Italy, the UK, Sweden, and Russia paying for AfD flights: four European crisis links I liked

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Italy, the UK, Sweden, and Russia paying for AfD flights: four European crisis links I liked 2

Why did the Italian President use a half-forgotten constitutional power to veto Paolo Savona’s appointment as finance minister? Here is why. FAZ: Russia paid 25,000 Euro charter for a private plane for former leader Petry & two other AfD politicians’ visit An unnamed EU official said that the UK’s Brexit negotiators are chasing a fantasy.…

British Eurocrats, the Five Stars, Conference Posters, Dutch Twitter, and a surprise: five links I liked

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Brexit-hit British EU staff ditch UK passports. As it turns out, the others still see them as Brits. The POP blog published an interesting article in 2017: “The 5 Star Movement is Neither Left-Wing nor Antifascist”, which is currently trending on Twitter (you wonder why). Still worth reading. Good advice on the LSE Impact Blog:…

Update: How the AfD ditched Euroscepticism and embraced immigration, in one picture

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Update February 5, 2018

In March 2017, I posted a graph which shows how the AfD’s Facebook posts moved away from euroscepticism and Greece-bashing towards immigration and Islamophobia.

This research on the AfD has now been published as part of a larger project.

But trends can change, and local regression smoothers have a habit of behaving strangely at the borders. So I downloaded another year’s worth of Facebook posts and reran the scripts:

Update: How the AfD ditched Euroscepticism and embraced immigration, in one picture 6

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the new graph confirms for 2017 what we have seen for 2016: Muslims and immigrants are all the rage, whereas the Euro crisis is so 2014. I leave the old graph/post below as is for comparison.

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Hardliner Björn Höcke will not be expelled from the AfD

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Hardliner Björn Höcke will not be expelled from the AfD 7

What’s the matter with Höcke? A party tribunal in his home state of Thuringia has ruled that Björn Höcke has not violated the party’s fundamental principles in his so-called “Dresden speech”. In January 2017, Höcke had demanded a “U-turn” in German memory politics, which he deemed “stupid”. In the same speech, Höcke called the Berlin…

Crooked right-wingers, Nazi Grandmas, pesky exam questions, and multiple party identification: four German links I liked

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German media report that about 10 per cent of all MPs for the Radical Right AfD (state and federal level) are currently investigated by the police. Allegations range from incitement to fraud and tax evasion. In dubio pro and all that, but it’s not exactly what you normally mean by a law & order party,…

Elections in Europe in 2017: four reports

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Elections in Europe: great expectations. [caption id="attachment_28012" align="alignright" width="300"] Source: Evans & Ivaldi, SCoRE project[/caption] 2017 was a year of high-profile national elections in Europe, in which the Radical Right was expected to do particularly well. Balanced and neutral as ever, the Express claimed that the votes in France, Germany, and the Netherlands could DESTROY…

Pooling Polish polls, British parties and the EU, white nationalists, and the Radical Right’s gendered policy agendas: four links I liked

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