Spanish Election: The Left Won, the Right Didn't Lose - The Atlantic - 0 views
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far from marking a clear rejection of the fascist past, the Spanish election can just as easily be understood as a sign that the lessons of the postwar period have lost their hold over European politics. The past hasn’t lost, in other words; it’s just been forgotten.
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Seventy-five years after World War II, the German taboo against far-right politics has been breached.
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Vox gained 10 percent of the vote on Sunday, proving that it has significant national appeal. Though Vox did not “win” the elections, its ascent was the day’s most significant development—more than the PSOE’s victory—one that marks a true turning point in Spain’s, and Europe’s, attitude toward the past.
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When I was born in 1982, the Communist system that the Soviet Union had, in the war’s immediate aftermath, imposed upon the continent’s eastern half seemed unlikely to collapse anytime soon. Meanwhile, the liberal democracies in its western half looked remarkably stable, in part because the brutal reality of totalitarianism had robbed extremists of the allure they had once enjoyed. Both systems, in their own ways, were based on an explicit rejection of the fascist politics that had led the continent on the path to perdition.
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In 2000, when I turned 18, the fault lines of World War II no longer marked the continent as starkly, but the war’s lessons seemed to mark its politics even more deeply: In Central and Eastern Europe, citizens who had purchased their freedom with decades of suffering could be counted upon to guard it jealously. Meanwhile, the political culture of Western European countries—especially those, such as Germany, that bore the heaviest historical responsibility for World War II, or those, such as Spain and Portugal, that had been ruled by fascists well into the 1970s—seemed committed to moderation.
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Meanwhile, countries that thought they were immune to the resurgence of the far right are finding out that the salutary effects of their violent past have started to fade.
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Two decades into the 21st century, both of these assumptions have turned out to be wishful illusions. Across Central Europe, citizens have freely elected authoritarian populists
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After three-quarters of a century in which the legacy of World War II shaped the basic categories of the continent’s politics, its lessons are being thrown overboard.
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Europe’s long 20th century is coming to an end. The past is lost—and the future is far less certain than many European politicians appear to grasp.