Tag Archives: WorldNews

No voice, no future? Roma ignored as Europe goes to polls

EU shame

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Europe’s 10 million Roma badly underrepresented at a time when populist forces are trying to villify communities

Pata-Rât is just a few miles outside Cluj-Napoca, in north-west Romania, but it feels a world away from the pretty streets and baroque architecture of the bustling city centre. Here, rubbish from the city and region is deposited in vast mounds, and the air is thick with the smell of rotting waste.

About 1,800 people call Pata-Rât home, almost all of them of Roma origin, living in depressing and unsanitary conditions in a makeshift camp backing onto a landfill site. Many were evicted from housing in the city centre and forced into the camp’s crowded huts.

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Austria’s crisis is a lesson for Europe: far-right parties are unfit to govern | Julia Ebner

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Caught out in a scandal, the Freedom party is playing the victim and dangerously undermining trust in democracy

It is hard to shock the population of a country where racism and corruption have become so normalised that they are considered business as usual. Yet, the latest revelations of Austria’s “Ibiza scandal” are on an entirely new scale, setting in motion a complete meltdown of Austria’s coalition government.

Leaked video recordings show the now-resigned vice chancellor HC Strache and parliamentary whip Johann Gudenus offer Austrian contracts and assets, including the country’s most widely read media outlet, Kronen Zeitung, to Russian oligarchs in return for campaign support. It marks the climax in a series of political scandals of Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ). Just the past year saw the far-right deputy mayor of Braunau am Inn (Hitler’s birthplace) publish a poem comparing migrants to rats, high-ranking FPÖ politicians cultivate connections with neo-Nazi fraternities and the extreme-right identitarian movement, and the FPÖ-led interior ministry attempt to bring the national intelligence agency (BVT) under its control.

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Nigel Farage discussed fronting far-right group led by Steve Bannon

Footage shows Brexit party leader calling Bannon’s plan a ‘fightback against globalists’

Nigel Farage discussed the idea of fronting a global alliance of populist and far-right politicians being put together by the controversial former White House strategist Steve Bannon, it has emerged.

Farage said he would be keen to take the role after Bannon discussed the idea of forming a group based around populism and “economic nationalism”, with potential members including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines leader who is accused of presiding over mass rights abuses and who has admitted authorising extrajudicial killings.

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