Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

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freddie_mercury

Tooze makes the case that Fidesz's victory in Hungary in 2010 was a direct result of the terms of the IMF bailout. That the supremacy of the Law & Justice party in Poland was a result of the crisis. That the fall of Tymoshenko and Yushchenko -- tarred with the pains of the crisi -- in Ukraine led to rehabilitation of Yanukovych and the subsequent Russian invasion of Crimea.

In Greece the populists didn't take power in the same ways but it is disingenuous to pretend they didn't exist and exert power as a result of the crisis. To call New Democracy -- the party that took power after the crisis -- "not populist" is a mis-reading of history, I think. They campaigned on fear of illegal immigrants, after all. And the second biggest party is SYRIZA -- which is definitely populist -- and which didn't even exist until the crisis destroyed PASOK. And by 2015 SYRIZA's clearly populist platform was enough to take it power in Greece.

One of the themes of Tooze's book isn't that the consequences were immediate. Sure, it took 6-7 years for SYRIZA to get to power in Greece. But that is still a direct consequence of the crisis.

Is Fidesz really a comparison point though, for anti-establishment parties? They held power in 1998 and they saw their biggest increase in votes in from 1998 to 2002.

I mean, you definitely have a point, with them going from from 42.03% in 2006 to 52.73% in 2010, but they weren't born out of the crisis like their American counterparts, and while they started out anti-establishment, they kind of became the establishment in 2002.

I'm not saying the financial crisis didn't have an impact on Europe, it absolutely did, I just think it's much more nuanced and complicated than the article outlines. On one hand you have countries like Italy, that fit the bill perfectly, on the other hand you have the Scandinavian countries like my own, where we didn't really see a rise of populism because it was already here, in fact we kind of saw a decline. For a while anyway, because right-wing populism is certainly on the rise now, but is that really the delayed effect of the financial crisis or is it something much more complicated?

Tooze never made they claim that all of the consequences didn't exist at all before the crisis. For instance, one of the consequences was the rehabilitation of Yanukovych in Ukraine. Obviously he existed, with quite a lot of power, before. But the crisis destroyed the credibility of his rivals leaving him as "last man standing". And that -- along with the clear abandonment of Ukraine by the EU (or at least the ECB) during the crisis -- led almost directly to the current invasion of Crimea.

> I just think it's much more nuanced and complicated than the article outlines.

Maybe this is where the article is giving you a skewed perception because Tooze's whole point in his book is that things are super nuanced and complicated! I mean, part of his thesis is that the invasion of Iraq played an (eventual, partial) role in Putin humbling the oligarchs in 2009 and further cementing his power. The whole vibe I got from reading Crashed was that nothing was simple. It wasn't "subprime mortgages", it wasn't "bad bankers", for instance. Because those are simple answers, simple explanations.

Tooze's main thesis is that the traditional, simple view is that the 2008 subprime crash was an American thing, the 2010 European crisis was a European thing, both of them are basically wrapped up by now, and that's that. And that traditional, simple view is wrong because the real world (unsurprisingly) is nuanced and complicated.

I guess the outtake is that it's better to read the book than the article about the book. :)

Fidesz' victory was guaranteed in 2010. With or without the bailout. The preceding government was full of typical scandals of corruption and incompetence, and they were seen as the old guard from the Communist/Socialist era. People hated them, and it was surprising for a lot of people that Fidesz lost in 2006.

Without the bailout the economy would have been much worse, and Fidesz could have used some kind of other external enemy instead of the IMF.

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