Gefira #30 The portents are not good

Description

The 2008 financial disaster marked the beginning of a deep identity crisis in the West. After the collapse of American Lehman Brothers, governments around the globe began to support their financial institutions with unlimited amounts of tax money. Small and middle size companies would bankrupt and people in the United States continued to be evicted from their houses while the financial elite would receive a handsome amount of public support. In other words: socialism for Wall Street, capitalism for Main Street. It became painfully clear that the free market and capitalism did not work for the banks and financial institutions.

Then followed the euro crisis, with Greece’s debt at its centre. Particular European economies are suffering from the imbalance between income and a rising public debt. In 2015 it was apparent that the European leadership had no solution for Greece let alone for similar problems that will soon inevitably emerge in Spain, France and Italy.

The revolution of the middle class

In 2015 Europe was confronted with an invasion of immigrants of biblical proportions. Sweden had been replacing its own shrinking population with people from the Third World for a long time earlier, but it was in that year that suddenly the common people began to realize that this demographic process, slow though it may be, has become unstoppable.

Since the 2015 so-called refugee crisis, citizens in many European countries have begun to understand that migration from the Third World has not a marginal effect but will transform large parts of the continent. The countryside of France, Spain and Italy is depopulating while the big cities are rapidly being colonized by non-Europeans. The leftwing parties do not dare to discuss migration and the consequences that it entails. They accuse anti-immigration parties as Lega Nord (Italy), AfD (Germany) and FN (France) of scaremongering and populism. While socialists across Europe assure their voters that nothing special is happening, the reality is that more than 50% of the youth in cities such as Amsterdam and Paris are now of non-European decent. Unsurprisingly then, it is the anti-migrant right-wing patriotic parties that are gaining votes in the elections. The latest surprise happened in Andalusia, Spain, where the Socialists lost their traditional power base.