Austrian elections?!

[hollodero]

(10-16-2017, 02:24 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Well shit, Hollo. Looks like Austria saw other countries going right in the latest round of elections and told them all to hold their beer.

We usually do that, yep. Our constant consuming of beer does play a role in that, as does our tendency to literally ask someone else to hold it while we do stuff like the opposite of drinking. Rome was built on seven Hills, Austria on seven beer cans.

In the more figurative sense of the word, our people are often more narrow and primitive then people in other countries. I do not equal being right with being primitive, mind you, being right does not mean anything like that in the first place (most parts of our left don't get that, which is why they are kinda primitive in the end as well). The problem is rather that in Austria being primitive means being right, hardly anyone else would define himself being "right" here. Why don't I have a nice job, a cool car, a decent looking girlfriend and money? It's mot me, it's refugees (asylum seekers, foreigners... all swear words in those circles) taking away from me what would appertain to me for being Austrian, that's why. Easy answers.

People voting for that substanceless "hate group" called FPÖ, to at least 75% guaranteed, don't think any more complex than that. They believe refugees get free Iphones from a state taking the money for that away from decent citizens. They believe anything anyone pulls out of his sit-upon if it only mirrors what they already feel is the truth in the first place. Austria is the primary candidate for idiocracy, where you do not have to do anything more than to spread these rumors (be it about free stuff for refugees or mass crime being swept under the rug by state media etc.) and offer the solution (vote for FPÖ). I am not oversimplifying that, that's the whole concept.
Even AfD in Germany is ten times as sophisticated, while of course comparable overall. Sad.

Associating things like Trumpism with that would be oversimplifying things - the roots are similar though. Unlike the US, our right-wing populism didn't use the conservative shell, but rather a separate party. At this point though, our conservative party moved far into that territory to gain votes, making the ideas behind it more main-stream. What Austria got now is an anti-muslim, anti-immigration majority with little (conservatives) to none (the original FPÖ) additional substance.

Our election winner (the conservative one, not the FPÖ one) is a 31-year-old professional politician and former foreign minister who brags about having single-handedly closed down refugee routes. Which of course is ridiculous. When asked anything, he could get there within 11 words though, always. He's no Macron, although I read that comparison in US media. He's rather the hypothetical love child of Macron and Trump. I tried hard to find some additional ideas or visions, there were none to see. We will get a right-wing government, that won't bring much change (our politicians hardly run the country, it's more the bureaucracy), will be widely avoided internationally and probably will bring down the FPÖ again for several years (because as a purely destructive force, they have no one who could do any constructive work or anything else but hateful speech and immediately starting munching at the troughts of power without a shred of discretion; and even the primitive voter base figures that out after some years).

Until then --- super phun thyme.

The really sad thing for me is that it could have been even worse and in a sense one needs to be relieved.

(10-13-2017, 01:45 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Are the polls showing FPÖ that much of a lead? Last I saw, ÖVP was ahead, with SPÖ and FPÖ close together but behind, and SPÖ a little further ahead of FPÖ.

...and so it indeed happened. You cannot even rely on the unreliability of polls any more.