Most analysts expected #Modi to brush aside #India’s enervated & poorly funded opposition parties, some of which had their #bank accounts frozen & their leaders #jailed by the govt in the run-up to the #election.
Yet the mood shifted dramatically as early vote counts trickled in Tues morning & indicated that the #BJP might not single-handedly secure the 272 seats needed in the 543-member #LokSabha lower house, as it comfortably did in 2014 & 2019.
In all seriousness, I find that Trump supporters and Putin supporters are very alike, just like all supporters of far-right populist leaders everywhere, specifically in that they are: extremely ignorant, genuinely racist, and easily swayed by angry nationalistic rhetoric.
"May 24 (Reuters) - Britain's Communities Minister #MichaelGove said on Friday he will step down as a member of parliament ahead of the July 4 general election."
#Austerity#Populism#Europe#Globalization#Inequality: "Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy in recent decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Europe since the 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect austerity to increase populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters, who are hit the hardest by austerity. We identify economically vulnerable regions as those with a high share of low-skilled workers, workers in manufacturing and in jobs with a high routine-task intensity. The analysis of district-level elections demonstrates that austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions, but has little effect in less vulnerable regions. The individual-level analysis confirms these findings. Our results suggest that the success of populist parties hinges on the government's failure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies."
Power is like a gigantic milk providing machinery,for a democracy in process society,once the politicians become ravenously,all forms of attention can be used as a ploy to satisfy one's need until whole society faint from hunger,and constant attention seeking is how populism and extremism have been benefited in the age of digital,..
Two blog posts today, going into deep dependencies in our political discourse and the dangers lurking for democracy within them.
In this first post I explore how political polarisation is the most efficient tool of malicious governments like Russia and China to influence our western democracies to make them weaker at resisting their imperial push
In this second blog post, I explore how the populist right deals in trafficking ideas from the critical left and reinterpreting them in a different framework.
I end on a positive note that perhaps we should at least recognise the need for solutions on the problem of multinational corporations wielding too much power as unifying the left & right here.