But I still haven’t seen a definitive explanation of why so many voters are switching to far right parties, and how exactly they can be won back*. Because the far right parties sure aren’t going to solve their problems (although they do name them), and the center assume they just need to do more of the same but better, and that hasn’t and won’t work either.
It makes me wonder whether a) the whole system of parliamentary democracy has reached its limit and cannot logistically please its voters any more than now, or whether b) voters just have too high expectations/are too selfish.
*I imagine that some voters that have been sucked too deep down the propaganda hole, like those of Trump or Orbán, cannot be won back.
Here’s my hot take: people aren’t switching to far right parties all that much. In a moderately healthy democracy, up to 30% of voters are often protest voters. They are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs and vote for whoever promises the largest upset of the status quo that they could see as potentially benefitting them.
Often the media then likes to massively overinflate their popularity, artificially enhancing their electoral success. But it’s also often short-lived. If you look at Dutch elections, you’ll find that a group of voters went for LPF, then PVV, then FvD and then PVV again. Each time it’s broadly talked about as the “rise of X party” but almost every time nothing truly materializes.
In the US you see a hardcore group of approx. 30% of voters vote for Trump religiously. Then there’s a smaller group of moderate Republicans that dislike the Democrats enough to end up voting for Trump too. They don’t like Trump but he’s “ok enough, and better than Obama/Clinton/Biden/Sanders etc…”.
In France, Le Pen got around 30% of the vote. She didn’t perform dissimilarly to the last presidential election results, it was more noticeable that the other parties got much smaller than they were. But whether or not Le Pen can actually take the crown remains to be seen.
It often happens when a society’s prosperity decays, even if the right doesn’t offer rational solutions. Climate change is driving a ton of problems but for many of these voters it is nonetheless a lesser concern. I think for many people who feel desperate, everything starts to look like a zero-sum game. So they vote for a policy of all take and no give.
That’s part of it another is that the right offers some easy answers to some very complex questions. They aren’t the right answers but they’re easier to wrap your head around. As prosperity drops, the time, effort and resources the average person can commit to understanding the complex problems facing their country also drop. This means the easy answers take root easier, and spread further and faster because the less informed are less resilient to them.
We lefties have some easy answers and they feel quite right, too. Eat the rich. But I guess it’s not that famous in the less educated social stratum - “What if I am one of the rich, after I won the lottery?”
But I still haven’t seen a definitive explanation of why so many voters are switching to far right parties, and how exactly they can be won back*. Because the far right parties sure aren’t going to solve their problems (although they do name them), and the center assume they just need to do more of the same but better, and that hasn’t and won’t work either.
It makes me wonder whether a) the whole system of parliamentary democracy has reached its limit and cannot logistically please its voters any more than now, or whether b) voters just have too high expectations/are too selfish.
*I imagine that some voters that have been sucked too deep down the propaganda hole, like those of Trump or Orbán, cannot be won back.
Here’s my hot take: people aren’t switching to far right parties all that much. In a moderately healthy democracy, up to 30% of voters are often protest voters. They are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs and vote for whoever promises the largest upset of the status quo that they could see as potentially benefitting them.
Often the media then likes to massively overinflate their popularity, artificially enhancing their electoral success. But it’s also often short-lived. If you look at Dutch elections, you’ll find that a group of voters went for LPF, then PVV, then FvD and then PVV again. Each time it’s broadly talked about as the “rise of X party” but almost every time nothing truly materializes.
In the US you see a hardcore group of approx. 30% of voters vote for Trump religiously. Then there’s a smaller group of moderate Republicans that dislike the Democrats enough to end up voting for Trump too. They don’t like Trump but he’s “ok enough, and better than Obama/Clinton/Biden/Sanders etc…”.
In France, Le Pen got around 30% of the vote. She didn’t perform dissimilarly to the last presidential election results, it was more noticeable that the other parties got much smaller than they were. But whether or not Le Pen can actually take the crown remains to be seen.
It often happens when a society’s prosperity decays, even if the right doesn’t offer rational solutions. Climate change is driving a ton of problems but for many of these voters it is nonetheless a lesser concern. I think for many people who feel desperate, everything starts to look like a zero-sum game. So they vote for a policy of all take and no give.
That’s part of it another is that the right offers some easy answers to some very complex questions. They aren’t the right answers but they’re easier to wrap your head around. As prosperity drops, the time, effort and resources the average person can commit to understanding the complex problems facing their country also drop. This means the easy answers take root easier, and spread further and faster because the less informed are less resilient to them.
We lefties have some easy answers and they feel quite right, too. Eat the rich. But I guess it’s not that famous in the less educated social stratum - “What if I am one of the rich, after I won the lottery?”
Removed by mod
See, as I said, hard to understand for the less educated.