“Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left…
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Why? Status quo is the default in any state.
Institutional reforms seem to go through better if done proactively. Eg, Sweden, 1990s, preempted China shock. What gave? Had the right people been voted in (at various levels)? Was there a culture of running parallel optimisations (org-Darwinist take) of status quo ante?
You might be able to apply those to how Swiss institutional-reforms (if any) preempted China shock
(or, now, how they are handling vs just avoidinh "migrant shock", orthogonally to the "resilient" demographic, popular framings, etc)
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
1. https://arbetet.se/2026/09/21/sjukforsakringen-forklarar-var...
2. https://www.thelocal.se/20261012/beer-strike-and-contract-br...
I would say the center party is center-right.
However, the left has stated that they rather reasonably won't support a government that they are not part of. The center party on the other hand has said they won't support any government that the left party is in and seem to be open to forming a government (at least not denying when being asked directly) with the right wing parties of the former government, despite that bloc losing the election.
When one party's "red lines" only seem to soften when facing the right, I think that does say something about their true intentions.
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
Well you can spot them with a Rorschach test, perhaps.
To put it less ambiguously, I’m looking for a term for a character which is written to be repulsive but a number of people in the real world misinterpret as a role model.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...