“This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” Despite the bitter cold, the solidly frozen ground and black ice, between 100,000 and 350,000 people had assembled on Sunday, the 21st of January, in front of the famous Reichstag building in Berlin, which houses the German parl
In an interesting recent development, apparently Meloni (who’s very far right) was integral in getting Orban to chill the fuck out and allow passage of the EU’s military aid package to Ukraine. So as much as I dislike her, I do have to give her credit for that.
That’s one of the important reasons that the far-right took over politics in Italy recently, the Italian right is very pro-Ukraine while the Italian left is anti-Ukraine for some godawful reason. Being pro-Ukraine alone got them a significant portion of votes the left would’ve gotten otherwise. Couple that with one of the primary issues in politics becoming LGBTQ rights, with (especially southern) Italy being largely very catholic and consequently anti-gay (in fact gay marriage is still illegal in Italy, you only have same-sex civil unions), and with the other primary issue being immigration (mostly as a guise for racism), the Italian public started voting very right-wing.
The fact that the left started infighting in Italy and were completely splintered at the time of elections spelled their doom. You can find a similar scenario in some other European countries in the past few years.
Now that the right is fucking basic shit up in Italy, a good amount of the public has slowly been starting to realize that they liked it way more when the leftists were in charge and making slow improvements, even if it wasn’t perfect… but it isn’t helping much to stop the rise of the right. Italy has always been aligned with highly conservative beliefs, it’s common to miss the “good ol’ days” when Mussolini was in charge and the economy was good, so it’s the norm for politicians to openly say borderline fascist things (well now it’s just flat out blatantly fascist speech).
TIL - that’s actually pretty interesting.
I am consistently infuriated by how far-left political parties have become Russophile/Sinophile/extremely anti-western, for no other reason than “Russia is the successor state of the USSR” (sorta, but not really, if we’re getting technical) and “the PRC is the only true socialist country!1!!one”(lmao no it’s fucking not).
Like, I’ve gone to rallies in my city run by the DSA and Socialist Alternative, and there’s always some dipshit up at the front with the big fucking Soviet flags with pics of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao on them, and I just want to smack them and beg them to read, like, literally any history on the atrocities they perpetrated. They’re not heroes. Socialism isn’t supposed to be about heroes. It’s supposed to be about equality, egalitarianism, and human decency, rendered through political and government policies.
It feels like a lot of these groups are actually far more enamored by the authoritarian components of the former USSR, and far less interested in the actual “socialist” aspects - particularly, in the ways that socialist ideas could be applied in western societies that are going through late stage capitalism, but in most cases were able to avoid being subjected to authoritarian “communism” (quoted so because the USSR was very, very far from what communism is actually supposed to be in an idealistic sense, even if you ignore the authoritarian part).