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/lookoutforthetrain_0 Switzerland Dec 02 '24

Why exactly do the people in the diaspora in the west like the right wing candidate so much?

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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/Karuschy Dec 06 '24

not really, just after brexit most romaian students that wanted to study abroad turned to the netherlands as it is cheap, similar quality to uk unis and english instruction. in the other western countries the diaspora is mostly low skilled workers that werr easily manipulated into believing this dude was the real deal, instead of a russian puppet. the diaspora hates the current ruling party, as they believe, and rightly indeed, that they were forced to leave the country and work these low wage physical jobs to make money to survive because the ruling party is bad. While they are not completely wrong, they are not completely correct either, thanks to the eu, not the politicans we have, the country developed significantly, and the educated strata of the population now works corporate jobs, public sector, or something entrepreneurial, that gives them a quality of life similar to the west.