I hear a lot that people say the US Democratic Party would be right wing in Europe. But I see a lot of Europeans online say that their (left) parties are corrupt and right wing. What am I missing?
I hear a lot that people say the US Democratic Party would be right wing in Europe. But I see a lot of Europeans online say that their (left) parties are corrupt and right wing. What am I missing?
Left and right started as arbitrary concept based on where political parties sit in a parliament and they totally depend on the circumstances of the political system. In European history at the time democracies came into existence you could have separated idiological streams into e.g. republicans (as in people who aim for a republic) and monarchists. Also the more political parties with different topics there are the more difficult it gets to assign them to either left or right. As another commenter stated… dividing a political system into left and right helps to define a common „enemy“ which moves away the political discourse from other topics that matter.
I like to think of it as the Conservatives chose to sit on the right because they can’t accept that they’re not.
And I believe this pun works to some extent in French too, which is where that arbitrary labelling started.