Links I liked
Greece is going to the polls this coming Sunday. Zoe Alipranti thinks she knows who is going to win “The invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature” is an excellent feature about the political economy of one (seriously under-appreciated) county. Some Trump supporters are actually stock-photo/video models. Are you surprised?
On a very slow news day, two third-tier politicians for the centre-right CDU phantasise over future coalitions with the “moderates/liberals” within the AfD (where would they find them?). Ah yes, they also want to re-unite “the National” and “the Social”, which, by the lego-like greatness of the German language, becomes the “National-Social”. James F. Downes…
Bonnie N. Field has written a very clear explainer on the issue of minority governments in Spain for the EUROPP blog. Read it. Over at Europe Elects, Alexander Sarti explains how they predicted the distribution of seats in the European Parliament. By and large, it seems to have worked rather well. Somewhere along the way,…
The Guardian has a highly informative article on “political beauty”, a German political performance art collective. After Björn Höcke’s infamous “memorial of shame” speech, Political Beauty built a replica of the Berlin Holocaust memorial on a plot next to the right-wingers house. They also said that they would observe the man as part of their…
More on the AfD’s donation scandal(s): media report that the ultimate source of the illicit donations to Alice Weidel is a German billionaire dynasty. The family also donated to the Swiss SVP. You will not be surprised to hear that they have pan-European global interests, moved to Switzerland, became dual nationals, and divide their time…
The co-leader of the right-wing populist “Alternative for Germany” finally admits that the received assistance from a Swiss media agency (in German). The price tag? About €90,000. Find the juicy details here (in German) or read my short summary of the many AfD scandals. Sarah Wagenknecht was one of the main obstacles to a closer…
An important part of my job is dealing with stuff that is both unpleasant and weird (no, I’m not talking about teaching evaluations). Much of what goes on in far-right politics these days used to be called “the lunatic fringe” but has stealthily moved into the political mainstream. The “manosphere”, a network of unabashedly anti-feminist…
Back in 2001, the British General Election Study contained a (presumably open-ended) question asking Britons to name the “ most important problem facing the country”. A whopping 0.4 per cent of the sample came up with something along the lines of “Britain’s relationship with Europe”. So much for the eternal struggle going all the way…
It is a warm but grey and gloomy weekend in Germany, so here are three links I enjoyed: In case you were wondering whether Trump is a) evil, b) senile or c) a master strategist: here is a piece arguing that c) is unlikely, though a) and b) could easily be true at the same…
An Economist study finds that the quality of democracy is highest in Australia, Canada, and Scandinavia. No big surprise here. Time to move? You may have heard that a prominent member of the AfD was physically attacked in Bremen, which the AfD managed to put all over social media. The police say the initial account…