The European People’s party (EPP), an umbrella group of centre-right and conservative parties, has said in the final draft of its manifesto ahead of elections to the European parliament in May that it wants a series of deal with non-EU countries with a view to deporting irregular migrants for asylum processing in “safe” third countries.
“Yet another unsavoury EPP chunk of red meat, meant to attract the far-right vote. It will not work. All the EPP strategy has achieved over the past years, is making the far right bigger. So if they know it doesn’t work, why do they stubbornly repeat the same tactics each time?” said Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Dutch MEP, and the lead representative for the liberal Renew group on the parliament committee for civil liberties, justice and home affairs.
That might be a bit of a stretch.
Every step in the direction of the fascists will be followed by the demand for another step. But with the first step the political window has shifted, so the next step suddenly seems discussable when before it was just considered to bei heinous, barbaric and strongly rejected. This is how fascism rises. Not in a landslide, but step by step by step. I don’t expect some uneducated dissapointed young men from an underdeveloped region to get this. But the politicians know what they do and they make the same mistakes like a hundred years ago. But this time it is deliberate.
Mass deportations to third countries, particularly in Africa, is a plan straight out of the Nazi book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
Don’t you think that equating EPP to Nazis is rather disingenuous? Motivations and ideologies matter and EPP is not the same as NSDAP by quite a big margin. For example Germans far right had a meeting talking about a plan to remove all “non-biogermans” from Germany - that indeed was almost the same as the Madagaskar plan.
I’m not equating the EPP to Nazis. I say that they are willing to cooperate with Fascists, coopt fascist ideas and through this give rise to fascism. It is the same thing that the conservatives did in the 1920s and 1930s. The patterns are the same, the talking points are the same. The delusions about being able to control the fascists are the same.
That does not mean that they themselves are fascists. But they are willing to play that game, where everybody except the fascists are losing in the long run. And they do so for short term gains, that will be meaningless, just like the conservatives in 1930s Germany quickly found out.
You might understand that I interpreted that as equating to Nazis.
Otherwise, I would agree that conservatives a running an appeasement strategy with far right voters - but it’s not like the left has found any strategy to combat the rise of the right. In realty no-one (mainstream) want’s to touch the underlying structural problems with a pole (global inequality and general exhaustion from capitalism), I would guess because there is not really a solution in the current system.
Nobody did this. If anything, we compare them to Zentrum (Centre Party). Or any conservative party in any country where fascism ever took root. Go through the list and research, every time it was conservatives giving fascists control because leftists were “too socialist” for them.
It’s not that hard to read the comment I was referring to as equating EPP with fascist.
No, it’s not. It’s precisely what happened back then and that’s precisely what the remaining living Holocaust and Weimar Republic survivors are saying.
So why don’t you believe them?
Because nobody can reliably predict the future. That’s one possible outcome and I think it’s very unlikely.