The populist, nationalist, far-right Sweden Democrats got 13% of the votes in this weekend’s elections, ending up as the third largest party. This awakes all kinds of negative feelings in me. On the one hand, the negative, ranging from simple distaste to worries about a future that echoes 1930s Germany.<\/p>\n
And on the other hand a guilt-mixed gratitude that I share none of the worries and frustrations that have driven so many to vote against the “establishment”: I do not need to worry about unemployment, the social safety net, the availability of health care for the young and nursing for the elderly, integration and segregation, crime… Intellectually I know that several of these topics could become relevant to me personally with very short notice, but for now I blithely live on in my worryless world.<\/p>\n
But what this also does is awake debate. I normally skip all the articles about politics in newspapers etc. They’re either full of dull questions about administrative details (who wants to lower which tax by how many percentage points) or about individual politicians (who was caught fiddling what rule, or who said what about somebody else).<\/p>\n
And now, for the first time in forever, there are interesting articles about politics in the newspapers. They discuss ideology, the big issues, visions for the future. Oh there also are endless pages of discussion about who will or will not ally themselves with whom to form a government… but for the first time in years, or possibly EVER, I am reading and sharing articles about politics, such as this<\/a>, and this<\/a>. Good things might yet come out of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The populist, nationalist, far-right Sweden Democrats got 13% of the votes in this weekend’s elections, ending up as the third largest party. This awakes all kinds of negative feelings in me. On the one hand, the negative, ranging from simple distaste to worries about a future that echoes 1930s Germany. And on the other hand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current_affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5383"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5385,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5383\/revisions\/5385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}