Democracy remains popular across the world, but faced with a global array of challenges from inequality to the climate crisis, young people are far less likely than their elders to believe it can deliver on what concerns them.
According to a major international survey of 30 countries published on Tuesday, 86% of respondents would prefer to live in a democratic state and only 20% believe authoritarian regimes are more capable of delivering “what citizens want”.
However, only 57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government, against 71% of those over 56, and 42% of younger people said they were supportive of military rule, against just 20% of older respondents.
I wish I could say I was surprised. Here in Finland we had a parliamentary election earlier in the year and ended up with the most right-wing government we’ve ever had, with zero leftist or centrist parties in the government. One fresh minister had to quit his post due to being a neo-Nazi, and the extremist party whose ministerial post it currently is replaced him with a pedophile neo-Nazi (who won a vote of confidence, so apparently that’s not a problem to anybody but leftists.)
Almost half of the under-25’s voted for right-wing parties. The most popular one was an extremist right-wing party (multiple neo-Nazis, politicians who openly fantasize about eg. murdering gay people, the works), and 2nd most popular was the “fiscally conservative” party (who really aren’t much better than the extremists, and in many ways actually worse).
I’m honestly surprised by this because doesn’t Finland have like one of the best public education systems in the world? I’ve always thought strongly funded and accessible education is like the antidote to fascism, but it seems it’s much more complex than that. Fascists just always know how to push the right buttons to exploit people’s fears.
Not after >10 years of conservatives gutting education funding and blaming leftists for the inevitable decline of the system. Ditto with public healthcare, we have a legitimate healthcare crisis going on but they’re still going to cut more. Naturally with tax cuts for the rich that are going to be offset by decimating welfare, selling government property & state-owned stock of course.
The previous all-leftist government had to take 10bn€ in loans to help deal with COVID, and at the time the right was even calling for it so they could give money to businesses.
Now they’re claiming our current economic problems are purely the left’s fault and the spending was irresponsible (despite having previously wanted to take on more loans), and after less than half a year they’ve already confirmed they’ll be taking more than 10bn€ loans, just so they can give tax cuts to the rich and literally destroy the welfare system. So where leftists spent 10bn over 4 years to keep the country operational during a pandemic, the reich-wingers spent 10bn in half a year to make rich people even richer.
Conservatives are fucking evil.