Serbia’s longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, conceded defeat Sunday in a general election held after his once-tight grip on power was weakened by nearly two years of student-led street protests.
Serbia’s vote for a new Parliament came just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, a close ally of Mr. Vucic.
Is the tide turning?
No. The Canadian province of British Columbia just elected a conservative government for the first time in nearly a hundred years.
BC did? I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about Canadian politics, but isn’t BC pretty progressive?
Yeah this was hard news for me to hear. Neighboring Alberta are supposed to be the fuck-ups with the oil obsession, and BC are supposed to be the nature-loving progressives.
But the BC premier Eby called an election early to cynically capitalize on Conservative Party disorganization and that apparently pissed everybody off on both sides to swing the election to the nutjobs.
Not really. The developed world is its own beast; there’s no reason to expect somewhere like Serbia to follow the same trend. In general we should expect moderately prosperous authoritarian countries to drift towards democracy while developed democracies drift away from it as the capitalist class in each society shops around for the best deal it can get.
I wish this didn’t make so much sense
no, those who have been exposed to it for a long time, the youth there are rejecting it when they can, look what happened in Belarus when the tried Ukraine eschewed the yoke, paid the price and aren’t being supported enough, so theres that danger as well. Those who haven’t are too stupid to learn from the mistakes of others.
South American is nearly all going MSAGA, if Brazil goes, Mexico is the last one standing. People voted for Trump, twice, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Australia are all swinging that way. Russia is lost.
SE Asia is led by dictators in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, China and Laos, the only place pushing back is Myanmar, Bangladesh is balanced as is Sri Lanka. India has an authoritarian Hindu nationalist, Africa is a shit show from Kagame on down and on and on.
Being cruel, stupid and greedy are now badges of honour.
Lula won, BTW.
Yes, very true. But the majority of state governments in Brazil (the National Congress) have flipped to conservative. So it’s a big stalemate and congress will ensure that things get worse just to make Lula look bad (similar to what Republicans in the US do).
The tide turning means that it’s STARTING to go out.