Europe's Democracy Hangs By Thread

Candidates, parties banned without shame

May 04, 2025

∙ Paid

Romania votes with candidates, journalists banned
Germany labels AfD a 'right wing extremist' force alongside ISIS
Europe uses law to quell political dissent across continent

(2,100 words or about 10 minutes of your company)

May 4, 2025

Across Europe the judiciary is being used to tame political dissent. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been politicised. Supra-national governmental bodies like the European Commission and United Nations are not impartial but take a side on issues like open borders and migration.

When that collides with citizens' lived reality of inflation, falling living standards and the threat of global war, the people are promptly ignored.

Populists, or radicals that challenge the establishment status quo, place first or second in about a third of European elections.

The incumbents call themselves centrists — they are social democrats of varying colours, conservative, liberal, labour, plus descendants of communists and fascists — who conspire to exclude the people's choice from office.

What no-one mentions is that it may be precisely this cynicism, in which lib-lab-con are willing to bury their differences in order to protect the establishment from having to confront change, that leaves the electorate frankly pissed.

GOP Republicans and Democrats work together to protect the most powerful interests that control the U.S. Congress: war manufacturers, big pharma, big agriculture and the money power.

The result is uniparty.

You knew that already but it bears repeating in order to show that it is not extremism out there in flyover country at the root of this issue.

It is the military, pharma, financial complex that has circled the wagons in defence of its own vested interests.

Populism is not really about extremism. It is about no-one can hear you scream.

That's why the press focuses on the politicians, not the underlying causes. Television does not ask people in middle Europe or middle America what's gone wrong with their lives. It makes arch and tired references to the demagogues of the 20th century.

Literal Mussolini... duh.

Let's defer for a moment to academia, think tanks and the legacy media — even if these institutions did not have the people's interest at heart during Covid, and display no desire for free enquiry. They provide the research that claims to show a populist, right-wing threat, and they are also part of the censorship industrial complex that censors those same voices.

That's a conflict of interest but let's ignore it for now.

There is not always a correlation between economic crisis and popular dissent. Wealthy countries like the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria saw the rise of populist parties long before the financial crisis of 2008, while those citizens who were forced to bail out the banks, in Ireland and Greece, did not.

The top-down crisis of advanced representative democracies is largely ignored, despite evidence that citizens are frustrated especially with the European Commission making decisions at supranational level, accounting for 80 per cent of national laws which local representatives simply rubber stamp.

Given that the European Commission already has such power over 80 per cent of national laws, it is curious that the EC reacts in the way that it does — with a barely-concealed authoritarian tendency to shut down anyone who does not align with the mantra from Brussels.

That is what motivated the Brexit movement in Britain to withdraw from the European Union. There had been decades of complaint that Britain was a net contributor, subsidising the luscious range of French cheeses, for example, long before the worn and threadbare the words of EC president Ursula Von der Leyen.

There is evidence of a sub plot to pull the UK into the orbit of the U.S. which dominates investment and ownership of UK companies, while British military and intelligence remained firmly embedded on the European continent.

This is a story which was far too complicated for the British legacy media to report but which was explored valiantly by UK Column.

Ho, hum

The British Journalist
by Humbert Wolfe (1930)

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.

Remember, when you adjust your monocle as you raise your newspaper, that journalism is a trade, like plumbing.

I can tell you from having been there — BBC, Sky, CNBC and the rest — that they think about the political outcome no more than the plumber questions the sluice gates.

Like all trades you'll struggle to find a utility or construction worker that thinks outside the box. And when you do, you hang on to him like gold.

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