon Agreement limits these deficits to 3% – too small to pull economies out of depression by offsetting private-sector debt deflation.
Capitalism to fascism in a nutshell
> be a capitalist state
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> capitalist ruling class cuts public funding, lowers wages to increase profits for themselves
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> resulting lower living conditions makes working class organize to overthrow capitalist rule
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> ruling capitalist class crushes the leftist movements because they harm capitalists
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> some capitalists blame already marginalized people for the problems to scapegoat them and shift the blame
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> fascists rally people around this idea and make up myths about the country being great before these marginalized people got involved
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> fascists are voted into power since socialist movements have been crushed, and not stopped by the ruling capitalist class because capitalists are not harmed
> country is now a fascist state
Jokes aside, great video by Second Thought as always. The EU's future is looking grim...
Get organized while you can, comrades.
It so is.
Here in Finland we have multiple literal neo-Nazis in the government. Well, one of them was forced to resign from his ministerial post for being a neo-Nazi, so our extremist right wing government replaced him with a pedophile neo-Nazi and somehow that's been totally fine 🤦♀️
Wow, didn't realize it got that bad over there. When are your next elections?
About 3 and a half years, out of a term of 4 years…
And yeah, it's pretty fucking bad. This "person" is our new Speaker of the Parliament:
And trust me, those aren't even the worst of his outbursts I could dig up. Halla-aho is also a fan of the right-wing mass murderer Breivik, who coincidentally is also one of Halla-aho's fans and Breivik even mentions him in his "manifesto" as one of his idols.
They also defunded our Security and Intelligence Service because they said that right-wing terrorism is our most pressing security issue considering that we keep arresting neo-Nazi terrorists. It's only a matter of time until we have our own Utøya moment here, and conservatives are actively working towards making that happen.
Bruh. You know it's bad when we start electing our own Repiblicans. Wb the president? Are they at least more sympathetic?
The current prez Alexander Stubb is a pretty run of the mill "fiscal conservative" just like our last one. He's at least not outright sympathetic to Nazis, but his party – the National Coalition – is more or less indistinguishable from the extremist right wing "Finns Party". The joke is that the only way to tell the National Coalition MPs apart from the Finns Party MPs is that they wear more expensive suits.
Thankfully the president doesn't have much power anymore, thanks to a… uh… dictator we had 50-ish years ago (Urho Kekkonen. It's complicated, heh.) Naturally conservatives want to expand presidential powers, because of course they fucking do.
Interesting, I just read the Wikipedia article, he looks a bit like a 20th century Orbán
Heh, he was thankfully nowhere near as nuts as Orbán.
As far as autocrats go, his rule could definitely have been much worse – we stayed independent from the USSR, no fucked up secret police hunting down dissidents, the press was free-ish except for anything negative related to Russia (they basically had their boot on our neck and we had to "behave" or they'd invade us again like the good neighbors they are), and so on.
Having a "president for life" isn't exactly optimal, but since I had to grow up in a country with an autocratic leader I'm glad it was Kekkonen and not fucking Brezhnev or Tito.
At the rate it's going, what's going to realistically stop fascism in europe again? There isn't a socialist force to counter it like the USSR did last time, and we have yet to see a socialist revolution succeed in a place where capitalism has firmly taken root.
If anything, the neoliberal rot in former USSR since its overthrow seems to have put Russia in its own path to fascism. At least its interests are still aligned with the Global South I guess...
Exaggeration.