Thirty years later, the politics of the 1930s are still playing out in the former Eastern Bloc. ADADThough these political movements are sometimes lumped in with the modern-day populists of Western Europe, they are, in key respects, more like their 20th-century predecessors. They are authoritarian and socially reactionary — anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is a favorite theme of Poland’s ruling party. In the morally nihilistic world of Eastern Bloc communism, everyone from traffic cops to Communist Party secretaries felt free to exploit the system for private profit. In last month’s state election in the eastern state of Thuringia, the AfD won 23 percent of the vote and finished ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Source: Washington Post November 11, 2019 00:07 UTC