Politico: “Anti-immigrant forces gain ground in Europe”

From Politico (“Anti-immigrant forces gain ground in Europe”):

Czechs this weekend elected a new prime minister who heaps scorn on the European Union and says his country shouldn’t have to accept a single refugee. Germany just sent a radical far-right party to parliament for the first time since the days of Adolf Hitler. And Austrians last weekend gave the anti-immigrant Freedom Party its biggest share of the vote since 1999.

Those three elections in the past month are just the latest to upend the European political order by elevating anti-establishment populists. Nationalist parties now have a toehold everywhere from Italy to Finland, raising fears the continent is backpedaling toward the kinds of policies that led to catastrophe in the first half of the 20th century…

The European nationalist movement has some parallels to what happened in the United States last year with the election of Donald Trump. The new Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, is also a blunt-spoken billionaire. But while U.S. voters fear losing their jobs to immigrants or workers abroad, European voters are angry about the EU’s inability to contain the financial and eurozone crises and the ineffectual response to the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war zones.

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