do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
What is the point of this "no true Scotsman" comment, exactly? To defend Vucic? Or to say that what the people managed to do wasn't very hard because they managed to do it?
There are certainly different levels of oppression and autocracy.
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
> especially as there are still large vote thefts going on
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
If only there was any evidence at all. Trump could only find 50 people incorrectly registered to vote in all of California. They still check your registration at the polls too.
There is tons of evidence! When Texas does its biannual purge of voter registrations from blue zip codes, all the people who silently had their right to vote revoked generate statistics when they try to cast a ballot.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
The reason people get frustrated with the things you brought up are because they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and ignores actually impactful voter fraud. It's like complaining about a paper cut while getting mauled by a tiger.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
That's the excuse often given. If only it were so!
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
We have extremely low voter turnout overall and a truly negligible amount of provable election fraud, even after years of investigations from an administration that has a vested interest in proving the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
Ronald Reagan in 1987, while speaking to the Bicentennial of the Constitution Essay Competition winners, discussed reading the constitutions of other nations like the Soviet Union and noting their stated guarantees of freedom, emphasizing that the true difference lies in the concept of "We the People".
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
Bad take. These kind of hybrid regimes or "electoral autocracies" are kind of the flavor du jour of modern attempts towards authoritarian governments. You take control democratically, and then build a system where you control as much of the apparatus of democracy as possible: you change rules or laws to ensure opposition parties cannot gain an advantage in elections; you take control of or ally with the owners of media institutions to push your agenda; you concentrate powers under offices that are easy to control, such as an executive or judicial body. When these regimes topple, as with Orban earlier this year and Vucic now, it is because the autocrats overestimated their control. Orban didn't think it was possible for the usually fractious opposition to get the votes to defeat him, but Magyar managed it. Pressure from outside helps, too; when Orban took power, he did so as a center-right figure aligned with the largest political block in the EU (and got support from many of his counterparts, especially Merkel). By the time he lost power, much of Europe had distanced itself from Hungary and that pressure was being felt internally.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
Indeed, the democracy -> dictatorship pathway is well documented by now. The reverse is a lot harder, though it is good to see that when the people show they are not going to be cowed that there is a way back out. It takes a lot of bravery though and the people of Serbia are to be commended for what they have done here. Vucic is already laying the ground for discrediting them so the fight isn't over yet (watch is 'concession speech' to see how).
Definitely. As someone who's been living in Serbia for quite some time, I'd say Vučić's regime has been relatively mild. I haven't personally heard of people being jailed, killed, or even forced out of the country for political reasons. Turkey is much more repressive, while Russia, Belarus, and North Korea are in a completely different league.
Now both of these movements need to prove that they can lead their people better than the previous regime or the backlash will be enormous.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
Thing is there is a sort of regression to the mean. Even if you free all the media and do some great progressive moves, if people's lives don't get easier and future shocks make your living worse, blaming past governments only helps to a point.
Hence why going to EZ for Hungary is so worrying. Nothing helped fascist thrive more in Greece than austerity. With Drahma, you have some control over fiscal policies. Not so much with Euro. You'll do what Troika says, or else!
Yes, it is a problem. But barring an actual centralized EU government this is what we have right now, a federation that is 'loosely coupled'. It has advantages, but as you correctly note also some massive disadvantages.
Joining the Eurozone makes sense if your country does most of the business in euros. Which Hungary does. Czechia and I guess Poland do too and should have switched long time ago. Worth mentioning also that all of them legally committed to that on accession to the EU back in 2004; of the new EU members from CE, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Baltic countries adopted the Euro and I don't identify a fascist streak there.
> Joining the Eurozone makes sense if your country does most of the business in euros.
It doesn't. As Yanis Varoufakis put it nicely[0] you can't have fixed exchange rate with Germany (or other EU countries), shared customs and exchange union, balanced budget and a functioning society.
When you have two different economical and political policies it's a design guaranteed to generate problems.
> I don't identify a fascist streak there.
> Croatia
See there is your problem. Your fascist detector needs to be recalibrated.
Croatia has a *strong* nostalgia for the good old times of Nazi Collaborations (Nazis were less thrilled and found their handling of lesser races both brutal[1] and lax[2], which makes sense Ustashe hated the Serbs mainly, and Jews weren't that high on their list).
I don't agree with Varoufakis regarding more or less anything he says; he's been consistently wrong for a long time.
You picked one state from seven, while not mentioning fascist elements in Hungary or Poland (before Tusk). Great calibration on your side.
So some other things you failed to mention:
- most CE economies are very open and so big businesses already do internal accounting and/or facturation in euros anyway
- a move to euros would save transaction costs for companies and individuals
- in Hungary at least this would also probably lower mortagage costs (they had some issues with mortgages in Swiss francs in the past as far as I remember)
> You picked one state from seven, while not mentioning fascist elements in Hungary or Poland (before Tusk). Great calibration on your side.
Because I know how off mark you are about Croatian politics. Not going to wade in Bulgarian or Romanian politics that are way less on my radar. But each of them has their own flavour of - if not straight fascist then some far-right tumour.
Also, I didn't state that having your own currency is enough. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
What I do know all major Euro economies are experiencing constant crises that never end (Greece, Italy, Spain, France, ...). And that is excellent breeding ground for the populist movement.
Far-right appearing more business friendly is what pushes the scale in its favor.
> he's been consistently wrong for a long time.
He's also been right where it matters. Euro as a whole just produces more and more crises.
> Because I know how off mark you are about Croatian politics.
I am sorry, but what are you on about? Your thesis is that Eurozone accession enables future fascism ("Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power."). What does that have to do with Croatian fascist leanings, which existed long before they joined the EU? Precisely nothing. So why are you mentioning them in connection with the euro?
> What I do know all major Euro economies are experiencing constant crises that never end
Compared to what?
> And that is excellent breeding ground for the populist movement.
Compared to what?
> Euro as a whole just produces more and more crises.
Compared to what?
There is no serious analysis, only talking points about perpetual EU crisis which are exactly what the fascist movements are pushing, so yeah.
> Your thesis is that Eurozone accession enables future fascism ("Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power.").
Not really. I said it creates future crises that the fascists are usually best poised to seize.
If one country in the EU experiences problems (e.g. France/Greece/Italy/Ireland), then the whole EU will experience problems (because they have the same currency).
So rather than one country in Europe having its problems and dealing with it internally, most of Europe has a problem. And worst yet, if the crisis causes the euro to devalue, it will benefit only the net exporter countries, causing massive divergence in economies of different countries.
I hope you can see how this will cause losers to be more spiteful, while making winners more arrogant. That spite is great place for various far-right monsters to spawn.
It's a myopic decision because, as you said, it definitely has some benefits for companies and consumers alike, but long-term it sentences you to joint economic pain, without relief.
> What does that have to do with Croatian fascist leanings
It was a response to your quote:
> ...of the new EU members from CE, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Baltic countries adopted the Euro and I don't identify a fascist streak there.
You obviously are not good at identifying a fascist streak.
> Compared to what?
Stable EU states that aren't in the EZ. Like, say Norway or Switzerland.
> only talking points about perpetual EU crisis which are exactly what the fascist movements are pushing, so yeah.
Fascists can also talk about massive poverty. That doesn't auto-disqualify it. Their approach to solving it does.
This is slightly different from mine: either tighter EU integration or disbanding the Euro.
> I hope you can see how this will cause losers to be more spiteful, while making winners more arrogant.
These are again fact-free arguments based on feelings. Who are the winners and who are the losers? Germany as a big exporter certainly doesn't look like a winner now, does it? Spain is doing better than Germany since Covid in GDP growth.
And of course we need the EU markets to be converging and you can't really do that with 27 currencies and monetary policies. Why do we need them converging? Because businesses like the US or China greatly benefit from having huge economies of scale in their internal markets, which makes it much easier to expand after that. The EU has to come as close as possible to that too, otherwise we have no chance and will suffer much greater economic pain. But I guess Varoufakis doesn't tell you that. He just makes you long for the great times where you had to pay for each currency exchange and every bank transaction to other EU countries.
As for far-right monsters, the nazis are currently the most powerful parties in Italy, France, Germany, Austria among others. So your thesis still doesn't make sense.
> You obviously are not good at identifying a fascist streak.
You still don't understand what I wrote. There is no fascist streak that would distinguish countries that adopted the euro from those that didn't.
> Stable EU states that aren't in the EZ. Like, say Norway or Switzerland.
> These are again fact-free arguments based on feelings. Who are the winners and who are the losers? Germany as a big exporter certainly doesn't look like a winner now, does it? Spain is doing better than Germany since Covid in GDP growth.
You can't just weld two different time periods while ignoring what changed in-between.
Germany around 2008 was an exporter that benefited indirectly (devalued Euro) and directly (rescuing German banks) from Greek crisis. Germany today is basically deindustrialising at a rapid pace. It's exports can't compete with Chinese nor do they have access to cheap materials, and that's disregarding tariffs on their exports.
> You still don't understand what I wrote. There is no fascist streak that would distinguish countries that adopted the euro from those that didn't.
And you don't understand what I'm conveying. Far-right and fascist voices always exist. And no, Euro isn't the only possible crisis that can happen.
But those that happen are spread and amplified.
Want example of this happening? It's happening right now. France crisis turned into a France+Italy+Greece+Belgium crisis.
> And of course we need the EU markets to be converging and you can't really do that with 27 currencies and monetary policies.
You can't have them converge (also converging to what?) even with same currency! If say Gambia adopted the US dollar it wouldn't help Gambia at all. In fact quite the opposite. Only once there is a political union of US and Gambia can we talk about possibility of convergence.
Meanwhile, in Bulgaria there was the presidential election that no one cared about so the turnout is in the %20 and the pro-Russian candidate severely underperformed. It was expected to be %47 vs %30, ended up being in the %30 for both the pro-Russian and the pro-western candidates.
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Le Pen is more or less dead politically. The RN is currently twisting itself into knots because they want to use the anti-government protests but are still supposed to be about law and order.
Wait, is that true? I try to ignore the prediction markets as they appear to be very well funded efforts at the tail wagging the dog, but can you provide the links to the biggest positions on this?
Please understand that none of that stuff matters. Trump/AfD etc is about being maladaptive and antisocial. Trump voters aren't reading emails and they don't care about the Epstein files either. The sooner people understand this, the sooner we'll be able to, maybe, just maybe, get out from under this.
It is not really a party — it's a nomination list by the protest-organising students — and the people really voted against the ruling party.
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
I hope that everyone reads your comment. This is how far-gone it was in Serbia, and now there is hope of recovery. This is not some USA left/right party discourse, this is recovery from pure corruption. This is what happened in Hungary, where after years of "far-right"[0] control, a center-right party took over with just the promise of competency and far less foreign influence, and everyone cheered.
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
The replacement party isn't any better though. It will not change anything in Serbia. Just like Hungary which might look like it's changed , but it's not. The political layer isn't remotely controlling those countries. Powerful institutions are. And they are not chosen.
The same is true of the US, up to a point. Should the democrats win in the midterms, they’re largely defined by being not their opponents. They’re still corporatist and unwilling to take meaningful stands or make significant changes.
I'm Hungarian and there have been countless positive changes in only half a year. The people in charge are also way more competent than the last lot who all got promoted based on loyalty.
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
Wrong war(s), Serbia (proper) suffered zero damage during those wars. The only time Serbia (proper) suffered any real damage was ~4 years later, in 1999, in response to attacking Kosovo.
Ah yes, how could I forget about all the ethnic cleansing that happened in Serbia during the 90s. You (Serbia) were literally unharmed until 1999. Not even like a a single grenade that flew past the border into Serbia, or like a small scale terrorist attack.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
“Serbia (proper)” is doing a lot of work in your argument. I was talking about Serbs, not a line on a map.
Around 200,000 Serbs were driven out of Krajina in a few days during Operation Storm in 1995. Roughly a quarter of the ~100,000 dead in Bosnia were Serbs (Bosnian Book of the Dead). By 1996 Serbia was hosting over 600,000 refugees, one of the largest refugee populations in Europe at the time. Those people didn’t “deal with a refugee crisis”. They were the refugee crisis, and today they’re our neighbours, in-laws and classmates. Plenty of families in Serbia also buried conscripts who were sent to Croatia in 1991.
1999 also wasn’t just “a two-month air campaign” to the people who lived through it. It lasted 78 days, killed around 500 civilians by Human Rights Watch’s count, and was followed by another ~200,000 Serbs and Roma leaving Kosovo.
None of this cancels what was done to Bosniaks and Croats, much of it in Serbia’s name, by a regime many of us protested against. Bosniaks suffered and I’m not disputing that. But “you saw no death, you experienced no grief” is simply untrue, and saying it doesn’t make anyone else’s grief count for more.
Also saying Serbia has not experienced anything war-like but the NATO bombing, is delusional. You do seem to forget how many Serbian people died in WWI and WWI.
Whoever taught you this at such a young age, is helping spread and water the seed that is not letting anyone heal from the shit that was organized in the 1990s. I wish you well.
> “Serbia (proper)” is doing a lot of work in your argument.
Yes? That's my entire argument? That Serbia proper saw nothing even remotely war-like until 1999?
> I was talking about Serbs, not a line on a map.
No you weren't. You said "we (Serbia)", not "we (Serbs)". That's an entirely different claim. You then spend the rest of your comment talking in third-person, which is all I needed to know to make these generalisations:
You don't carry the name of your uncle who died on the battlefront, I do. You didn't pass through dozens of demolished houses on your way to school, I did. You (very likely) never saw a landmine with your own eyes, I did (on multiple occasions). You didn't grow up with a "crazy uncle" a house from you that to this day suffers from a severe case of PTSD, I did. You don't have to live your life knowing that an extended family member of yours hung himself instead of facing justice for what he did to Bosniak civilians, I do.
For you it's just a bunch of stories you've heard about second-hand. You didn't live through that, you didn't experience that, we did. The worst thing you experienced was a two months long air campaign, which as far as civilian casualties go doesn't even compare to like the tiny town in Bosnia I grew up in, let alone Bosnia as a whole.
Sit this one out and stop talking on behalf of me, a Bosnian Serb.
You’re assuming a lot about someone you know nothing about, which proves how young you truly are.
I also lost an uncle and an aunt in the war. My wife lost countless family members during the 90s. My family was halved and we buried grandparents, uncles and aunts in both world wars. None of that is second-hand to me.
You don’t know where my parents are from or what they lost, or what I have lost. You decided all of it from one word in a comment. That's a bold assumption. As you grow older, you'll learn not to assume. Not everyone tells their grief in the first person. Some of us chose to put it behind us and not lead with it, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Your loss is real and I’m sorry for it. But you told a stranger he “saw no death” and “experienced no grief” without knowing a thing about him. That’s deciding whose pain counts based on where someone lives now, the same thinking that made the 90s possible.
Nobody in this region has a monopoly on grief. I hope you have people around you to help carry yours, as it seems you should relief some of your pain. I hope in ten years time, you will look back at this thread differently.
There are many political factions in Serbia. Some (mainly older people) still harbor negative feelings towards EU and NATO countries for bombing them in 1999 and recognizing Kosovo as an independent state. So an alliance with Russia seems like a better option to them even though it's an economic dead end.
Great win for democracy. Now the students will
have to show that they can do better than Vucic.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic
recession in the whole Euro-zone right now.
Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries
right now.
>but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
Well, first of all, Serbia is not in the eurozone.
However, also. Whichever news source told you the eurozone was in recession, you should be a bit more sceptical of that news source. It’s just not correct. The eurozone had two short (< 1 year) technical recessions earlier in the decade caused by shocks from Covid and the invasion of Ukraine; beyond those it hasn’t been in recession since the financial crisis.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.
This is extremely good news. I know quite a few people in Serbia and elsewhere of Serbian extraction and this is going to make them so happy. Hungary showed the way, though in Serbia they were fighting at least as hard.
It is glorious. Moscow backed Vučić and lost anyway, due to their combined track record.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy. Trump is an asshole, no mistake there, but he has done us collectively a huge favor: it's very clear that America is for sale and that we should no longer let the good parts from the past cloud our vision in the present.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
But if you look at the path of Hungary, now maybe Serbia, and hopefully the USA skips all of this quickly... it's just that low-trust, aka corruption, is bad for business.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
BTW, I did not mean to go around your point regarding the trans-Atlantic alliance, and what so many of us died for. I just didn't want to disturb the thrust of HN.
> I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy.
I don't have that hope but if there is any path to that, it leads through many many coffins.
> how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment
There is some influence but it's not the largest part. It's just the robber barons of the world form natural coalitions and help each other.
No. English is my 2nd language, and even though I started really early and spent plenty of time in English speaking countries I still suffer from the curse of limited idiom. Feel free to correct me at any time. I think in this case it was in part because the people that I know that live here were refugees from the war (kids at the time).
Don’t worry, it’s a pretty common expression used precisely as you did. Haven’t heard it that much in the US in recent times though, which is probably why the parent post complained.
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
Also, some (not me), have survived regimes like Tito, Assad or Saddam, they definitely would have different perspective on word oppression.
(A thing to get us on the same ground, lets call him extremely corrupt, very few will dispute that)
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
It's not hacking, it's just surprise maintenance of someone else's computer.
It's not fraud, it's just maintenance of someone else's money into my bank account.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
Like dead people? We wouldn't want to disenfranchise them.
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
But you are, though.
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
You could replace the constitution of North Korea with that of the United States without a single thing changing in practice.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
Interesting times.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
Hence why going to EZ for Hungary is so worrying. Nothing helped fascist thrive more in Greece than austerity. With Drahma, you have some control over fiscal policies. Not so much with Euro. You'll do what Troika says, or else!
It doesn't. As Yanis Varoufakis put it nicely[0] you can't have fixed exchange rate with Germany (or other EU countries), shared customs and exchange union, balanced budget and a functioning society.
When you have two different economical and political policies it's a design guaranteed to generate problems.
> I don't identify a fascist streak there.
> Croatia
See there is your problem. Your fascist detector needs to be recalibrated.
Croatia has a *strong* nostalgia for the good old times of Nazi Collaborations (Nazis were less thrilled and found their handling of lesser races both brutal[1] and lax[2], which makes sense Ustashe hated the Serbs mainly, and Jews weren't that high on their list).
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgW81-Yi4F8&t=70s
[1]https://greekreporter.com/2026/02/28/ustase-fascists-eastern... It takes *a lot* to make Nazis complain about your barbaric mass execution methods.
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e#cite_ref-fischer_2... See "Honorary Croats".
You picked one state from seven, while not mentioning fascist elements in Hungary or Poland (before Tusk). Great calibration on your side.
So some other things you failed to mention:
- most CE economies are very open and so big businesses already do internal accounting and/or facturation in euros anyway
- a move to euros would save transaction costs for companies and individuals
- in Hungary at least this would also probably lower mortagage costs (they had some issues with mortgages in Swiss francs in the past as far as I remember)
Because I know how off mark you are about Croatian politics. Not going to wade in Bulgarian or Romanian politics that are way less on my radar. But each of them has their own flavour of - if not straight fascist then some far-right tumour.
Also, I didn't state that having your own currency is enough. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
What I do know all major Euro economies are experiencing constant crises that never end (Greece, Italy, Spain, France, ...). And that is excellent breeding ground for the populist movement.
Far-right appearing more business friendly is what pushes the scale in its favor.
> he's been consistently wrong for a long time.
He's also been right where it matters. Euro as a whole just produces more and more crises.
I am sorry, but what are you on about? Your thesis is that Eurozone accession enables future fascism ("Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power."). What does that have to do with Croatian fascist leanings, which existed long before they joined the EU? Precisely nothing. So why are you mentioning them in connection with the euro?
> What I do know all major Euro economies are experiencing constant crises that never end
Compared to what?
> And that is excellent breeding ground for the populist movement.
Compared to what?
> Euro as a whole just produces more and more crises.
Compared to what?
There is no serious analysis, only talking points about perpetual EU crisis which are exactly what the fascist movements are pushing, so yeah.
If one country in the EU experiences problems (e.g. France/Greece/Italy/Ireland), then the whole EU will experience problems (because they have the same currency).
So rather than one country in Europe having its problems and dealing with it internally, most of Europe has a problem. And worst yet, if the crisis causes the euro to devalue, it will benefit only the net exporter countries, causing massive divergence in economies of different countries.
I hope you can see how this will cause losers to be more spiteful, while making winners more arrogant. That spite is great place for various far-right monsters to spawn.
It's a myopic decision because, as you said, it definitely has some benefits for companies and consumers alike, but long-term it sentences you to joint economic pain, without relief.
It was a response to your quote: You obviously are not good at identifying a fascist streak. Stable EU states that aren't in the EZ. Like, say Norway or Switzerland. Fascists can also talk about massive poverty. That doesn't auto-disqualify it. Their approach to solving it does.This is slightly different from mine: either tighter EU integration or disbanding the Euro.
These are again fact-free arguments based on feelings. Who are the winners and who are the losers? Germany as a big exporter certainly doesn't look like a winner now, does it? Spain is doing better than Germany since Covid in GDP growth.
And of course we need the EU markets to be converging and you can't really do that with 27 currencies and monetary policies. Why do we need them converging? Because businesses like the US or China greatly benefit from having huge economies of scale in their internal markets, which makes it much easier to expand after that. The EU has to come as close as possible to that too, otherwise we have no chance and will suffer much greater economic pain. But I guess Varoufakis doesn't tell you that. He just makes you long for the great times where you had to pay for each currency exchange and every bank transaction to other EU countries.
As for far-right monsters, the nazis are currently the most powerful parties in Italy, France, Germany, Austria among others. So your thesis still doesn't make sense.
> You obviously are not good at identifying a fascist streak.
You still don't understand what I wrote. There is no fascist streak that would distinguish countries that adopted the euro from those that didn't.
> Stable EU states that aren't in the EZ. Like, say Norway or Switzerland.
Let's at least try being serious.
You can't just weld two different time periods while ignoring what changed in-between.
Germany around 2008 was an exporter that benefited indirectly (devalued Euro) and directly (rescuing German banks) from Greek crisis. Germany today is basically deindustrialising at a rapid pace. It's exports can't compete with Chinese nor do they have access to cheap materials, and that's disregarding tariffs on their exports.
> You still don't understand what I wrote. There is no fascist streak that would distinguish countries that adopted the euro from those that didn't.
And you don't understand what I'm conveying. Far-right and fascist voices always exist. And no, Euro isn't the only possible crisis that can happen.
But those that happen are spread and amplified. Want example of this happening? It's happening right now. France crisis turned into a France+Italy+Greece+Belgium crisis.
> And of course we need the EU markets to be converging and you can't really do that with 27 currencies and monetary policies.
You can't have them converge (also converging to what?) even with same currency! If say Gambia adopted the US dollar it wouldn't help Gambia at all. In fact quite the opposite. Only once there is a political union of US and Gambia can we talk about possibility of convergence.
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Seems true. Was at 70% before
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
* Forint 363 to the euro compared to 400 in 2023
* Homophobic law repealed
* Term limit introduced for MPs and PMs
* Rail overhaul plan
* No more kowtowing to Russia
(2) The most important thing is that power was handed over peacefully. New guy, new team, new ideas and approaches.
Edit: Hopefully this ages poorly. It's a tight race
https://www.reuters.com/live/brazil-election-live-lula-bolso...
Hopefully, wounds are healing, and more productive friends can be found.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
Around 200,000 Serbs were driven out of Krajina in a few days during Operation Storm in 1995. Roughly a quarter of the ~100,000 dead in Bosnia were Serbs (Bosnian Book of the Dead). By 1996 Serbia was hosting over 600,000 refugees, one of the largest refugee populations in Europe at the time. Those people didn’t “deal with a refugee crisis”. They were the refugee crisis, and today they’re our neighbours, in-laws and classmates. Plenty of families in Serbia also buried conscripts who were sent to Croatia in 1991.
1999 also wasn’t just “a two-month air campaign” to the people who lived through it. It lasted 78 days, killed around 500 civilians by Human Rights Watch’s count, and was followed by another ~200,000 Serbs and Roma leaving Kosovo.
None of this cancels what was done to Bosniaks and Croats, much of it in Serbia’s name, by a regime many of us protested against. Bosniaks suffered and I’m not disputing that. But “you saw no death, you experienced no grief” is simply untrue, and saying it doesn’t make anyone else’s grief count for more.
Also saying Serbia has not experienced anything war-like but the NATO bombing, is delusional. You do seem to forget how many Serbian people died in WWI and WWI.
Whoever taught you this at such a young age, is helping spread and water the seed that is not letting anyone heal from the shit that was organized in the 1990s. I wish you well.
Yes? That's my entire argument? That Serbia proper saw nothing even remotely war-like until 1999?
> I was talking about Serbs, not a line on a map.
No you weren't. You said "we (Serbia)", not "we (Serbs)". That's an entirely different claim. You then spend the rest of your comment talking in third-person, which is all I needed to know to make these generalisations:
You don't carry the name of your uncle who died on the battlefront, I do. You didn't pass through dozens of demolished houses on your way to school, I did. You (very likely) never saw a landmine with your own eyes, I did (on multiple occasions). You didn't grow up with a "crazy uncle" a house from you that to this day suffers from a severe case of PTSD, I did. You don't have to live your life knowing that an extended family member of yours hung himself instead of facing justice for what he did to Bosniak civilians, I do.
For you it's just a bunch of stories you've heard about second-hand. You didn't live through that, you didn't experience that, we did. The worst thing you experienced was a two months long air campaign, which as far as civilian casualties go doesn't even compare to like the tiny town in Bosnia I grew up in, let alone Bosnia as a whole.
Sit this one out and stop talking on behalf of me, a Bosnian Serb.
I also lost an uncle and an aunt in the war. My wife lost countless family members during the 90s. My family was halved and we buried grandparents, uncles and aunts in both world wars. None of that is second-hand to me.
You don’t know where my parents are from or what they lost, or what I have lost. You decided all of it from one word in a comment. That's a bold assumption. As you grow older, you'll learn not to assume. Not everyone tells their grief in the first person. Some of us chose to put it behind us and not lead with it, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Your loss is real and I’m sorry for it. But you told a stranger he “saw no death” and “experienced no grief” without knowing a thing about him. That’s deciding whose pain counts based on where someone lives now, the same thinking that made the 90s possible.
Nobody in this region has a monopoly on grief. I hope you have people around you to help carry yours, as it seems you should relief some of your pain. I hope in ten years time, you will look back at this thread differently.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone right now. Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries right now.
Most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans see decent economic growth currently.
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
However, also. Whichever news source told you the eurozone was in recession, you should be a bit more sceptical of that news source. It’s just not correct. The eurozone had two short (< 1 year) technical recessions earlier in the decade caused by shocks from Covid and the invasion of Ukraine; beyond those it hasn’t been in recession since the financial crisis.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
Many hours ago, I had a half-written email to you in my drafts. I have now sent it to you.
I don't have that hope but if there is any path to that, it leads through many many coffins.
> how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment
There is some influence but it's not the largest part. It's just the robber barons of the world form natural coalitions and help each other.
Your English is fine.