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The Countries: Forget it, Burkina Faso, Michigan is still the worst.

France feels they are having a crisis of democracy because turnout was only 74 percent.

The United States has never exceeded 62 percent.
 
The Right is the same everywhere.

Britain will send migrants and asylum-seekers who cross the Channel thousands of miles away to Rwanda under a controversial deal announced Thursday as the government tries to clamp down on record numbers of people making the perilous journey.

"From today... anyone entering the UK illegally as well as those who have arrived illegally since January 1 may now be relocated to Rwanda," Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a speech near Dover in southeastern England.

"Rwanda will have the capacity to resettle tens of thousands of people in the years ahead," Johnson said.

He called the East African nation with a sketchy human rights record "one of the safest countries in the world, globally recognised for its record of welcoming and integrating migrants."
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End the Right.
 
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Another Putin-Republican fascist is in trouble.

Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa looks to have lost his reelection bid to a green-liberal opposition party led by Robert Golob, according to partial results.

...

Jansa, 63, is an ally of nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and a fan of former US President Donald Trump.

He already served as prime minister between 2004 and 2008, and between 2012 and 2013.

A corruption scandal forced him out of office just a year into his second term. He took power for a third term in 2020 after the previous liberal premier, Marjan Sarec, resigned, saying his minority government could not push through legislation.

Jansa has faced anti-government protests since taking office, with tens of thousands accusing him of authoritarianism. He has also come into conflict with Brussels over his moves to suspend funding to the national news agency for more than a year and delays in appointing prosecutors to the bloc's new anti-graft body.
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Sour Krauts.

Pro-Russian Social Democrats

By "SPD cronies" the Ukrainian ambassador means above all Steinmeier, Schroder, and Gabriel. It is true that other Social Democrats also maintained a good relationship with Russia, including the current SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Motzenich, who always insisted that Germany should have as good a relationship with Russia as with the United States. There was also Manuela Schwesig, state premier of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, who did everything she could until the very end to save the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2.

But Schroder, Steinmeier and Gabriel are the three big names associated with the SPD's decades-long pro-Russian policy. The three men are now dealing with their past in very different ways.

President Steinmeier has now admitted to making mistakes. For almost 15 years, he had pursued the idea of a close cooperation with the Kremlin centered on energy. "Change through trade" or even "change through interdependence" was the name of the strategy, which aimed at a partnership with Russia that would modernize the country and diminish its authoritarianism. No matter what Putin did, whether it was the 2008 war in Georgia, the suppression of the opposition in Russia, or the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Steinmeier was always among those who opposed harsher rules or imposing sanctions.

As recently as 2016, two years after the annexation of Crimea, Steinmeier scolded NATO's "loud saber-rattling and war cries" on the alliance's "eastern border," when 10,000 NATO troops held maneuvers in Poland and the Baltics to practice defensive maneuvers. Today, the German president speaks of having "failed": "We held on to bridges that Russia no longer believed in and that our partners warned us against," he admitted in early April.

Schroder's adopted children

It's a view that former Chancellor Schroder is far removed from. Schroder is linked to Putin by a friendship that has lasted more than twenty years and goes far beyond political ties. Putin may even have arranged for Schroder and his then-wife Doris Schroder-Kopf to adopt two Russian children, something that normally they would not have been able to do according to adoption laws.

In 2005, just a few weeks after being voted out of office, Schroder moved into the Russian energy industry as a lobbyist. He is chairman of the supervisory board of the Russian oil giant Rosneft and is also on the payroll of the Russian pipeline operator Nord Stream. He still refuses to give up these posts, though leading members of the SPD have repeatedly urged him to do so.

"You don't do business with an aggressor, with a warmonger like Putin," SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil said pointedly on social media in March. "As a retired chancellor, you never act completely privately. Especially not in a situation like the current one."

But Schroder turned a deaf ear, instead flying without consulting the German government and the SPD leadership to Moscow to talk to Putin.

The talks yielded neither known results nor consequences, and it subsequently became quiet again around the former chancellor and the ultimatum that his party had issued. While there was public talk of regulatory proceedings and party expulsion, the SPD leadership has not carried out any of its threats.


What role does Sigmar Gabriel play?

Schroder recently had a visit from his old party comrade Sigmar Gabriel at his private home in Hannover. After an hour and a half of conversation, Gabriel was quoted as saying: "I wanted to ask Gerhard Schroder what came out of his talks in Istanbul and Moscow on the peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. But unfortunately, despite a variety of international efforts, there seems to be no quick end in sight to this terrible war of aggression."

But was that really all Gabriel wanted to discuss with Schroder? The former German foreign minister is working through his past in a different way to Steinmeier and Schroder. The day before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gabriel had claimed that Putin was "not concerned with gaining land." In the meantime, the 62-year-old, who has since joined the German business community after his political career, admits, "It was a mistake not to listen to the Eastern Europeans when they objected to Nord Stream 2. That was my mistake, too."
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Jimjamesak said:
Nice to see the German left-wing finally realizing that Russia was never going to be their friend.
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To be fair, the SPD is the Center-Left. You know, the kind of people who believe markets will solve poverty and authoritarianism.

The real Left party in Germany is called... wait for it... "The Left":

Concerning foreign policy, The Left calls for international disarmament, while ruling out any form of involvement of the Bundeswehr outside of Germany. The party calls for the withdraw of U.S. troops from Germany,[52] as well as the replacement of NATO with a collective security system including Russia as a member country. They believe that German foreign policy should be strictly confined to the goals of civil diplomacy and cooperation, instead of confrontation, though they also believe that such demands are more of a vision, are not to be implemented as soon as possible, and should not be seen as inflexible preconditions for a federal, left-wing red–red–green coalition.[33][53]

In their manifesto, the party says: "All support for NATO states which, like Erdoğan's Turkey, disregard international law, must be stopped immediately."[54] The Left criticised Germany's defense plan with Saudi Arabia, which has been waging war in Yemen and has been accused of massive human rights violations.[55][56] The Left supports further debt cancellations for developing countries and increases in development aid, in collaboration with the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Bank, and diverse bilateral treaties among countries. The party supports reform of the United Nations as long as it is aimed at a fair balance between developed and developing countries. The Left would have all American military bases within Germany, and if possible in the European Union, enacted within a binding treaty, dissolved. The Left welcomes European integration, while opposing what it believes to be neoliberal policies in the European Union. The party strives for the democratisation of the EU institutions and a stronger role of the United Nations in international politics.[57] The Left opposed both the war in Afghanistan and the Iraq War,[50] as well as the Lisbon Treaty.[58]

The party has a mixed stance towards the Russo-Ukrainian War. Gregor Gysi has described Russia as state capitalist, and the party has called the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the Russian military intervention in Ukraine to be illegal; however, Gysi commented that older elements of the party have a strong penchant for Russia and the Soviet Union.[59] The party declared in May 2014 that Ukraine should not receive any kind of support from Germany as long as there are fascists inside its government.[60] Some members of the party (like MP Andrej Hunko) are strong supporters of the Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.[61]
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Kepler said:
To be fair, the SPD is the Center-Left. You know, the kind of people who believe markets will solve poverty and authoritarianism.

The real Left party in Germany is called... wait for it... "The Left":
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I’m well aware of what “Die Linke” is.

Die Linke is the successor party to the old East German Socialist Unity Party, there’s a reason why they’re a fringe party (when you have to apologize for the Stasi…). Not shocking to see them so pro-Russia.

But even the SPD, and especially the Greens, has had it’s history of being cold on NATO.
 
Jimjamesak said:
I’m well aware of what “Die Linke” is.

Die Linke is the successor party to the old East German Socialist Unity Party, there’s a reason why they’re a fringe party (when you have to apologize for the Stasi…). Not shocking to see them so pro-Russia.

But even the SPD, and especially the Greens, has had it’s history of being cold on NATO.
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TBH if you take the Useful Idiot stuff about abandoning NATO out (and, you know, the Stasi...), Die Linke sounds like an admirable party for domestic policy. It's all the stuff we're for but have been programmed to reject because it's not attainable. Where, of course, the best weapon the status quo has is in being perceived as indomitable. "It is easier to imagine the end of life on Earth than the end of capitalism."
 
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Kepler said:
TBH if you take the Useful Idiot stuff about abandoning NATO out (and, you know, the Stasi...), Die Linke sounds like an admirable party for domestic policy. It's all the stuff we're for but have been programmed to reject because it's not attainable. Where, of course, the best weapon the status quo has is in being perceived as indomitable. "It is easier to imagine the end of life on earth than the end of capitalism."
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They’ll always have the stink of East Germany and the Stasi though.

I’d much rather have the SPD/Greens here than Die Linke.
 
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