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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   23798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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The rise did indeed took place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries.

Regarding the mediocre performance of the SwedenDemocrats (Sweden's far-right party) in particular, my guess is that a lot of people who vote for them domestically aren't particularly Eurosceptic, but sick of MENA immigration and perceived softness on crime. There's probably therefore less motivation for to vote in an election that they're likely to feel has less direct influence on these issues.

That's probably a large reason.

In Finland, the Finns Party crashed, getting one of their worst results in well over a decade. Probably the main reasons are:

  • They're in a government that's doing (by Finnish scale) hard austerity and anti-union policies, which their supporters don't like, and anti-migrant measures, which their supporters do like - but getting the center-right to cosign those only makes it easier for their educated wealthier voters who have voted the Finns to cut immigration but consider them too redneck and embarrassing to return back to the center-right.

  • They ran a very underwhelming campaign concentrating on things like the new EU regulation mandating bottlecaps that stick to the bottle after opening - mildly annoying and might cause dribbling when using some packs, but hardly the sort of an issue that would get the masses really moving and made them look piddling. In general, since EU membership is more popular than ever, they're in a bind - moving to the centre pisses of the remaining hardcore Euroskeptic base while doing the sort of "EU is pretty lame, Finland has no influence" spiel just evidently makes their supporters think there's no point in voting and stay home.

The Finnish Left got a huge surprise result, but this is probably mostly due to the vast personal popularity of the party leader who was running as the main candidate, and partly probably a protest vote against the government.

There are also the numerous recent scandals...

But yes, I agree motivation pays a very important role in the results of the EU elections given the low turnout. Which I feel is an underdiscussed part of these elections.

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