Am I the only one who kinda feels like I'm not living in a democratic system anymore?
Not saying this is the first such thing that happens, but it's probably the one that will make me stop using the word to refer to the society I live in.
Not saying this is the first such thing that happens, but it's probably the one that will make me stop using the word to refer to the society I live in.
The way the parliament is elected is quite fair - it gives a little more power to people in smaller countries, but that's not unusual (UK westminster constituencies vary from 22k to 120k. U.S. congress areas are more even, ranging from 500k to 1 million). There's an argument that it should be more even than the current 11:1 ratio, but we call the U.S. senate democratic and that's a 69:1 ratio.
The actual choice of MEP comes down to a proportionate election, meaning that if you get 15% of the votes, you get 15% of the MEPs. This beats fptp systems where MPs in the house of commons are elected with as few as 30% of the votes cast.
Voting for a representative is the very essence of representative democracy. Perhaps we should have direct democracy. As it happens I watched an episode of The Orville[0] last night which covered this scenario.
Personally I'm a fan of representative democracy. It's the worst system except for all the others. I expect my representitive to work full time in understanding proposals and voting on my behalf, but they are a representitive, not a delegate. This is where direct PR falls down (who gets the seats is down to the party, not to the voter. I can't vote for Candidate B rather than candidate A if they are part of the same party. STV works better in this case, although 90% of voters don't really care and in the UK 80% don't even know who their MP is!
The cynical in me would complete the sentence with "...a vast majority would not even understand what the article is about"
That's why I vote for people who can spend a lot of time looking at it and voting for or against it in parliament.
As it happens my preferred grouping were pretty much split evenly, there's certainly pros and cons.
It only works as long as the representatives see it as their duty to represent the will of the voters accurately, which I'm starting to believe is an antithesis to human behavior, and thus will never be the norm.
I'm not saying that European society (if such a thing even exists) is inherently undemocratic; just that it's not democratic enough to be called a proper Democracy.
And I'm not even asking for direct democracy on everything, but there should be laws in place that force politicians to put decisions up for vote to the public if there's a certain level of resistance from the population.
Take for an example the UK referendum to leave the EU. Even though it's overall a complete shitshow, and all sides usually agree on that, nobody can really claim that it wasn't a democratic decision. Was it a smart one? Who knows, I doubt it. But it was democratic, and that's more than I can say about this mess.
For example I am for a "democracy of experts" system, in which any decision must be voted exclusively by those who have expertise on the matter the vote is about.
From my point of view the Brexit vote is totally not-democratic because it put an absurdly complex decision on a big part of the population which has not even remotely the competence to decide on the matter.
As you see it is not all white or black.
Isn't that not just a technocracy? I actually think a system like that would make a lot of sense, but I still believe the population should have the power to veto a law that they don't want.
As for the brexit vote being undemocratic, I see your point, but I don't think just because the people were uninformed that means the referendum was undemocratic. First of all, I don't think most MEPs who voted for the copyright reform were any more informed, on average. I also think it should ultimately be up to the population of a democratic system to decide things, even if they don't understand the situation entirely. That's the point of democracy.
There's a Youtube video kicking around of someone (I forget who) going round Europarl asking MEPs if they'd actually read Articles 11 and 13.
The most common answer, by a country mile, was "no".
We elect representatives to read these things and make a reasoned decision on our behalf. Not to do the political equivalent of putting on a blindfold and throwing a dart, hoping to score a bulls-eye.
I think that too, IF they take the time to become experts in the matter of the law they don't want.
Manipulating people and having them vote without all the facts on the table and then denying them that vote after the facts were on the table is not democracy.
And who decides who is an expert on what?
That's not really the idea behind representative democracy. It's supposed to work that you vote for the person whose values intelligence and approach to policy you agree with, and they use their skill and judgement from there on in - you can of course lobby them on issues.
This is the problem with representative democracy; it assumes there's a good proxy for my voice, and there increasingly isn't
Large parties, party discipline and backroom deals are (imnsho) fundamentally at odds with a well-functioning representative democracy.
Representative democracy is meant to be a way to mitigate the problem of true democracy, which is the idea that it's easier to build a consensus among a small group than a large one and also that "the unwashed masses don't know what's actually good for them".
Bottom line is that it's impossible for 1 person to serve as a uncompromising proxy for a large group of people on multiple issues. Even if there weren't parties, there would be a point where my 95% agreement representative gets into the 5% of issues where we disagree. And no matter what, that's going to feel bad man.
Parties exist almost as a separate mechanism than government itself. They're more strongly tied to elections and voting than any specific application or creation of policy. They're about how we select our leaders, not what our leaders can do.
Unless your goal is to short circuit the process by created additional bureaucracy/difficulty in the process, it still doesn't seem like a bug. And if that is your goal, it seems more that you have a problem with the law creation/implementation and not how people's voices are being represented.
#include "vote-leave-broke-the-law.txt"
If you told UK citizens that the choice is in fact for a No Deal Brexit and what that will mean, they wouldn't have voted for Brexit. However the population was lied to about the economic benefits and voted against their own interests.
So when the population can be lied to on such a scale, what do you find as being more democratic exactly?
And more importantly, after it was clear that Britain will not get a good deal, why wasn't the referendum repeated?
I still find it hard to not value your own autonomy. For thousands of years, wars of independence were fought for this exact purpose. You might not value it, but I don't think you can attack others for placing value on it.
The only Leave-scenario people actually could have voted for in the referendum was a no-deal-brexit. Any other promsies were ranging from uncertain to wishful thinking.
I disagree. I think this is exactly the kind of question that lends itself well for a public referendum. The problem with Brexit in particular was its execution, not its premise.
For one, the people were given only a binary choice. As is clear by now (and many people knew that before), there are more than two options on the table: it is about in or out of the EU, the EEA, the ECJ, the EUCU, and about the laws underpinning the GFA. Secondly, the entire referendum was strung together haphazardly because the government didn't think it could lose, so none of the campaigners (let alone the public) knew what they were arguing for. And because of that ill-defined question, we still see major division among parliament about what people actually voted for. Lastly, the entire campaign was hijacked by xenophobic tendencies that only distracted from the main question.
Case in point would be Owen Patterson, a prominent brexit campaigner, who wanted to
1) Invoke Article 50
2) Negotiate a new deal which looks very much like the EEA plus CU, but witout any closer integration
3) Offer the public a referendum between that new deal and staying in the EU
You are oversimplifying this - that vote was between a definite (the status quo) and a vague future direction (insert personal fantasy about what "leave" actually meant)
Is it any more democratic to make people choose between "definitive choice x" and "the mystery box", than it is to make people vote for a vague bag of promises (a representative) as they already do?
If not, then what you're probably after is a democratic choice between two or more defined options. But who chooses which options are presented to people? Who oversees the ensuing floods of propaganda?
A direct democracy moves even more power to the propaganda machine, not the people.
A democratic approach would be to conclude that a 1.8% majority is in the error margin, and then carefully listen to both sides and try to work out something that many people on both sides can live with. That way you can get a solution that appeases 70&, 80%, or more. That's real democracy, in my book.
It's not an easy path though, especially not in the face of what I call "chest-beating politics". The Brexiteers have not proven to be especially easy to compromise with on pretty much any issue.
There are many better ways to enact more direct democracy, by the way. For example, you can have a randomly chosen subset of people (maybe 50, or 100) vote on every proposed laws, more or less the same as jury duty. The difference with a general referendum is that these people will actually get the time to properly inform themselves and have good-faith discussions (instead of idiotic Boris Johnson spectacle bullshit "discussions").
There are many variables you can tweak, and other possible systems as well. Reading up on e.g. Athenian Democracy might be a good start, if you're not already familiar with it.
Almost every argument I’ve seen about Brexit has included someone arguing that it wasn’t. This is generally followed by “oh, but Remain broke the rules too” rather than any actual defence of the behaviour of the Leave campaigns, which doesn’t actually help any of this look more democratic.
Did any parliament members run on this issue? If so, how many? The point I'm getting at is, to what extent did "the people" really have a say in this issue?
Politicians are elected and some time down the road laws are proposed without much, if any, input from the people. It's not really possible to know ahead of time what laws will be proposed years in advance and how your representative will actually vote on them when the time comes. That's my main gripe with the whole "well you should've voted for a better representative!" argument. Yeah you can vote them out after the fact, but ahead of time the best you can do is vote for someone who represents your district's interests in the most general sense. It's really a crapshoot as to what your representative is going to do once they're sat in front of some dense, hard-to-understand legislation cooked up by a nameless, faceless corporate-political committee.
That sweet, sweet money flowing into their pockets.
I'm more annoyed that they keep pushing the similar legislatures despite widespread protests. remember ACTA and others?
It looks to me like they will keep pushing same stuff, that people actually do not want, again and again - just wait some time until the heat dies down so to say.
At least call out the House of Representatives, that's what supposed to truly represent individuals. The senate is supposed to be at a state level by design (originally of course it was supposed to be a check on the general public, but it doesn't work that way anymore).
I did ("U.S. congress areas are more even, ranging from 500k to 1 million")
> The senate is supposed to be at a state level by design
Yes, same as the EU Council (which is 1 rep per country, although that rep is the head of government of each country rather than directly elected -- I believe the senate started off in a similar fashion)
The U.S. House is more balanced than the UK parliament or European Parliament, but it's not an insane inbalance. Not sure what would happen if American Samoa became a state. Would it's rep get a vote? If so that would be 1 vote for 55k people. You'd have to have about 6000 reps in that case to have an even spread.
Now I hate this new law, I think it needs to die, but I recognize that a democratic process created it. I also recognize that “democratic process” includes cronyism, special interests, ignorant and venal politicians, and the rule of a minority of powerful people. What I find many times here is a belief in pure systems ruled by logic and strict interpretations of language (again, programmer logic), while real life and politics are nothing like that.
In short, people here should be given a free copy of The Dictator’s Handbook when they sign up, and s quiz on the contents before they’re allowed to comment on political threads.
Again, this is where you’re running into problems. You’re confusing among other things, the branding with the reality. The DPRK has “democratic” in the name, but so what? Even in less blatant departures from the spirit of the thing, democracy in practice takes many forms. No one (I hope) thinks they live in an Athenian democracy, so what kind of democracy are we talking about? Usually it’s a buzzword interchangeable with “free society” which is another buzzword.
For example, the U.S. styles itself as the world’s leading democracy, but that’s branding again. In reality it is nominally a federated system of indirect representative republics. The U.K. also considers itself a leading democracy, but in practice we’re a constitutional monarchy where power mostly rests in a parliamentary system and civil service.
In short, talking only in terms of buzzwords means that we can project whatever desires we want on “democracy” or “freedom” when the reality is complex.
I have no idea how you got that idea considering I just wrote that the systems we call democracies may not be all that democratic in reality.
If this boils down to Europe not being your idea of democratic now, and for the entirety of its history, then you’re making no point at all.
As in, with poor results. Which is exactly how it does work when it is working. Almost invariably the results are poor because so many of the voters are ignorant.
As evidenced by Merkel and Voss's reported comments (which were in the Wired article on this): "The protesters are a bunch of people Google paid off to protest. Every one of them has a pay cheque".
Which to me sounds a lot like the oft-quoted line from the other side: "George Soros is bankrolling this".
Words mean what the majority thinks they mean.
Democracy as a word has been used as a word that means, mostly, that there are elections. The specific notion that the people decide directly is usually referred to us 'direct democracy'. A very wide ranging set of systems which all have in common that, primarily, some chunk of the populace gets to vote politicians out of office, has been called 'representative democracy'.
In the case of 'representative democracy', the 'democracy' bit still means 'power' for 'the people'. It's just that the 'power' that 'the people' have is specifically the ability to vote in (and out) a bunch of representatives who then decide.
Perhaps it is disappointing that this model didn't do what you wanted it to do here (which is: Presumably said representatives should decide to do what the people want them to do), but to lean on etymology to claim that this isn't 'democracy', that's just fallacious reasoning.
Because you decided they didn't?
Elections are coming up pretty soon, if they really didn't then the vast majority of them are getting voted out in what will surely be the greatest upheaval in the history of the EU; which of course won't happen because hundreds of millions of us do feel that we're being correctly represented.
protip: just because you got outvoted, it doesn't mean that democracy isn't working correctly.
Hundreds of millions? Surely not. I am sure that there isn't even one hundred million EU citizens that know and/or understand what this is, let alone feel good about it. That's why nothing will change, I agree on that with you, but that changes nothing about how bad and wrong this is.
> Because you decided they didn't?
No. It's because every trustworthy organisation that cares about open Internet actually says (contrary to their usual silence) that this is alarming and have done everything they could to stop this. I really don't understand why you don't listen to them, I see no logical reason not to - everything they (e.g. Wikipedia) say is true and objective. There is a middle ground that we could try to find.
On top of that, every single author/content creator I know is against it and says that their work is doomed because their platform won't accept it or will end. Because of how much of that content is educational, this is definitely something that goes directly against interests of every EU citizen, much more than any copyright-related bullshit.
In this case, foreign corporate interests (EU produces a minority of worldwide content) were more valuable to our representatives (that we can't even choose because our country is too small - we have less than 3% of the EP) than our own interests, and that's why I don't think democracy is working, not because I got outvoted. On top of that, in this case, my country is caught in the middle of a German-France political deal that we can do nothing about (again, less than 3% seats in the EP). It is literally against all interests of all citizens of my country, approved to serve German/French interests - that is totally undemocratic. There literally is not a single subject (person, company, etc) that would benefit from this in my country - every content creator here is small.
Protip: Just that it suits you doesn't mean that hundreds of millions of people are happy with it, especially if most nonprofit AND commercial players agree it's wrong.
Just a reminder that quite a lot of people are against second brexit referendum because repeating it would be undemocratic.
Remember ACTA? how many times it was tried again and again under different name?
The only ones who wanted those articles to pass were media organizations akin to RIAA - which frankly speaking are a parasite of the industry, which have tons of money to burn on legal lobbying.
And nowadays - where artists can directly sell their works to customers - they are absolutely unneeded.
Plus the whole idea of upload filter is absolutely idiotic. It will either do nothing, but give excuse to further escalate the law(especially if it goes towards centralized content filter - which could be easily used for censorship). Or it will be implemented in similar vein to youtube copyright system - no way to decently appeal, automated process that tags more content than it should, taking the least amount of effort.
Link tax on the other hand was already tried in few countries - Germany and Spain or Portugal(forgot which one it was) - in former case most media outlets signed a contract with search engine and social media corporations that they can list their content for free.. in other case such contracts were forbidden and media outlets reported a loss of profit - because way less people were visiting their sites - they disappeared from indexing services, and social media platforms - which serve as a form of advertising.
Also - didn't EU post a study that piracy actually boosted sales and profits of movies and music? Because it works as free advertising, and most(but not all) of pirates wouldn't buy the product anyways. (https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...)
On a side note you should never ever accept a law just because you trust a current government to not abuse it. You cannot 100% prove that in future there won't be a government that will abuse it.
Yes. This is how slavery was ended in the British empire and how the civil rights act passed in the US.
In fact I think it should be standard procedure for every poll. Making MEPs publicly state the reason for their vote makes them more accountable and this at least makes them think (hopefully).
The whole thing was a backroom deal between Germany (which wants gas from Russia) and France (which apparently really likes ultra restrictive Copyright). We would have the same result without this fake theater of the simulated democracy facade. Time to abolish the EU.
The EU is also already dying. Brexit will come soon and Italy is on it's way out. What the remnants will be is unclear but the EU as a whole has already failed. The settlement process to unwind it will be lengthy and painful.
(The reality of course is that the US has had not only a say, but often the only say in how the internet should work in the rest of the world for decades, and when it comes to copyright law we have an undemocratic international treaty dating back generations that keeps pushing expiry dates back and back globally)
That's a non sequitur. I believe that these copyright changes will apply in Switzerland too due to international agreements.
There are many types of democracy, each have pros and cons.
People almost never vote in favor of war.
IIRC they even shot down german war planes that entered their airspace and suffered no retaliation.
So yeah, they do have a knack for maintaining their neutrality.
I haven't looked at who voted, but I suspect that the votes aren't on a country-by-country basis either.
* Europe
> Russian influence
* Russian, Chinese, American and whoever else wants a piece of the cake.
What? Dude, the EU can only do this because the member-states are backing it. European politics is corrupt at least from the national level up. Would you abolish countries next? Because that's what it'd take.
I see the problem within society. There's too many people who care only about themselves and who don't mind at all if their neighbors got thrown under the bus by politics, even if they don't even gain anything. It's a problem of mentality.
The president of the commission is voted for by the people (Juncker received the most votes in 2014)
Does America vote for the secretary of transportation?
In theory under say a westminster system MPs can take control. This is almost unprecedented until last night. Even when they do push non-controversial laws (Private Member bills, like the upskirting one recently), they're usually stopped.
So the difference seems to be
1) The president of the EU commission is effectively elected by the people. Same as the prime minister (except for May, Brown, Major and I think Callahagn who were simply appointed on their first attempts. So 3 of the last 7 were elected) 2) The UK prime minister has a selection of about 1400 people to select from when appointing the executive (members of commons and lords). There's no comfirmation from parliament. The US President can appoint anyone, with confirmation from the senate. The EU commission president gets to appoint from candidates pre-selected by the EU heads of government, and those appointments have to be confirmed by the MEPs. 3) The UK parliament can in theory (but rarely in practice) pass laws. The EU parliament can't, however through the committees they seem to have more power to make changes than in the UK.
The UK, US and EU are all different, but they are all democracies.
Does the secretary of transportation have the power to create laws?
Do you honestly believe that a functioning democracy doesn't require a) separation of power (not present in EU, where legislative and executive power is merged, and the parliament has only the power to (dis)approve) and b) direct accountability to the people of the most impactful, legislative, branch (not present in EU, where legislative branch is appointed by executive)?
MEPs can also amend bills coming from the commission, so very similar to the UK system.
Of course we live in interesting times, with a minority government, a fractured party, and parliament last night made a move that hasn't been done for over 100 years. Even last night all parliament did was gain control over it's own timetable.
Still parliament can't effectively pass any laws on it's own -- take the Voyeurism (Offences) #2 bill. An MP had attempted to introduce this, but 1 MP had objected, and thus it couldn't be passed. Instead the government introduced it.
The secretary of transportation has no legislative power as opposed to the EU Commission. This comparison is flawed.
> The president of the EU commission is effectively elected
It is the most intransparent and indirect way of determining a political position. As voter you have zero control over who is part of the Commission.
Also the EU constitution was put in place without the consent of the people of the member states. It was completely instigated by some elites hence inherently undemocratic.
It's the same way the British PM is elected. Direct (or rather electoral college) elections for the U.S. president is one way, but many countries have the head of government as leader of the largest party. In this case Juncker was the nominated candidate of the largest group (the EPP)
In practice, Congress has over the years delegated a lot of legislative power to the agencies.
Now, pretty much no-one voted for MEPs based on which alliance they were part of - they voted based on party, because it's the parties that decide what platform their MEPs are running on and that are the ballot. Not only that, which alliance was bigger was pretty arbitrary and depended almost entirely on how the backroom deals between the various parties had gone. Oh, and there's some justified suspicion that this was all specifically set up to get Juncker in: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/eu-democratic-... (He then rewarded one of the guys who helped him manage this with an extremely shady permanent appointment as the head of the EU civil service.)
This is very different from the UK system, where each party and its leader agrees on their platform for the next election, publishes it as a manifesto, and runs collectively on the promise of enacting those policies if they win. Partly because, unlike the UK Prime Minister, the European Commission isn't meant to represent the people at all - it's meant to represent the EU's interests as an institution.
The Westminster system works only because First-past-the-post can effectively disenfranchise 2/3rd of the electorate, dramatically reducing the variables of parliamentary arithmetics. When that doesn't work, the system crumbles. And this is precisely what we have seen in two of the last three UK elections, with hung parliaments: alliances were built in the Commons that have little or no connection to manifests and the likes.
The EU Parliament is infinitely more representative of the population - which is why, for example, the UK could send several MEPs from UKIP, who have failed to enter the British Parliament for 20 years.
> there are no EU-wide political parties, just shifting alliances of local national parties
That's just not true. The two main groups are very stable alliances of the postwar socialdemocratic and conservative parties. Only small parties "shift", and that's just a recent development due to a rise of populistic parties that reject the traditional left/right setup. (They are also forced to aggregate for administrative reasons depending on their size).
> Now, pretty much no-one voted for MEPs based on which alliance they were part of
Nice baseless generalization there, that's definitely not the case. In countries that take MEPs seriously, there are big discussions on where each party will "sit", so to speak. In many cases it reveals where the real insticts of a new party really lie.
The Guardian piece you link is particularly interesting. It's permeated by a conviction that national governments, rather than MEPs, should "run things" around Bruxelles, and when it doesn't haeppens it's some sort of stitch-up. It's a very anti-democratic view, but it suits the UK discourse that the EU is "unrepresentative" when the UK is a minority on a give subject - and it reflects an authoritarian view of government, typical of post-Blair Britain.
> He then rewarded one of the guys who helped him manage this with an extremely shady permanent appointment
Yep, this was a scandal. The EP censored Juncker, and the situation did not escalate only because he's on his way out anyway. Hopefully the new Commission President will fire Selmayr. We'll see.
Not what Tory MPs say. They say things like
> Neither Cabinet, MPs nor Party Policy Forum ever saw or debated it. It was roundly rejected
> and widely agreed to have cost us our majority, leaving the mandate in Parliament, not the
> Party. (As I wrote in @Telegraph the morning after). Lost majority=Lost mandate.Écrasez l’infâme
Of course google/fb etc had a stake in this and were lobbying. They're not the ones who stand to lose from this outcome though, even if that's what the Axel Voss & team would like to believe.
You mean a handful activists? The people at large do not care one bit.
You can claim that you're acting in their best interest, so they should be counted as "on your side", but that's obviously false.
/sarcasm
Yes, mislead will is also a will.
However, the Brexit vote should never have been legally binding, it's now how referendums work in England. The people who wanted Brexit literally said out loud we lied next morning, the resigned and/or disappeared.
Sure, it's the will of the people...
It wasn't.
It should have been legally binding, if it had been then it could have been challenged in court and very likely would have been overturned due to the cheating of the leave campaigns.
N Farage, May 2016.
Sure, there's always some dubious local leaflets, or a stupid statement or three, in every election. This was quantitatively and qualitatively different by orders of magnitude. By far the most disingenuous campaign I've ever seen for a UK vote.
So I do feel duped - I don't think it matters which way one voted - as UK elections have generally done much, much better at presenting issues. The leave campaign promised the moon on a stick in a very US style, which 24hr news happily amplified. Farage burst the bus slogan the morning after the result.
Suffice to say both sides ran bloody awful campaigns, and the end result is no-one is happy.
The first EU referendum saw a booklet sent to every household discussing and arguing both sides of all the main issues - to allow people a chance to understand before voting. Leave actually had a case back then - in joining the EU we were turning our back on significant and long standing Commonwealth trade arrangements.
It's not just one ad or campaign, or funding, but a whole interminable series of them. At some point it's no longer poetic licence and firmly into fraudulent. The vote should - based on the numerous breaches found - have been invalidated and a rerun forced, along with prosecutions for those found to have breached rules. A fraudulent contract is not held to be binding.
Not for a different answer, but for a referendum that adheres to the standing laws of the land. It matters not if the result of the rerun is another vote for leave - this time one achieve by legal means. How else to ensure that the democratic process itself remains fit for purpose and something we can have confidence in? Without the need to accommodate international observers.
Otherwise where's democracy? Why should that be OK, but fraudulent contracts or selling of investments not be? Does no amount of fraud invalidate the process for you?
Frankly, it's just people being unwilling to consider that the opposition has legitimate and deeply held political grievances with the status quo. I mean, just think about the argument. People only voted for Trump because of Russian meddling. That implies a belief that media can significantly influence people. But the vast majority of the media hated Trump. So then you have to hold two opposing viewpoints simultaneously: that media is deeply influential (when it's paid for by the Russian state) and that it simply isn't influential (when wielded by the established media and every celebrity with a platform). I suspect that there are a lot similarities with Brexit.
So which is it? Does media matter? Or does it not?
Some of the reports of Russian involvement seem just a tad too convenient. Besides, much of the Trump/Brexit phenomena is explainable without. Maybe there was foreign meddling too, who knows?
The grievances seem clear for anyone who cares to look - those areas and people hardest hit by deindustrialisation, globalisation and have been deprived regions for knocking on 40 years, and also hardest hit by austerity voted most for leave, and for Trump. The chance to kick the system, hope for jobs, for a different way. So blame silly voters or the parties might have to admit that leaving those regions to rot may have been a mistake. Admitting mistakes isn't on message, so politicians can't do that!
Of media, I suspect for most of us old media - TV and papers - has far less an effect than ever before. So they get more and more outrageous to try and stay relevant. Most now get news from a selection of sites rather than the morning paper or evening TV. For older folks who still have the habit of news from a single source, I suspect they still have impact. I really doubt any media site or paper can turn an election like they could in the 70s and 80s.
Advertising on the other hand is much more insidious. I'm used to seeing ads from both sides of every campaign. Personalised net and social media ads mean people can be targeted with what they're susceptible to - their own personal hot issues. That has the potential for effect the old media used to have, perhaps far more, and is invisible to all except recipient. I was certainly very surprised (and disappointed) by some of the FB ads revealed after the referendum.
I think we may be in violent agreement. :)
"There is no plan for no deal, because we'll easily get a great deal" Boris Johnson.
"getting out of the EU can be quick and easy - the UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation" John Redwood.
I'm sorry, but in what universe are the terms for non members going to be better than the terms for members? The banks were expected to compensate for the insurance misselling scandal...
I think it would be interesting if there was a law that you couldn't say something untrue in an election. That would be incredible. But, of course, then all your politicians would be in jail. As it stands, it falls on the opposition to eloquently communicate the truth in a believable way when someone lies. If they fail, I'm not sure you can blame democracy.
To be a bit less pointed, I understand that you are angry, but your anger is not effective. If the Brexit side lied (and I'm inclined to agree with you here), how did Brexit win? How would you improve the situation? If your answers are something like "Because Brexiteers are stupid racists" and "There isn't anything you can do", then you'll never get any farther. You need spend your time learning how to communicate to the people who voted for Brexit and to get your message across in a way that they can understand.
Otherwise you just become the angry guy on the internet, which isn't really satisfying for anyone.
I don't like Orban, and his propaganda is shameful, but what he does is exactly what people want (and corruption on the side).
The opposition does not have any shared platform that the majority of the people would want, other than "not orban".
That's how it should be. 5-6 medium sized parties. Having only 2 choices is not democracy either.
Propaganda is the key, because he uses relentless propaganda to hammer the message that migrants want to go to Hungary and take people's jobs, etc., and he uses migration as an answer for everything (those who ciriticize government corruption, do so, because they want to let in migrants, etc)
Many people believe him, because the opposition has much less opportunity to convey its message (less money for billboards, Fidesz took over the major radio stations, shut down opposition newspapers using economic means, etc.), so people have to actively seek out alternative news sources, and those who don't are mainly reached by government propaganda.
But it's a problem of hungary not having a strong democratic culture. It's not a problem of "not what people want".
Also, I feel the immigrant thing is not as relevant amongst Fidesz supporters: Jobbik has the same view with regards to migrants that Fidesz has, but did not get 49% of the votes.
People vote with their pockets, and hungary had years of good economic growth, the government cut income taxes, tourism boomed and real estate followed.
Much like the situation in italy's '50/60s economic miracle, people will put up with corruption as long as they have a booming economy, even if the government is not responsible for such growth.
Hungary will hit a brick wall in the near future, but it will have gone there by the will of its people.
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