Earlier today, the European Parliament released a video on YouTube to encourage EU citizens to vote in the upcoming elections in June. This, alongside the US presidential elections, and the international political climate of today make this the most important electoral year in recent history for EU and US citizens alike.
In the US, the Republican party goes further and further right by the day, very openly collaborating with neo-Nazis (Ron DeSantis' campaign team even posted a video on twitter with various Nazi symbols, the Black Sun being the most prominent), and just as openly enacts various flavours of fascist policy in states with a Republican governance. And the cherry on top: Project 2025. Feel free to read it yourself, but tl;dr: it aims to gut the federal US government in order to effectively establish a dictatorship.
In the EU, several right or far-right parties have gained prominence across the union. Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary is already famous across the western world for being democratic in name only. In Romania, AUR went from unknown just 5 years ago to getting 9% of the votes in the last elections and with 15% support in polls for the next election. “SOS Romania”, completely unknown in the last elections, has also shot up to 5% support in polls in just a year after Diana Iovanovici Șoșoacă took over the party (after being kicked out of AUR for locking a crew of journalists in her office). And in the rest of the EU things are no better.
So, are we doomed? Well, no. Maybe…
Before we go any further, let’s look back to 2020 in my homeland of Romania. In 2020, Romania held parliamentary elections with the lowest voter turnout since the revolution of December 1989: 32%. This is low, VERY low. Now let’s look back at AUR’s 9% which actually got them in a government coalition for a short while. 9% sounds like decent support, but when you take the voter turnout into account, only 2.88% of all Romanian citizens actually supported them. And yet, that support got magnified to over 3 times what it actually was by voter apathy. “Why bother, nothing changes anyway.”
Now why am I bringing this up? Recently, a lot of people, particularly self-proclaimed left-wing people, have been encouraging others to abstain from voting in protest of not feeling represented by any party. I’m not the first to point out this is very dangerous, but I want to add to the pile of why you should fucking vote no matter what. If you don’t feel represented by any party, then vote for the least evil of the bunch. If you can’t vote for someone who will do good, then vote for someone who won’t do more bad.
Oh, and if the party that does represent you has no chance of winning, vote for someone close enough to representing you who does have a chance. It sucks, but if you don’t do that you leave the door wide open for someone with highly destructive views to win.
While keeping people with far-right ideologies out of governments is already very important to keep a democracy going, it is especially so in the current international political environment. Ukraine has been resisting a full-scale Rusian invasion for over 2 years now. And since before that, Russia has been making friends in governments all across Europe, and where they failed they funded far-right groups to help induce civil unrest. Several of the far-right parties mentioned above have close ties to Russia, meanwhile in Ukraine they funded separatist groups in the Donbas region, and in Moldova they’ve openly supported the separatists in Transnistria. The republican party in the US has ties to Russia as well, with Russia funding groups to support Republican candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
So to sum all of the above up: Go vote to preserve the freedoms you hold dear. With the rules-based world order on the death-bed (if not dead already), we need to do what we can to keep our countries free, so we may stay united and strong, and voting to make sure far right lunatics stay out of office is the least we can do.
Oh, and something I found but didn’t know how to integrate in this article: Adolf Hitler didn’t actually win with a majority vote in 1933 either, he only got 43.9% of the votes, or the support of just under 39% of all eligible voters. So yeah, go vote, then keep the pressure on the elected officials to do good and not bad so we don’t have a repeat of ‘39-'45.