[Beren]

IMO the biggest threats to peace in Europe are:
1) ideological rifts, for example if individual countries get more and more authoritarian due to right-wing victories (e.g. Hungary, Poland, or in fact Turkey and Russia, which not long ago many people thought would join the EU in the not-so-far future).
2) a European government becoming increasingly powerful and detached from the people.

It's counterproductive to force European integration when it causes one of the above.

The situation in Hungary is not due to forced European integration, it's because we'd want to integrate but we can't, so we got frustrated and blame the EU rather than ourselves. Orbán's anti-Europeanism is rhetoric rather than real though, he doesn't really do anything to oppose Brussels as long as he's allowed to tap EU-transfers. Hungarians are aware that they need the EU more than the EU needs them, even if they seem to forget it sometimes.

[Rugoz]

The situation in Hungary is not due to forced European integration, it's because we'd want to integrate but we can't, so we got frustrated and blame the EU rather than ourselves. Orbán's anti-Europeanism is rhetoric rather than real though, he doesn't really do anything to oppose Brussels as long as he's allowed to tap EU-transfers. Hungarians are aware that they need the EU more than the EU needs them, even if they seem to forget it sometimes.

Where did I say the situation in Hungary is due to forced European integration?

The problem with Hungary/Poland/Russia/Turkey (to various degrees) is that they
a) pretend to defend the interests of an ethnic minority in neighboring countries. This is obvious in the case of Russia, now also happens with Turkey and we heard similar rhetoric from Orban and the new Polish government. This is the kind of bullshit nationalism that plunged Europe into wars over and over again.
b) diverge from liberal democracy. We all know authoritarian states and liberal democracies don't like each other at all.

Again, I don't think the situation Hungary is anywhere close to the one in Russia/Turkey. Hungary is also rather small and powerless.

[fokker]

Certain developing countries diverge from liberal democracy because people are unhappy with the system. It isn't what they expected, it can't solve corruption, leaders don't defend national interests. People then decide to try out a strong leader, who will at least defend national interests like Putin or Orban. Usually such leaders are also populists and if public opinion changes against them, they will seek ways to regain popularity by satisfying the public. People tried electing various parties already, but it didn't really help, they feel betrayed. The result is they prefer certainty of a strong leader to another experiment. In Ukraine people keep experimenting and revolting but it never works.

EU can't solve this problem with threatening with sanctions against Hungary or Poland. Once there is at least one such country, it will protect the other from sanctions. It will get more and more difficult as they will help each other out. In the end all the EU can do is threaten. If today FPO formed government in Austria, EU could do nothing as Hungary and Poland would help Austria out.

[Potemkin]

Certain developing countries diverge from liberal democracy because people are unhappy with the system. It isn't what they expected, it can't solve corruption, leaders don't defend national interests. People then decide to try out a strong leader, who will at least defend national interests like Putin or Orban.

Having a liberal democracy always and everywhere means putting thieves and traitors in charge of your country. This is just as true in developed nations such as Britain or America as it is in Russia or Hungary. It's just that in nations like Britain or America, it usually doesn't matter, as the interests of the thieves and traitors leading those nations happen to coincide with the national interests of those nations - they are, after all, the heartland of the global liberal-capitalist system. For the most part, what's good for our masters is good for us as well. This is not the case in developing nations, where there is a contradiction between the national interest and the global liberal-capitalist system. As soon as a liberal democrat gains power in such a nation, the first thing they will do is sell out their country to foreign powers (specifically Britain and America, plus the EU). This is blatantly what was happening in Russia under Yeltsin, or in most of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In these nations, which are peripheral to the global liberal-capitalist system, liberal democracy is functionally equivalent to treason and kleptocracy.

[Beren]

It's just that in nations like Britain or America, it usually doesn't matter, as the interests of the thieves and traitors leading those nations happen to coincide with the national interests of those nations - they are, after all, the heartland of the global liberal-capitalist system.

So Trump's rise to power and Brexit must be Anglo-American reactions to the shifts of the centre of the global and a regional (European) liberal-capitalist system. "We won't be a colony!" - as Orbán would say.

[Potemkin]

So Trump's rise to power and Brexit must be Anglo-American reactions to the shifts of the centre of the global and a regional (European) liberal-capitalist system. "We won't be a colony!" - as Orbán would say.

YES! At last, somebody gets it!

[fokker]

YES! At last, somebody gets it!

I would say US and Britain are still centers of liberal capitalist system. But the system no longer works only for the benefit of their citizens. It is only the beginning of bigger changes. West enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity during the 20th century which will be difficult to maintain in the 21th century.

[Potemkin]

I would say US and Britain are still centers of liberal capitalist system. But the system no longer works only for the benefit of their citizens. It is only the beginning of bigger changes. West enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity during the 20th century which will be difficult to maintain in the 21th century.

The problem is that the liberal-capitalist system increasingly no longer has a 'heartland' - a core group of capitalist-imperialist nations which dominate and manipulate the global economic system for their own national benefit. The upper bourgeoisie has, in effect, become trans-national, and has severed its local and national ties. The national bourgoisie of every country, not just the developing nations, are now traitors to their own nations. One of two things will now happen - either the whole concept of the nation-state will become obsolete, and patriotism will become a thing of the past, or else the entire liberal-capitalist system, which is now blatantly working against the interests of the majority of the population of even the developed nations, will ultimately break and sink without trace. It seems that we may be entering a new age of revolution....

[Rugoz]

Certain developing countries diverge from liberal democracy because people are unhappy with the system.

More like people are indifferent about it. They are more interested in their side winning than in upholding democratic institutions. There's also a certain amount of shortsightedness and naiveté involved. It's hard to argue for example that Chavez/Maduro would have won the same support if people knew the outcome. Wanna-be dictators never say: "I'm going to take away your democratic rights!". In fact even Hitler said "give me 4 years". Of course people never got the chance to judge him after 4 years.

Democracies will inevitably turn into autocracies if the people are not vigilant. In countries with a long democratic tradition this process take longer since the political elites are largely loyal to the democratic institutions that constrain their rule.

It isn't what they expected, it can't solve corruption, leaders don't defend national interests.

Authoritarian rule has a shitty track record when it comes to solving corruption, in that regard it's hardly an alternative to liberal democracy. What constitutes defending national interests if of course subjective.

People then decide to try out a strong leader, who will at least defend national interests like Putin or Orban.

I suggest you ask Beren whether Orban defends national interests.

Usually such leaders are also populists and if public opinion changes against them, they will seek ways to regain popularity by satisfying the public.

If populists could satisfy the public and remain popular forever they would not attempt to sabotage democratic institutions. The reason they do that is to prepare for the time when their popularity will inevitably drop or can only be upheld (temporarily) by massive propaganda. Popular leaders, especially if supported by a coincidential economic boom, have the advantage of staying in power long enough to dismantle democratic institutions.

EU can't solve this problem with threatening with sanctions against Hungary or Poland. Once there is at least one such country, it will protect the other from sanctions. It will get more and more difficult as they will help each other out. In the end all the EU can do is threaten. If today FPO formed government in Austria, EU could do nothing as Hungary and Poland would help Austria out.

I just said it's a potential source of conflict, especially when those "nationalists" start to invade neighboring countries in order to protect their ethnicity from "discrimination". Ideological differences never help either.

[hartmut]

I strongly reckon, that Macron and his stunning wife Brigitte [1] will defeat Le Pen.
France will decide for modernity and Europe, found in this very unconventional couple.

After the sad folly of the British, and after Trumps unexpected and crazy triumph, Europe now more and more realizes its core identity.
To be explicitly pro European is growing to be a successful hallmark, especially for young people.
(Here you may look even to UK in that respect, not to mention France, Germany, Spain, not least Romania, and now even Serbia..)

[1] http://img.voi.pmdstatic.net/fit/http.3 ... -amour.jpg

[Clangeddin]

So in the end it really didn't take that much to defeat Le Pen.

[Beren]

So in the end it really didn't take that much to defeat Le Pen.

I'm sure the OP believed it would be harder!

[Kaiserschmarrn]

One problem is that the polls are still off but now in the other direction and with a larger error, e.g. polling data for Wilders and Le Pen were much higher than the actual results. I wonder if pollsters, by trying to compensate for previous wrong results, are introducing even more errors now. The Brexit polls weren't so bad, Trump polls were somewhat worse, but this actually started with the last UK elections where the Tories did much better than the polls suggested.

It's also important to note that the polls themselves were much less wrong than the prediction models built on top of the polls, because they add an additional layer of complexity and past data input which the modeller is free to pick and choose at his discretion. That's how a model by Princeton uni could give Clinton a 99% chance of winning. The US elections are a good lesson on how bias, among other things, can influence "objective" models.

Still, based solely on the polls, Le Pen was too far behind two weeks before the election to be anything else but an extreme outsider.

Personally, I think the best way to look at this is to consider it a setback rather than a defeat. After all, a third of the French are outside the political mainstream and were prepared to vote for an "extremist, borderline Nazi party", in the face of pretty much all mainstream political and media players across the western world closing ranks against them.

[Frollein]

What the gloaters like to ignore is the fact that all the problems that caused the rising discontent in the population - which in turn caused the rise of "populists" - are still there, are still gaining momentum, while the momentary victorious candidates have no solutions for them other than the same strategies that caused the problems in the first place.

The fact that people kicked the candidates of the old establishment parties out in the first round and elected "outsiders" with both Trump and Macron should serve as a warning sign of how desperate the electorate is: people on whichever side of the political spectrum are nonetheless conservative in their voting habits; if they suddenly abandon the established parties to vote for "outsiders" (however genuine these are), they've almost reached the end of their rope and are willing to try "someone new," because trust in the old system has been completely eroded.

If those "last resort" candidates fail to deliver, does anyone really believe that the following elections will show a return of the electorate to the abandoned systemic candidates? Or isn't it much more probable that people will then vote even more outside the system?

Wilders, LePen et al have time working for them - the inherent dynamic of the current situation will only gain momentum in the next five years.

[Potemkin]

You sound like a Commie explaining why the Revolution is historically inevitable, Frollein.

[Frollein]

The revolution may as well be extremely right-wing as it may be left-wing, Potemkin, although I think the distinction will be between the ruling elite's internationalism vs. nationalism, and less about the question of who owns the means of production (though that may become a problem if international trade is affected).

I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's Collapse and am at the chapter about the end of the Norse settlement in Greenland. This passage strikes me as very apropos for today (p. 273)

"I would guess that, in the end, Gardar was like an overcrowded lifeboat. (...) Starving people would have poured into Gardar, and the outnumbered chiefs and church officials could no longer prevent them from slaughtering the last cattle and sheep. Gardar's supplies, which might have sufficed to keep Gardar's own inhabitants alive if all the neighbours could have been kept out, would have been used up in the last winter when everybody tried to climb into the overcrowded lifeboat, eating the dogs and newborn livestock and the cows' hoofs as they had at the end of Western Settlement.

We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar's chiefs (...)."

Against that background, the crowing of "victory" just because another representative of the short-sighted elite has gained a last Pyrrhic victory, is both pathetic and frightening. Do they really believe the storm won't come if they just elect another banker?

[Rugoz]

The far right doesn't have to "win" elections to push the political spectrum to the right. ~70% of the votes in the first round went to the center-right (Macron, Le Pen, Fillon, Dupont).
In Germany the SPD/Greens are losing and the CDU/AfD winning.

[Beren]

You sound like a Commie explaining why the Revolution is historically inevitable, Frollein.

It's fucking inevitable because only Le Pen and comrades have solutions to the problems, the final solutions that can solve the problems for 1000 years perhaps and we can live in a world without problems then. So let's party and celebrate decisive defeat because it must be temporary!

Check out, great moves indeed!

[hartmut]

One problem is that the polls are still off but now in the other direction and with a larger error, e.g. polling data for Wilders and Le Pen were much higher than the actual results. I wonder if pollsters, by trying to compensate for previous wrong results, are introducing even more errors now. The Brexit polls weren't so bad, Trump polls were somewhat worse, but this actually started with the last UK elections where the Tories did much better than the polls suggested.

It's also important to note that the polls themselves were much less wrong than the prediction models built on top of the polls, because they add an additional layer of complexity and past data input which the modeller is free to pick and choose at his discretion. That's how a model by Princeton uni could give Clinton a 99% chance of winning. The US elections are a good lesson on how bias, among other things, can influence "objective" models.

Still, based solely on the polls, Le Pen was too far behind two weeks before the election to be anything else but an extreme outsider.

Personally, I think the best way to look at this is to consider it a setback rather than a defeat. After all, a third of the French are outside the political mainstream and were prepared to vote for an "extremist, borderline Nazi party", in the face of pretty much all mainstream political and media players across the western world closing ranks against them.

Indeed, “ the polls themselves were much less wrong than the prediction models built on top of the polls”. The later are 'projections' that are, more or less, a bet on the future.
But you incline in a subtle way, there could be a kind of conspiracy performed by media.
And you seem to try to foster this by a highly regarded source: “ model by Princeton uni could give Clinton a 99% chance of winning”.
Would you have the prettiness to link your source, or give a hint where it can be found?
It is fairly hard to ignore: Your sometimes stark claims are, at least sometimes, not driven by facts.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Indeed, “ the polls themselves were much less wrong than the prediction models built on top of the polls”. The later are 'projections' that are, more or less, a bet on the future.
But you incline in a subtle way, there could be a kind of conspiracy performed by media.
And you seem to try to foster this by a highly regarded source: “ model by Princeton uni could give Clinton a 99% chance of winning”.
Would you have the prettiness to link your source, or give a hint where it can be found?
It is fairly hard to ignore: Your sometimes stark claims are, at least sometimes, not driven by facts.

Obviously you are free to read whatever you want into my posts, but I don't believe that there is a conspiracy. My view is exactly as stated in my previous post.

As for the link, there are plenty of articles out there about this, but I'll give you my favourite: Five Reasons Nate Silver is Wrong & Sam Wang is Right: Hillary Is 99%+ Likely to Win. Note that the second sentence in this article is wrong. Nate Silver is not a Princeton Election Consortium economist. It's Wang who has done the 99% prediction as part of the Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silver disagreed with the prediction.

Princeton neuroscience professor Sam Wang has determined that Hillary has a 99%+ likelihood of becoming our next president. Princeton Election Consortium Economist and professional sports statistician Nate Silver just stated: fivethirtyeight.com/...

All of this data is nevertheless consistent with Clinton being an Electoral College favorite. She has a 64 percent chance of winning the Electoral College in our polls-only model and 65 percent in polls-plus, putting her somewhere in the range of being a 2-1 favorite.

Both Sam Wang and Nate Silver aggregate a state’s polls then apply statistical methods to calculate a probability of winning that state. These methods should produce similar results but they don’t. That discrepancy indicates there is probably something wrong with one of the methodologies. Careful examination of polling and early voting data finds 5 reasons that Sam Wang is probably right and that Nate Silver’s methodology has 2 major flaws.

1. Professor Sam Wang is more scientific and has greater past forecasting skill than Nate Silver

Sam Wang, PhD, has demonstrated expertise in statistics and science that Nate Silver lacks. Quite simply Sam is both smarter and better trained than Nate. And Sam has a scientific reputation that is at stake if he makes an unscientific mistake in his methodology. Nate has a monetary interest in getting as many clicks as possible. This point would be an example of an appeal to authority and confirmation bias on my part but for one thing. Sam has a stellar track record in presidential election years. Nate has a great record as well but made an election day adjustment to bolster his success rate. Thus Sam’s success rate is better than Nate’s.

2. Nate is “unskewing” the polls

A number of experts have pointed out an obvious flaw in Nate’s methodology. The disagreement between Nate and the experts was written up by one of Huffington Post’s most credible reporters, Ryan Grim.

The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.

Silver calls this unskewing a “trend line adjustment.” He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That’s the number he sticks in his model ― not the original number. …

Guess who benefits from the unskewing?

By the time he’s done adjusting the “trend line,” Clinton has lost 0.2 points and Trump has gained 1.7 points. An adjustment of below 2 points may not seem like much, but it’s enough to throw off his entire forecast, taking a comfortable 4.6 point Clinton lead and making it look like a nail-biter.

Nate Silver responded via Twitter that Grim's piece was “idiotic and irresponsible” Then he made a claim that opens up his methodology to scientific dissection.

The reason we adjust polls for the national trend is because **that's what works best emperically**. It's not a subjective assumption.

If we examine the ABC news/Washington Post poll above we see almost no long-term change in the national poll numbers. There is very little, if any long-term trend since the nominations were settled. What we see is a lot of short-term variability that directly responds to news events. But, because Comey’s unprecedented meddling in the race happened ten days from election day, the final news blip pushes the trends in Nate’s methodology towards Trump.

I will make a confession. I suck at statistics. (Note that Sam Wang is brilliant at statistics.) However, I am a PhD geochemist who has developed and managed nuclear waste safety research. I have studied the possible effects of climate change on nuclear waste transport in great detail. I have looked at mountains of data, figures and analyses. And it is obvious that Nate has made an elementary error. His methodology overweights the effects of Comey’s announcement because it came at the end of the polling cycle. This is scientifically similar to the sophomoric cherry picking done by climate deniers when they used the hot El Niño year of 1997 as a starting point in their analyses to claim that global warming had stopped.

3. Nate allows new Republican polling operations like “Remington” to bias his data set.

The top hit for Remington on Google says:

remingtonresearchgroup.com/Remington Research Group voted polling automated telephone surveys. ... Axiom Strategies is the largest Republican political consulting firm in the country.

Nate made “house bias” corrections, based on past performance for well-established polling firms but Nate has no way to correct for “house bias” for new polling operations. Remington, a Republican political operation out of Kansas, just polled a number of swing states for the first time. Remington's numbers appeared to have a large Republican bias compared to other polls taken about the same time, but the sample size is too small to determine a correction factor for house bias. Nate should have not allowed Remington’s apparently biased polls into the overall sample because they may have created a false trend towards Trump just before the election. It appears that Remington may have gamed Nate’s methodology to help Trump. Remington certainly had the motivation to do so.

4. Nate has discounted early voting results

Nate claims his methodology is empirical, but he ignores actual voting results that show his trend adjustment is wrong. Record smashing democratic early voter turn out in the Latiño district of Las Vegas has created an insurmountable lead for Hillary Clinton in Nevada, yet Nate has stuck with his 2 point trend adjustment favoring Trump to Nevada’s polls. Thus Nate predicts that Trump is likely to win Nevada despite the unprecedented turn out of Hispanics who have been repeatedly vilified by Trump. Moreover, Nate simply ignores the analyses of John Ralston, Las Vegas’ most respected local political reporter. This is political and scientific malpractice by Nate.

5. Nate Ignores Hillary’s GOTV machine & Trump’s lack of GOTV

In recent presidential elections Democrats and Republicans have both had good GOTV. Thus they cancelled each other out. This year Hillary has a state-of-the art GOTV machine while the Republican party is relying on Trump’s free publicity machine and the anger of Trump’s white male base. However, Trump has mobilized women and Hispanics to vote Democratic like never before by his hateful speeches and vile behavior. Voters screened out by “likely voter screens” may turn out like never before to stop Trump. So, the combination of Hillary’s much superior GOTV plus evidence from early voting that “unlikely voters” are turning out in record numbers to stop Trump indicates that the late surge is towards Hillary, not Trump. The ABC/Washington Post poll above may be hinting at a last minute surge towards Hillary, but it certainly isn’t showing movement towards Trump.

Conclusion:

Nate Silver’s methodology has 2 major flaws this year. He claims his methods are “empirical” but ignores evidence that shows his methods are flawed. Sam Wang’s methods are more scientific than Nate Silver’s.

It's science!

If you want to accuse me of making baseless claims you better back that up with facts. Otherwise one could get the impression that you just don't like what I have to say.