A sad day for democracy

[dissonance]

And on the bright side, piratpartiet won two seats in the EU parliament.

[RC-1290]

So then,would you mind telling us Americans exactly what the BNP stands for? I mean like fiscal and social policy, not all the supremacist stuff.

Just watch their lovely awful tv ads on youtube, it'll give you a clue.

[Major Banter]

British National Party.

Nazis for the people.

Oh, and watching the news I just watched the BNP chap who won the seat walk out of a town hall, then get mobbed by the public yelling "nazi scum" - he was taken back into the town hall before they took him apart.

[Woe Kitten]

The BNP stands for the British National Party. The party was historically set up to fight against the influx of Black and Asian peoples into the UK and to demand that those 'foreign' to the UK be removed from our shores. Thankfully Britain has very little tolerance for racism and after a hard fought battle (often physical in nature) against racism the decent people of this country managed to subdue the BNP from moderate success in the 70s as the national Front (NF) to relative insignificance. The party has it's original roots in Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists... if you don't know who Oswald Moseley is: think of a British Mussolini.

It should be remembered that Fascist/Racist parties and groups often come out of the left wing and right wing simultaneously. It's a bad idea to thing of left and right as two ends of a line. It's a better idea to think of them as two ends of a loop. If you go far enough in either direction you end up in the same place.

Recently the BNP have tried to re brand themselves as a party that stands for 'Britishness'. The idea of this was to put up a front of respectability and that policy has really worked for them. It's a sad thing that they have managed to fool so many people but nobody should doubt for a second that the BNP stands for one thing and one thing only: Racism.

[Chrille]

I think it's sad that DF got any votes. It's a Danish national party.
Hardly as influential as the BNP, but still.

[Lobstar]

Its a Democracy, they have all the right to get into the parlament. Just as anyone else.

GO PIRACY PARTY! CYA IN BRUSSELS!

[Woe Kitten]

It's not true that anything goes in democracy and it's also not true that anything should go. There need to be rules in place to defend people from all kinds of things in democracy.

e.g: Corrupt politicians need to be kicked out and people who insight racial hatred need to be in prison not running countries.

One particularly important thing is that people who have no respect for democracy shouldn't be allowed to be elected BY a democracy. The BNP would disenfranchise a large portion of our citizenship and probably do anything they could to hold on to power.

[unclep4ul]

Yes, a fascist party that gained votes by playing on the fears of a disillusioned public during an economic depression. Sounds familiar.

Now people will think the BNP has a chance and its going to be a lot easier for them to rally support.

I disagree with this, I believe the majority of their votes were protest votes, and that the British public are smart enough not to vote for them in a General Election.

On a slightly different tone I do believe that we as a nation benefit from membership to the EU, but that we do need stricter immigration controls.

[Dionysos]

Go piratpartiet!

Also, the reason for this is the huge amount of non-voters is, partly; people are either fed up with politics and don't vote because they don't see a point anymore, or they simply don't care at all. People are frustrated, and I think germany is one of the prime examples; it is *INCREDIBLE* (I repeat, incredible) what politicians get away with saying, doing, and acting like without having to step down or cause a public outrage. The people either totally lose their faith in politics/the government and because they don't know or don't care to check out the smaller parties simply don't vote, or they are too ignorant to care at all.

I think the portion of people being fed up (but still not voting a different, smaller party) is growing, as well is the portion of people that is just too plain dumb to care. Luckily in sweden the pirate party is on the rise. In germany I'm afraid *nothing* will change until it's way, waaaay too late.

[B2019]

The fact that an openly raceist party is able to get into power in any way shows the problems with how we run democracy. Unfortunately our view of "the people know whats best" is, although pleasing to the ear, a joke in reality. We are supposed to give the decission of how a country is run and what laws should be in place to the uneducated (in the sense of how the country works) and to people who have seen nothing of the country but their back garden.

Problems like these lead to parties who openly deny the holocaust,

In 1998 Nick Griffin said, "I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also also once held that the Earth was flat... I have reached the conclusion that the "extermination" tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria."

and are abusive to ethnic minorities and homosexuals.

And the BNP are more confused than anyone else. They are close to splitting into the light raceists who believe in the crack down on immigration and then the crazy ones who go around beating up any minorities.

Nick Griffin (BNP party leader) is having to take things back he said in earlier, less politically correct, years and put a sugar coating on anything hes saying now. this isnt pleasing the die hard fans who dont believe that immigrants should just be "tollerated" as he has recently put it, but that they should be deported out of the country. this raises the issue that is the party just lieing to the public when it talks about its views on immigration and actually has a much harder aggenda but is too afraid to put it forward? (if you have followed the party at all in recent years then it is a very simple question)

[904]

I think this is not necessarily because people like their right-wing ideas, but they are against the lisbon treaty, european interference with national laws and want to send a message to the current ruling parties in many countries. This will blow over, since these parties generally speaking don't bring much to the table and really can't make a difference, just ignore them.
I don't think this is a sad day for democracy, this is how it works and how it should work. The government should be a reflection of the population. You can disagree, but I'd rather see this than a 1 or 2 party system.

[R26]

I'm glad that the Socialistic Party kept their 2 seats here in the Netherlands.

[marks]

To everybody saying "Oh, we should blame this on the people who didn't vote, those are the people who let the BNP get 2 seats"...

You want to know why I didn't vote? You submit a blank voting sheet, you show that you don't support the candidates, but you support the system. You purposefully decide not to turn up to vote at all, you're showing that you don't support the system. And I know many people who don't vote for that very reason, democracy is deeply flawed, and it is only becoming more apparent as time goes on. Is it the best we have at the moment? Arguably. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for something better.

[Dionysos]

Only if no one votes will democracy be abolished. That's not gonna happen... it will only change through war or a revolution brought about by crisis.

[KILLA-COW]

GOD BLESS DEMOCRACY.