The boost in support in the far right is concerning in Europe however it is also over reported and the media often fails to understand the political systems.
Most European countries have proportional representation.
In Germany AFD won 16% of the vote. They came joint second which made headlines but 16% is low. Worst case is they could conceivably join a coalition in a split Bundestag. But AFD are not currently realistically close to power.
In France, the far right was 33% of the vote, again making headlines and troubling. However that is in the first round. France has a second round where the 67% can coalesce around candidates. It’s troubling but the far right is not getting a majority in the French parliament, and it remains unlikely they would won the presidency as the left and centre out weigh them.
In the UK Reform is polling around the same level as the Conservatives at about 18%. In the UK’s system its first past the post so it looks like they’re get a few seats at most - literally 5 - put of 650 seats. The UK is looking very likely to elect a centre left party to power with a huge majority, mainly due to the implosion of the conservative party.
While these are all concerning and reflect lots of local trends, there is a huge difference with the US. In the US the republican party is viable for the presidency, the house and the senate and already hold the supreme court.
The US is in a far worse position than almost any European country when it comes to the extreme party being at the doors of power. Europe has much work to do, but the US is fucked because its much vaunted electoral system and constitution has been shown to be extremely weak and fatally flawed, and seems to be unfixable.
The reality is that fascists don’t need to win a popular majority to take power. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power they leverage the existing state apparatus to repress the rest of the population. As long as the regime has the support of the police and military, then it can wield power through force.
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamentary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
The boost in support in the far right is concerning in Europe however it is also over reported and the media often fails to understand the political systems.
Most European countries have proportional representation.
In Germany AFD won 16% of the vote. They came joint second which made headlines but 16% is low. Worst case is they could conceivably join a coalition in a split Bundestag. But AFD are not currently realistically close to power.
In France, the far right was 33% of the vote, again making headlines and troubling. However that is in the first round. France has a second round where the 67% can coalesce around candidates. It’s troubling but the far right is not getting a majority in the French parliament, and it remains unlikely they would won the presidency as the left and centre out weigh them.
In the UK Reform is polling around the same level as the Conservatives at about 18%. In the UK’s system its first past the post so it looks like they’re get a few seats at most - literally 5 - put of 650 seats. The UK is looking very likely to elect a centre left party to power with a huge majority, mainly due to the implosion of the conservative party.
While these are all concerning and reflect lots of local trends, there is a huge difference with the US. In the US the republican party is viable for the presidency, the house and the senate and already hold the supreme court.
The US is in a far worse position than almost any European country when it comes to the extreme party being at the doors of power. Europe has much work to do, but the US is fucked because its much vaunted electoral system and constitution has been shown to be extremely weak and fatally flawed, and seems to be unfixable.
The reality is that fascists don’t need to win a popular majority to take power. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power they leverage the existing state apparatus to repress the rest of the population. As long as the regime has the support of the police and military, then it can wield power through force.
https://valleysunderground.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
Not all republicans are nazi or far right. That may be a small percentage of the republican voters.
Well, they’re not part of the solution so they might as well be part of the problem.