From being repeatedly asked for ID to feeling threatened by harmful rhetoric, politicians say lack of diversity is undermining work of EU
As a newly minted member of the European parliament in 2019, Alice Kuhnke swiftly learned to keep her ID badge handy. Sometimes the request to see it would come just moments after she had swiped it to enter a building, other times she would be stopped hours later as she made her way to meetings.
Six months into the job, she mentioned the stringent security measures over coffee with a few colleagues. “They said ‘Are you serious? I’ve never been stopped.’”
Kuhnke, a Black MEP from Sweden, put the same question to her Black colleagues. The answer confirmed what she had suspected: “Some of them had been stopped.”
It was one of her first hints of what it meant to work in a European parliament that is profoundly out of step with the demographic reality of Europe. While racialised minorities make up an estimated 10% of the EU’s population, MEPs from these groups accounted for just 4.3% of the total lawmakers in the last mandate, according to analysis by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).
Racism? In Europe?
Next you’re going to tell me far-right political parties are on the rise there.
Are there any countries where right wing parties aren’t on the rise?
People are pissed off brother! /s It is a concerning trend, but I think social media and the need for inflammatory news headlines have driven a lot of these ideas into the open. I think racism, xenophobia, and blind nationalism has always been everywhere and we have given a way for some of the more racist/crazy/extreme people to speak out. It just shows us how much we still have to grow as a society.
Failed neoliberal policies and mismanagement (or lack thereof) of globalisation made people more inward-looking and nativist.
But as far as I can tell, Latin America is having a “pink wave”, which made the right stop on their tracks there.
The UK. The Tories are fucked and Reform UK isn’t really likely to get beyond minor party status.
Well the next UK election seems to swing the other way.
Tories are about to bite the biggest one imagineable in the UK, and the AfD has definitely gotten into some serious shit after that Nazi conference came out
