Compare that with Ukraine’s 90% approval of independence in 1991.
71,5% for staying in the USSR in the March '91 referendum (83,5% turnout) - 92% against in the December 1991 one (84% turnout)
The public opinion turned around very fast in one year. Then the Communist Party and other left wing parties were the strongest in the late 90s. It’s like Lenin’s quote about there being weeks where decades happen. There’s no reason why it could not happen again or elsewhere.
Nah, it’s the New Left -> Neoliberal pipeline, except for some reason they refused to admit it for themselves unlike in most other countries.
Some still can be considered leftists in spite of questionable views on foreign policy, but the majority are r/neoliberal types. Then there’s the sizeable amount of racists and clash of civilization types.
In German right wing press.
The budget hole is actually not a big deal.
There was way less national debt before Covid-19 but the actual issue is that in 2011, the neoliberals pushed through a constitutional amendment requiring the country to have a balanced budget.
Then Covid comes and the war in Ukraine. The covid expenses are a given, but then the government pumps a lot of money into the military because the government sees itself as part of the western bloc and wants it to survive.
So they ran a deficit budget for two years as an arbitrary exemption, and now the constitutional court says “you can’t actually” - so the government is gonna do austerity now and throw people under the tank it just bought.
There’s no risk of collapse whatsoever. It’s just the new (old) form of the bourgeois state enforcing bourgeois interests.
A country like Argentina, beyond its meat industry, isn’t really a country with a significant impact on the environment - but this will hurt the local population.
By design even, considering what the aim of the current government is.
Venezuela’s economic crisis really began after oil prices fell drastically in 2014 and the west used Chavez’s death/Maduro’s election to increase pressure on the country via sanctions which for example made buying parts to maintain oil refineries difficult. Before that, it was doing about as well, or better (of course, failing to become independent from oil exports) compared to the other countries in Latin America.
Argentina was already in a crisis for the last …20 years-ish, but this acceleration of the crisis happened in a week even as Milei backpedaled on some potentially damaging promises like cutting trade with China.
They will probably lose territory to Poland as well if this keeps up
Sigh
No they won’t. It was a fringe position in the Polish far-right before the election and now that the libs have won it’s even less likely to happen.
Or, the fighting will eventually stop and the current status quo will remain permanent. It’s hard to tell.
It’s less wacky politicians (though there undoubtedly are some that actually believe that) and more nationalist propaganda - showing Poland as an island of righteousness against the removed west or something. It’s an attempt by the far-right Law and Justice Party to gain support via culture war and shocking people into disgust and hoping they back you based on that. Even at the cost of pretty blatant lies.
It works on my family, at least in part. 😕
0 chance. The SPD agrees, the CDU agrees, most of the AfD except the very nazi ones agree, the FDP and the Greens agree enthusiastically and likely even the Left Party is likely to have a sizeable amount of people voting for. Probably only the BSW (the left wing conservative splitter party of Sahra Wagenknecht) will vote against.
Libs 100% don’t know what the PFLP is, or any of the secondary groups active in Palestine, including the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.
To the average person’s view, the situation is filtered by the media and it is a dualism of:
Israel (Good Guys) vs Hamas (Evil Arbitrary Terrorists)
He’s not advocating Europe separate from the US, but become a military superpower in its own right by having as large a military as the US. I am sure both Petr Pavel and Joe Biden agree on enforcing the “rules-based international order”.
To think that the EU suddenly wants to ditch the US because they see them as a burden/dangerous is wishful thinking. In fact the only countries willing to do that might be France, because the local bourgeois don’t like to be limited by the US on pursuing their imperialist interests in Africa.
Yeah, I know. The same map keeps popping out from time to time since about 2015. I think it originates from some LDPR guy.
After some digging, it originates from 2014:
TVP Info, 23 April 2014 “State Duma to the Polish MFA: Let’s Partition Ukraine” supposedly from a letter from Zhirinovsky. - He was unhinged enough to be seen making those claims and the west could be seen using those as proof Russia was out to get Ukraine from day 1. Genuine proposals or propaganda? Who knows. The war did indeed happen and claims that Poland is gonna march into Lviv are still showing up from time to time, in spite of them being frankly unlikely.
Additional context: Poland was ruled by libs back then… but very atlanticist ones that still had ambitions to for example overthrow the government of Belarus and indeed Ukraine (pre-Maidan), so while less reactionary, state media had still a heavy baggage of bias in foreign policy questions.
Yeah, it’s something I see popping up from time to time and it annoys me every time.
It almost feels like a losing battle, because “No, Poland isn’t going to reclaim its pre-1939 territories like it’s a cored province in a map game” never sticks, and a few weeks later someone goes and makes a reference to it again.
Support for such a thing isn’t even widespread among the far-right opposition, while the media, from lib to mainstream fash are all overwhelmingly positive towards Ukraine and eager to sabre-rattle against Russia.
What Poland does do however, is try to expand its regional influence. Especially in the Baltics the Belarusian opposition (with the hope of them getting into power eventually).
The only thing on foreign intervention in my reply is the reference to loans, which were taken by the Polish People’s Republic, and indeed the Romanian Socialist Republic - the 80s were a period of austerity to repay foreign debt to continue purchasing specialized goods from the west - that is undeniable.
“Stole a Piece of Land barely enough to Feed a Family”. Anecdotal evidence, one of which I have no evidence of being true or not, and is besides the point of “Communism bad, because they ‘stole’ my grandma’s land”.
“The State of Constant Fear” is also anecdotal reference, one which is even harder to verify and can be claimed just as easily as “a very large amount of people are supportive of revolution to overthrow the government because they don’t go and vote”
Aha, the classic. If “Russia” (you clearly mean the USSR, but probably think modern day Russia is the same thing) is so evil and despised across the former Warsaw Pact, why is it still popular in East Germany? In Bulgaria? In Serbia? Even, before 2014, in Ukraine? And besides, what does Russia matter? Does the viability of a political ideology depends on if a state is popular around the world or not? Were that the case, Kingdoms would have been abolished centuries before the French revolution and religion would be gone by now.
“context I avoided on Purpose” No, it’s nonsense you added, and a common tale told around these parts of the world. What do you think Donald Tusk, the Kaczyński brothers, Lech Wałęsa and Bronisław Komorowski, all major political figures of the post-1990 era in Poland all have in common? They were in the opposition to the PZPR. And nowadays the most common political ammunition between parties in Poland is to accuse each other of communism. This is moronic! “Oh he was in the communist party and that’s why he’s corrupt!” is fucking nonsense - and what’s communist about market reforms, joining the EU, befriending America, like the Alliance of the Democratic Left did in Poland in the early 2000s? (and lost 3/4 of their voters after that).
Blame all the problems on socialism all you want, and I know you will, but how long will this continue? 20 years? 50 years? And you want to dig further and uncover more and more “crimes”. All this’ll do is find out that to expand the “Crimes” of communism, you have to go “the fascists from WW2 are innocent victims, actually”
Raising the interest rate (i.e. making loans more expensive) is the measure taken if there is a belief that there is too much demand for goods by the population (Keynesian inflation theory) or too much money in circulation (Monetarist inflation theory). It’s taken in the hope that reducing the purchasing power of the population will slow the price increase down with falling demand. Which is why you had mainstream economists talking of say the need to increase unemployment (i.e. take people’s incomes away) and how wage increases are bad due to the supposed theory of the wage-price spiral.
“Wage-price spirals, at least defined as a sustained acceleration of prices and wages, are hard to find in the recent historical record. Of the 79 episodes identified with accelerating prices and wages going back to the 1960s, only a minority of them saw further acceleration after eight quarters. Moreover, sustained wage-price acceleration is even harder to find when looking at episodes similar to today, where real wages have significantly fallen. In those cases, nominal wages tended to catch-up to inflation to partially recover real wage losses, and growth rates tended to stabilize at a higher level than before the initial acceleration happened. Wage growth rates were eventually consistent with inflation and labor market tightness observed. This mechanism did not appear to lead to persistent acceleration dynamics that can be characterized as a wage-price spiral” (IMF, Nov/2022)
Cutting taxes is a measure taken with the hope that with reduced costs, private enterprises will scale up production and increase the amount of goods’ supply as compared to demand, lowering or at least stopping the increase in prices, as orthodox economists hold the thesis that excessive demand (as supposedly caused by the 2020 Covid Crisis) is responsible for the currently high inflation.
Nowadays, it’s commonly accepted in many studies, such as this recent one from New Zealand that a significant cause in the inflation is the desire for even higher profits compared to what they already had in years prior.
Lowering taxes in response to a stagnant economy in this case is, as I understand it, unlikely to affect inflation, but is rewarding a private sector that used the fuel and energy price crisis caused by the war in Ukraine to enrich itself even as those prices fell again, with more riches. Especially considering the currently stagnant economy, it’s placing hope on a sector that has already failed to deliver out of an ideological belief that the state is unable to do what the private sector can, as well as the support it gets from and how many politicians have personal relationships with the private sector.
And I’m from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the “communists” of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom’s childhood friends… and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you’d find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the “LGBT Lobby” is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they’re “all thieves” anyway… and against foreigners. After all, they’re only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir “Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder”. Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C
The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.
That’s what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.
Oh hey, my family did this back in early 2010s Italy. The local gold and silver dealership proudly displayed a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics near the counter, that was fun.