I think the emphasis should be on the 27.
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Much more palatable than this.
As distinct from constructed “national” histories.
You are partly correct and @LapsedPacifist has missed my point completely. The history and relationships of groups in Central Europe is unbelievably complex - Germany and Italy are 19th century constructs and the Habsburg empire is best perhaps described as “sprawling”. Nationalism, linguistic clades, territory and tribalism have all had their part to play and they still simmer - I won’t say more than that or someone will take me to pieces at great length.
The English, specifically, tend to regard understanding all that stuff as beneath their dignity. We have a foreign secretary who is more interested in classical era Rome than 21st century Europe. Our political right seems to want to regard Europe as a group of easily distinguished countries with simple epithets such as “Poles - hard working and over here”, “Bulgarians - untrustworthy”. But the complexities of Northern Ireland and the adjoining part of Scotland should remind us that tribalism is very important, before we are torn apart by media barons and politicians trying to foment inter-tribal warfare. Italy is a warning of how strange on the surface alliances can be,.
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Mark Blyth predicted this one accurately, too…I find his conception of global Trumpism to be increasingly true. I realize he suddenly has a lot more breathless fanboys, and that his argument has some flaws, but I think that we need to really heed the warnings the left has been getting for a long time now with regard to economic policy: “Good enough” ain’t good enough.
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In what universe is 46% to 54% a narrow win? especially given that 48% to 52% in the UK referendum is treated as if it was some kins of landslide.
I know the left hasn’t had a good year, but give credit where credit is due: the Green candidate won by a large margin in the Austrian Presidential election! And that is big deal in a country where Kurt Waldheim, an actual, certified Nazi, was President not that long ago.
Maybe, giving the population an opportunity to reflect on their democratic choices is not such bad idea.
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Well, all other relevant parties of Austria gathered behind Von der Bellen, and still the FPÖ guy got 46 %. That is narrow, considering that a decade ago, far-right parties wouldn’t have stood a chance of gathering double digit figures.
This is not a two-party, two-stage system where results are expected to be of the 51% / 49% type.
My point was though that much of the German media has been covering the Italy referendum as a bad thing, as “something directed against Europe” like the Brexit and the close call in the Austria vote, where I would rather agree with Cory that the democratic aspects of this proposal were dubious at best. But you don’t get to hear this here, everybody bought into that other narrative.
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there’s one issue I see as worrying: all parties* backed van der Bellen and still Hofer collected nearly half of the votes. the right has a very large voter pool in Austria, and this is not an exception but true for many (most? all?) European countries
* that is except the FPÖ, naturally. and some ÖVP politicians more happy with a right-wing president
eta: blargh, what @anon85905360 said
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This is incorrect. The FPÖ under Haider got 27% in the 1999 national election–before any of us could even contemplate that fascism would have even remote chance in Europe. Haider’s death created a vacuum on the right–which took a while to fill, but in hindsight, he can be viewed as a precursor of Farage and Trump (although in a much smaller pond).
He became a victim of his on superiority complex: driving into a concrete pillar at 142 km/h on a mountain road in fog, with 1.8% alcohol in his system. Farage has been luckier and has survived similar brush with death. I remember his rise and fall well as I lived on the Austrian border, at the time.
This is why a left-of-centre candidate winning in Austria is good news in my book.
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true, should have been “two decades”. I’m getting old 
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Unfortunately, the first helps to create the second.
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This only just occurred to you? Even here on BB people have been comparing Trump to Berlusconi pretty much since the campaign began.
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but comparing Trump to Hitler is much more common, Berlusconi fits imo the bill better as precursor
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Sure, and Trump has also commonly been compared to citrus fruit. I’m just saying that anyone who has been engaging in political threads on BB in other than write-only mode must have noticed this comparison before.
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…lucky for him, unfortunate for the UK.
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I know the Darwin Awards generally don’t do such common things as drunk driving, but 142 km/h? On a mountain? In fog? With over twenty times the usual legal limit of alcohol in your system? Surely this is Darwin-worthy.
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it was 1.8 ‰, not 1.8 % - but still a stately concentration, the legal limit in Austria is 0.5 ‰
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Does it now? I suppose you could argue that Fascism is a critique of Liberalism’s failures in responding to the threat of Communism. Many things have been argued, not all of them are true.
Thanks for correction. Was sind ein paar Zerostellen unter Freunden?
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“everything within one order of magnitude is totally exact” (most astrophysicists)
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