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.
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. 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. 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.
