Comment by bojan
1 day ago
In the Netherlands we have this phenomenon that around 20% of voters keep voting for the new "Messiah", a right-wing populist politician that will this time fix everything.
When the party inevitably explodes due to internal bickering and/or simply failing to deliver their impossible promises, a new Messiah pops up, propped by the national media, and the cycle restarts.
That being said, the other 80% is somewhat consistent in their patterns.
In the UK it's the other way round: the media have chosen Farage as the anointed right-wing leader of a cult of personality. Every few years his "party" implodes and is replaced by a new one, but his position is fixed.
The problem is more nuanced than that. but not far off.
The issue is that farage and boris have personality, and understand how the media works. Nobody else apart from blair does(possibly the ham toucher too.)
The Farage style parties fail because they are built around the cult of the leader, rather than the joint purpose of changing something. This is part of the reason why I'm not that hopeful about Starmer, as I'm not acutally sure what he stands for, so how are his ministers going to implement a policy based on bland soup?
Starmer stands for press appeasement. Hence all the random benefits bashing and anti-trans policy. If you try to change anything for the better in the UK without providing "red meat" to the press they will destroy you.
> This is part of the reason why I'm not that hopeful about Starmer, as I'm not actually sure what he stands for, so how are his ministers going to implement a policy based on bland soup?
Tony Blair said at the 1996 Labour Part Conference:
> Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile
Starmer is a poor copy of Blair. None of them stand for anything. They say things that pleases enough people so they get elected, then they attempt to enact what they really want to do.
> The Farage style parties fail because they are built around the cult of the leader, rather than the joint purpose of changing something.
There is certainly that. However there are interviews with former Reform / UKIP members that held important positions in both parties. Some of said that Nigel Farage sabotages the party just when they are getting to the point where they could actually be a threat. Which leads some people to think that Nigel Farage is more of a pressure valve. I've not seen any proof of it presented, but it is plausible.
Saying that though, most of the candidates for other parties (not Labour / Conservative) are essentially the people that probably would have no cut it as a candidate in Conservative or Labour parties.
In the post Alastair Campbell era of contemporary UK Politics, it often boils down to 'Don't be George Galloway' and allowing your opponents enough rope to hang themselves.
His party didn't implode, and he didn't have one every few years.
He succeeded with UKIP as the goal was Brexit. He then left that single issue party, as it had served it's purpose and now recently started a second one seeing an opportunity.
This is almost 40% in Slovenia, but for a moderate without a clear program.
Every second election cycle Messiah like that becomes the prime minister.
In Ireland, every four years the electorate chooses which of the two large moderate parties without clear platform it would prefer (they’re quite close to being the same thing, but dislike each other for historical and aesthetic reasons), sometimes adding a small center-left party for variety. This has been going on for decades. We currently have a ruling coalition of _both_ of them.
We had a number of somewhat stilted rainbow coalitions due to our electoral system based on proportional representation with a single transferrable vote - in fact its where most of the significant policy change on e.g. Education and the Environment came from since the IMF bailout via Labour and the Greens. Previously you had the PDs as well in the McDowell era.
The problem is that the election before last was a protest vote to keep the incumbents out at the expense of actual Governance - with thoroughly unsuitable Sinn Fein candidates elected as protest votes for 1st preferences, and by transfers in marginal rural constituencies thereafter.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/09/irish-voters-h...
Note that Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA and would be almost unheard of to hold any sort of meaningful majority in the Republic - but have garnered young peoples support in recent years based on fiscal fantasies of free housing and taxing high-earners even more.
This protest vote was aimed almost entirely at (rightly) destroying the influence of the Labour Party and the Greens due to successive unpopular taxes and DIE initiatives seen as self-aggrandizing and out of touch with their voting base. It saw first-timers, students, and even people on Holiday during the election get elected for Sinn Fein.
Fast-forward to today, and it quickly became evident what a disaster this was. Taking away those seats from Sinn Fein meant redistributing them elsewhere - and given the choices are basically AntiAusterityAlliance/PeopleBeforeProfit on the far-left, and a number of wildly racist and ethnonationalists like the NationalParty on the far-right, the electorate voted in force to bring in both 'moderate' incumbents on a damage-limitation basis.
https://www.politico.eu/article/irelands-elections-european-...
> That being said, the other 80% is somewhat consistent in their patterns.
Yes very consistent in promising one thing and then doing another.
Is being a tax haven and doing propaganda to tell your citizens how virtuous you are economically (what NL has been doing for several decades) not right wing populism?
We haven’t had a left-wing parlement for some decades now
My point being that the 20% right wingers aren't really a 20% minority… they're more like the majority.
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