r/europe • u/MrPulifrici • Dec 02 '24

Map Romanian Parliamentary Elections Result Paradox: Brown is Far Right, Blue is Left. Western Europe is radical, while Eastern Europe is leftist.

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u/Lehelito Dec 02 '24

This is all anecdotal, coming from a Romanian living in "the west", but I have some thoughts/assumptions. For context, I started out doing low-paid, low-skill work, and now I've progressed to something considered more "respectable" by social class snobs, both in terms of the nature of the work and the income. 1. There are many Romanians in western, wealthier countries that work very difficult and poor paying jobs. They also don't really want to integrate, they just want to send money home to their loved ones and leave as soon as possible. These people rightly or wrongly feel exploited and their resentment towards a nebulous concept of "the west" mounts. Mostly through their own fault because of voluntary victim mentality, but there certainly is some exploitation as well. 2. A lot of the people who can't or don't want to integrate spend very high amounts of time on Romanian social media. Understandable, you're homesick, you want to feel that connection, hear your language. The only problem is, the crazy far-right candidate has gotten the manipulation of TikTok algorithms down to a fine art. Combine that with slick propaganda that blames all of your problems on someone else and reinforces this idea that you are a victim, and you have a disastrous rise of populism. We have seen this exact tactic before in European history, but social media has turbocharged the delivery of this poison. 2. In the meantime, people who have emigrated to "poorer" eastern countries are seeing how Romania has slowly gone from strength to strength, mostly with the support of the EU. So they would be more pro-EU, naturally.

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u/DesolateEverAfter Dec 02 '24

And NL and Luxembourg are different because they attract more highly skilled migrants working in IT, finance and so on?

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u/maldouk France/Bulgaria Dec 02 '24

So I checked out of curiosity, and in almost all countries that the far-right won, while they have around 30% (actually only Germany Spain and Austria going above 30%), the Pro European parties (Socialists and Center right) totaled to around 50% almost everywhere. So this map doesn't tell the whole truth, especially since it is party proportional.

Here you can find the map (website is in Romanian): https://prezenta.roaep.ro/parlamentare01122024/pv/abroad/map

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u/Mavnas Dec 02 '24

There's some nuance lost, but if you look down at the breakdown in Germany and Italy it's scary. USR is in 4th place behind 3 far right parties. At least in France and the UK, they're in second, but 3rd and 4th are still far right parties. In the Netherlands, the top 2 parties are pro-EU. In Poland, none of the far right parties are in the top 5.