Apparently there’s a lot of racism involved. Many are anti-immigration, so they vote for them. But if I’m right in my analysis, Chega and IL will eventually replace all parties and become the analogous version of the Republicans and Democrats. I wonder if there is US involvement at play.
Oh yeah, the media has always given the far-right party (Chega) a disproportional amount of screen time. Meanwhile the communists get suppressed. The problem is that the far-right managed to steal a lot of votes in former communist bastions. Regions in the interior that were far-left (for decades), have now shifted to the far-right. So PCP went from ~7% to barely above 3%. They also stole a lot of votes from the center, so forming a stable government is quite hard. But this is probably good because the right wing has more votes now.
What shocks me is how the media has managed to turn so many people into neoliberals. I hear so many people parroting neoliberal talking points like, how they are tired of paying high taxes (hilarious, because our taxes are average by EU standards), they claim public companies are a burden and should be privatized. Even public healthcare is seen as a burden, many think just relying on private insurances would be better, since they’re paying “twice”.
People here just don’t learn anything from mistakes from the past. Examples:
But now the privatization of healthcare and the public airline company will suddenly fix everything? My god, how can people be so blind? It feels hopeless to argue against this.
But that’s also because of the shrinking of proletarian in the First World. Most productive jobs have been outsourced to the Third World. Many workers in the Global North want to become bourgeoise, they have no material interest in revolution.
Mostly because of Neoliberalism, which started with Reaganomics. It’s the same here in Europe. The state can’t do anything directly. The only intervention states have is, either via public companies that have yet to be privatized, or taxes (which are slowly being removed).
For example, if you need a road fixed then the regional government has to create a public competition, for a bunch of private companies to enter against each other. The one that presents the lower cost wins, and then proceeds to fix said road. This needless bureaucracy slows down things a lot. Also, since reparations are being made by private companies, they have an incentive to do a shitty job, so that roads break down sooner (planned obsolescence).
So you see, every job that the state should do directly is being outsourced to 3rd party private interests. This creates a group of companies that need to leech of the state to survive, the more they leech the better their profits. They also have no real incentive to properly fix things. So this is why everything in the West is slowly becoming worse over time.
Easy scheme,
Put tariff , stocks go down, buy stocks;
Remove tariff, stocks go up, sell stocks;