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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

We have elections on state level coming up. Hard choice, because for once a single vote really matters (before every government was more or less the same, now there is the risk of having the AfD sitting there). And those voters are voting! So, two choices, vote on principle and hopefully strengthen the oposition enough to count, or vote for the conservative government hoping to make thek strong enough to not need the far right.

Well, it actually isn't that hard a choice, but still.

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As first generation out of portuguese dictatorship in the 70's, living through the whole west/east split, and spending half of my life in Germany, it isn't fun seeing that happening. Similar increase is happening in Portugal, Chega party being one of them.

It is as if the younger generations have no clue what they are voting for.

When they discoverer, it will be too late.

This is what people who court the far-right don't realise. Far-right politics are a means to an end — that end being naked power. You will get chewed up and spat out if you do something they don't like. The silver lining is that a far-right regime is never sustainable in the long run as a result, but there is a lot of collateral damage along the way.

The left isn't working for them and you could say the same thing about the left.. unchecked it becomes China or USSR. Things will swing back and forth. Too many left policies created unhappiness.. too many right policies will create unhappiness in the future. Rinse and repeat.

The mass immigration policies of the left has created a burden on some (while creating a boom for others).

I would hardly consider Angela Merkel left-wing, but go on I guess. Of course people on the far-left can be power-hungry authoritarians too. Stalin, Malema, and Chavez immediately come to mind. But this phenomenon manifests more often on the right in the west because most of western politics is so scared of any actual far-left sentiment that they nip it in the bud as soon as it pops up. If they had this same attitude towards the right, we would not be in this situation.

Too many left policies create unhappiness? You do have a szrange definition of left. Just a hint, the USSR was rightfully called Stalinistic and the Vommunist. Ehile China is a one party totalitarian regime that only recently is curbing down capitalism. None of which are representative of left politics like pro-union, social security, health care and the like.

Left wing policies unchecked lead to communism, totalitarianism.

Plenty of unhappiness can be created from left policies. Mass immigration cause job loss and wage reduction. Increasing taxes creates unhappiness. Spending more today than you have creates unhappiness tomorrow.

Right wing policies lead more often to totalitarianism then left wing ones, historically speaking.

And if you really believe that migration, and not union busting and unchecked capitalism, lead to lower wages, well, I don't think there is anything I can say that might make think about those things more critical.

> It is as if the younger generations have no clue what they are voting for.

They know exactly what they are voting for.

I dont think they realize long term consequences, life and politics aint tiktok where 10 second attention span is normalized or even cool. Shit has consequences for decades, but nobody knows them.

I dont have an answer. I personally moved away from my home country (Slovakia) almost 2 decades away, thinking far right is probably the biggest long term threat with causing some civil war with our big Roma population. Oh boy was I wrong, far right is now completely managed by russian troll farms now, they literally jump as russians whistle (an expression back home), having some utterly illogical positions.

You look left, there is a guy completely interwined with 'ndrangheta who probably will win, murdering journalists, managing economy so badly that Romania took us over. Right is this above. Both love russia in fact. Nothing competent in between. People voted last time for cca new face and he turned to be some bipolar less than useless freak who just pissed off literally everybody left and right.

What about the president who’s quitting?

The hard core of those voters, yes. The usual 10-15% or radicals and racists. All the others actually have no clue sometimes.

I think they understand it, they just don't give a shit, because they aren't the people being targeted.

> And those voters are voting!

That's why it's even more important to go vote this time, and for a party that will likely make the cut. For all intents and purposes, votes for the everybody-knows-they-will-be-<5% parties are lost votes, with the only difference to "not voting" that there's a buck or so per voter for those parties' piggy-banks.

The rumor that invalidating the ballot makes any difference makes a reappearance every few years, so for clarity: The same applies to invalid votes, which end up being just a line-item in some statistic nobody cares about.

Absolutely agree. And there are only so many above 5% parties, so the choice actually isn't really that hard.

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