Catch-all Europe isn't that great thread

Tanya is also a restaurant reviewer, if you want a dose of high level ultra criticial snark she’s your woman.

Thanks for the link and some education!

That was a damning indictment. Fantastic article.

It is impossible to say whether Jeremy Corbyn will survive the year. He wrote in the Guardian in August, “Driving anti-Semitism out of the party for good, and rebuilding trust, are our priorities.” But for me, Howard Jacobson’s circle has closed. How Leon Trotsky would have laughed!

EU study on widespread and growing antisemitism. Even if you don’t want to dive into all the figures in the full study, the statements from participants that accompany all the data are really troubling.

Edit: This gives a short overview and ties into the discussion on Corbyn

Last polls on Germany (average between polls) show AdF going from 12.5% in the election to 15%, and the greens going from 9% to 18.5%. The CDU, since Merkel’s moderate substitute took power has gone from <30% in previous polling up to 30%.

Of course polls are not elections and a lot can happen, but the US media narrative (informed US media) of Germany shifting right seems to be very limited in its analysis.

I think she was the right choice to keep that slide from happening. Note she has a completely different (much harder line) immigration policy position than Merkel, taking that issue off the table somewhat for the AfD. Smart move by the CDU.

Meanwhile the Socialists are in a race to become the least relevant party in German politics today. :)

Not much harder (although definitely harder). At least she supported Merkel’s decision to open the door to refugees, which is more than any of the other serious contenders in the race.

The Greens being the second party points towards a disintegration of the socialist, towards the left.

Meanwhile we finally got our far righters here in Spain doing their thing. We’ll see if other parties deal with them or not.

It’s all that was needed. It really shows how out of touch Merkel had become with the electorate.

Some positive developments (still a draft, but a good direction to move towards):

I know little about Hungary outside of my own family and a one semester course on Hungarian history in college. But this move doesn’t sound surprising.

It’s been brewing for a while. The current punishment mechanism relies on unanimous voting (Hungary is undergoing that process, I think, it was some months ago), so other countries flirting with breaking the rule of law would veto.

I’ve been saying forever an instrument like this is necessary. This could be as important as any further integration/reform step.

Yeah, Poland has threatened to veto any use of the existing mechanism against Hungary, as it has its own rule of law spat with the EU over its treatment of the judiciary (the government forcibly retired the entire Supreme Court not long ago).

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A car bomb went off in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Lets hope this is NOT part of a return of “the Troubles” with the Irish border coming back into play via the Brexit.

I hope so too. Although the fact that every political party on each side of the border from Sinn Fein to the DUP are united in condemning it gives me comfort and makes me feel like this is a breakaway group of nutters living in the past.

That’s so weird. Can you give more context? The two contexts I can come up with are:

1- Carnival
2- Cultural week at the high school

Also, I did not see a bomb belt in the video.

Not saying that it’s not racist, it is. But the degree depends on what we are really seeing. If it’s cultural week it would be the same as kids dressing as rappers or cowboys when having an US event. Racist, since it’s an overt simplification and appropriation of another culture, but not offensive necessarily

Agreed - it’s probably one of the two kind of events you mention (though probably not Carnival; because that would be very weird for everyone to dress up in the same kind of outfit).

That being said, Belgium has a reputation for problems with racism - not least because of their complete obliviousness to their own colonialist past (i.e., the Congo Holocaust). See also the Cecile Djunga story recently; how any European country - in 2018 - can have only one black presenter on TV is beyond me. And it’s not because there aren’t any blacks living there - their national football team is something like 50% “congo”-belgians. Lukaku has told some pretty hair-raising stories from his upbringing.