Am Sat, 30 Apr 2016 13:08:28 +0000 schrieb QAston <qas...@gmail.com>:
> On Friday, 29 April 2016 at 09:07:47 UTC, Marco Leise wrote: > > It might be difficult with your daily > > experience in Berlin to look at the world from above, but if > > you do it should become obvious looking at Turkey, Russia, > > Poland, Austria and Germany's own past or Donald Trump, that > > if we let these people take over, everyone loses. > > So what's your way forward without becoming a nationalist, > > narrow-minded society like the one you criticize? > > What a lovely broad brush you have here. It's not like anything > else is going on in any of those countries - it's all nationalism > and narrow-mindedness and you're so virtuous and enlightened to > point it all out. > > I'm going to speak for Poland because I live here and I've spent > significant amount of time to try and figure out what the hell is > going on in our politics. You know, because I actually vote here. I'm sorry that I offended you. I didn't go into details, because I didn't want to write an essay. Of course there is always something else going on. In many cases a rising unemployment rate and dwindling identification with the political elites for different reasons is involved. The sentence right before where you cut the citation captured what I was thinking of: […] frustration with the establishment leads to the rise of people who favor a single opinion, prejudice, distrust, controlled press and weak courts. You'll agree with me that parts of the media reform and the changes to the constitutional court in December were heavily criticized by people inside and outside the country for touching the last two points. On top of that, the party took control of the secret service from the parliament. > The goverment was changed because the last one did not deliver on > it's promises and there were many scandals involving it. Just > this week there was a leak with recording of past govt > representative asking one of the richest buisnessmen in the > country to intervene in an independent newspaper to make it more > govt friendly. And mysteriously the head of the newspaper was > fired after the chat took place. Hopefully with the new govt > these things won't happen anymore, when they do it's likely we'll > have another govt change. > > The party which lost last elections still has a strong position > in EU parlament (their representative is the president of EU > council) and from there they make campaign about the new > goverment to delegitimize it. Yeah, it's a shitty move, but out > politicians can't see past next 4 years so they don't care for > ruining reputation of the country. Ironically, this tactic was > also used by party currently in power in Poland, but it was much > less effective. We have really shitty politicians. > > Last elections were not a result of sudden "nationalism" and > "narrow-mindedness" emerging. That was meant to be directed at the anonymous poster's projected picture. But I confess that the local media portrayed PiS as nationalist/conservative and the December changes seemed typical for parties that try to silence opposition to their views. The same media also interviewed pedestrians that objected the EU's planned sanctions as unfounded. Now if you say that the sanctions were pushed by the opposition, that gives the whole thing a bad taste. But the points above remain. > The winning party didn't emphasize migration crisis much, > they were much more focused on social issues. Their > sollution is to redistribute money more, I personally > disagree with that, so I hope they'll lose power in next > elections. I don't know about Poland, but in Germany the money distribution is getting worse. Leaving fairness questions aside and exempting money invested in companies, it is an economical problem, since a few million € in one person's private property don't buy as much as the same money spread on more people. > Still, there were parties which emphasized > stopping migration much more, they didn't even make it to > the parliament. Poland took refugees from Ukraine and > Caucassus while EU didn't give a shit. Nationalism my ass. I agree, that the EU ignored the situation for too long and left it up to Poland and Hungary to handle the refugees. It was a pretty shitty crisis management. The government numbers on refugees are heavily skewed though. One source reports 5328 Ukrainians were granted asylum up to March this year while another said only 4 people got refugee status in the last two years (according to Euromajdan Warszawa). The numbers were filled up to ~1 million with Ukrainian guest workers and students. -- Marco
