"Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has announced that he is dissolving the national assembly, and calling for legislative elections on June 30 and July 7.
The French president said that he can’t pretend nothing has happened, that the outcome of the EU election is not good for his government and that the rise of nationalists is a danger for France and Europe."
Why is the right becoming more popular? What changed?
2008, the global financial crash, the subsequent shift of trillions of all the currencies towards the already-rich, then Covid hammering the final nail in the coffin of proving that governments care about the people only inasmuch as they provide value.
We’ve had sixteen years of people getting poorer and poorer, shit getting more expensive, and the news outlets they read pointing towards immigrants/gays/leftists as the problem.
The right take those messages and amplify them. They tell people that only they can speak truth to power, when the reality is far more nuanced than that. But people don’t want nuance, they just want to be able to pay their bills. The people aren’t stupid though, they know that the windbags can’t really change anything, but the status quo hasn’t done shit to help them, so fuck it, we’ll vote for the other guy.
“They’re all the same anyway”
This is more of a general answer as fascism seems to be gaining more ground globally. A book published in 1997 “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy” theorized roughly every 80 years (or about a human life span) we face a crisis related to a critical mass of people losing the knowledge and shared values from the previous generations. Imagine the perspective of a Revolutionary War veteran who fought under General Washington to help forge the United States, who would be understandably upset to hear any mention of a Civil War between states, which didn’t start until 82 years later.
We are losing that collective memory now both in the U.S. and abroad; the remaining World War II veterans are in no position to punch these fascists when they see a swastika flown at a rally. Unless we vote in numbers large enough to throw the MAGA movement into the dustbin of history, in the future we can expect younger Trump acolytes to take root in the same vacuum of thought.
From a recent article
All the major media outlets have been bought by a few far-right billionaires. For some years now, propaganda has been omnipresent, 24 hours a day.
Social media disinformation campaigns from the Kremlin and possibly also the CCP.
And America too.
Powerful American people/groups spreading disinformation or funding political extremism is very different from the government doing it.
Money is power. Just because that shower have the sense to sit outside of the spotlight of political scrutiny does not mean that they are apolitical nor does it make the influence they cast not strongly American in flavour.
There’s too many factors to name in a brief comment, but here’s an interesting statistic:
In all recent European elections, all center-left parties that have tried to swing to the right on immigration to try and woo right-wing voters, have lost seats. No exceptions.
Edit: Clarified the swing on immigration was to the right.
Is this because they waited too long, or because the answer is something other than anti-immigrant sentiment?
For example, there’s this statistic that almost everyone dies shortly after having CPR performed on them. Paradoxically, that doesn’t mean CPR is bad: it absolutely saves lives. It’s just that they do it too late on a lot of people (and also perform it on a bunch of people who are going to die no matter what but that’s not the point of this anecdote).
Great analogy.
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Everything is in motion, nothing is static. As Capitalism declines and the material conditions of Europe decline, reactionary elements longing for “the good old days” rise. It’s generally what happens when Social Democracy turns Nationalist, and is deeply terrifying.
This can be opposed only through strong antifascist organization, not just sitting home and hoping things get better. They won’t, with that attitude.
Edit: to add, the reason Social Democracy specifically was mentioned is because both Social Democracy and Fascism are based on the idea of Class Colaboration, only the aims and results are obviously very different. Adding the Nationalist element to an existing Social Democracy can quickly end up changing to outright fascism.
Immigration policies in particular have been a hot topic in Europe, so Nationalism has been rising with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
easy emotional messaging × a lot of funding from rich assholes of all types × great means of communication that can target audiences even in isolation.
Technology
The left is fucking the dog, is what.