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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I think right wing populists benefit a lot from the general feeling that the established parties and the media refuse to even admit that there might be a problem caused by mass immigration.

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Contrary to _dilerium's answer, I think this, in at least Sweden, was a quite significant factor. But that must(?) have changed now. During the last wave of immigrants coming to Sweden, the whole range of parties, except for the Left Party, made a 180 degree turn and agreed with the Sweden Democrats narrative. Even the Social democrats are now saying that Sweden is under a social and economic collapse due to immigration which was lauded by the Swedish Democrats.

See for example [0] (Swedish) and links within.

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/internationella-medier-sver...

I'm skeptical that's a significant factor, because right-populists seem to be gaining even in countries, like Denmark and the USA, which have a large portion of mainstream media and politicians hostile to mass immigration. In that case, immigration opponents can't claim that nobody takes their concerns seriously, or that you're not allowed to criticize mass immigration, because many mainstream outlets and figures are doing so. But the media support seems to if anything just help their cause: years of Fox News harshly criticizing illegal immigration from Mexico feeds well into Trump's strategy of doing the same thing, but with the rhetoric amped up a few notches.

Right wing isn't gaining in Denmark. Not sure where you have that from.

DF is gaining because ordinary people are seeing their jobs being outsourced or underbid by eastern european citizens. In fact this is today the primary reason for why parties like DF gets more and more power. They are the only parties who actually takes peoples concern seriously. There is a much much bigger fraction of the western society who do not stand to benefit from technological progress, multicultural society and globalized workforce.

If anything what is happening right now is a national conservative trend where people who aren't benefitting will vote on the parties that are sceptic to progress.

I agree with that. Fears about globalization's effects on the working class / blue-collar middle class, which in Western Europe post-WW2 had a reasonably good and stable economic position, but is now becoming much more precarious, are a big economic driving force behind the right-populist parties. I think that's a much bigger effect than any worries about the media or political correctness.

> I'm skeptical that's a significant factor, because right-populists seem to be gaining even in countries, like Denmark and the USA, which have a large portion of mainstream media and politicians hostile to mass immigration.

The populist complaint against rightist politicians in the United States is that they claim to oppose illegal immigration, but that's actually just a scam to fool the rubes into voting for them. When push comes to shove, they quietly endorse the current (Democratic) administration's policies on the matter and make sure that efforts to block them always fail. Given that, the factors behind Trump's support aren't so different from the factors behind support for populists in Europe.

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