this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Europe

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Anyone who thinks this shocking needs to leave their social bubble.

The European liberal left is in losing battle for their voters and their solution is pretending that nothing’s happening.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think that they're pretending that. However, the issue is that right-wing and right-of-center parties carelessly throw around lies and half-truths that match the way people tend to be thinking anyway.

It also doesn't matter to them that they create rather than solve issues, as long as their narrative is stable. A very recent example: Conservatives normally claim that they are in favor of having a strong and growing economy. However, German conservatives just deliberately worsened the economic outlook of the entire country by suing against the 2021 state budget. To do so, they weaponized an overly aggressive debt ceiling they themselves[1] put into place in 2009 and which they themselves ignored for most of the years between 2009-2021.

[1] Along with the Social Democrats who unfortunately have been moving further to the right for at least the last 20 years. Since Conservatives, Free Liberals and Social Democrats all voted for this debt ceiling rule at the time, it's now part of the constitution. Abolishing that rule is now an impossibility, as the coalition would need support from a large number of Conservatives to do so.