Stuff Report:
All around the world, the far-right, nationalist renaissance is gaining strength.
Nationalist parties hold more than 10 per cent of the vote in 14 countries in Europe.
The German state of Thuringia is currently embroiled in a political crisis after the centre-right Christian Democrats broke a long-held understanding to join forces with the right-wing Alternative for Germany party.
Yet such parties have never really got much of a foothold here in New Zealand – and according to Politik website managing editor Richard Harman, we may have an unlikely figure to thank for that.
“Maybe we owe Winston Peters some thanks for this.
“New Zealand First, back in the nineties, picked up on those populist, nationalistic themes that we’re now seeing expressed in a much more extreme fashion.
“We’re relatively lucky that our populist party – New Zealand First – has behaved in a very democratic and quite reasonable way over the years.”
The MMP electoral system New Zealand uses was originally born in Germany in the mid-1940s, and was conceived largely as a political system which would curb the chances of a party like the Nazis from gaining power again.
But representative systems must represent what people vote for: and in many representative democracies, people are voting for right-wing nationalism.
Where has this shift come from?
“In the recent Irish election there was a feeling the two main parties had simply market-researched themselves into a vacuum.
“I think there’s some truth to that – political parties these days regard politics, or political ideology, as a product. They go out, focus group it – both our main parties are doing this as we speak.
“The more we do that, the more space it opens up at the ends of the political spectrum.
“I was speaking to a political pollster for one of the main parties who was making the point that there’s a vacuum in New Zealand for a social conservative party.
“That’s because, if the main parties get into extreme social conservatism, they alienate more people than they win.”
So – could we see such a rise in populist parties here in New Zealand?
The New Zealand Initiatives’s Oliver Hartwich says anything’s possible.
“I think there is a chance. New Zealand’s democracy is not immune from these developments.
I think we’re also seeing a growing disconnect between what’s happening in the Beltway in Wellington, and in the rest of the country.
“In some ways I think we have to look at countries like Germany, like Trump’s America, and ask ourselves – could that happen here, and what can we do to counter that?
“One thing we can do is work on civics education. We can try to increase our political knowledge. We can have a better political discourse than that which we currently have, which is happening between elites, but not with ordinary voters out there in the countryside.
“The last thing we want to see in New Zealand is a repeat of these problems we’re currently seeing in Europe.”
The left believe any alternative opinion to their own is “far right”. This is taxpayer funded propaganda from RNZ. Approved speech by the Ministry of Truth. 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
“…the far-right, nationalist renaissance…”
Ghandi and Stalin were both nationalists. Were they also “right wing”?
Do people on the right wing of the political spectrum refer to themselves as “right wing”?
Or is the term only use by people on the left wing of the political spectrum to shut down free speech?
That gets manipulated to the point where the authoritarian left, like Labour in New Zealand, claim the right to being called “Liberal” when they are all but that. It’s maddening.
I was going to write a comment about this piece of utter garbage propaganda masquerading as journalism…. but I can’t type on my phone while my head is down the toilet vomiting.
It gets worse than that, I listened to the audio and half it was the comparison of NZ MMP to German MMP and the rise of the “right wing” German parties. We all know what that is lefty code for!
Will these column-inches be declared in NZ Firsts election return?
“Yet such parties have never really got much of a foothold here in New Zealand”
Which is why, as Katie Hopkins pointed out in that Sky Aussie interview, New Zealand is ripe for takeover by the Islamists, we are already on bended knee.
Jehovah wept, Ed !
you start his with
“Stuff reports:”
That is not going to fly with me.
Sorry, off to lunch.