Last year I linked to the Politest: le test pour se positionner politiquement, i.e. the test to see where one is situated politically in France (here, with questions translated into English). There’s a similar test—which I just learned about—, EU Profiler, that was devised for the 2009 elections to the European parliament, that tells which parties one is closest to in all European countries. To take the test, go here (on peut le prendre en français et d’autres langues européennes aussi).
Here are the parties in selected European countries that the EU Profiler informs me I am closet to:
France: PRG followed by PS (my Politest result was the other way around)
UK (England): Liberal Democrats
Germany: SPD
Italy: Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (don’t know a thing about them)
Spain: Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (huh?) followed by PSOE
Greece: PASOK (ugh)
Poland: SLD-UP
Turkey: Özgürlük ve Dayanışma Partisi (don’t know them but they sound sympathique)
@Arun
I am an American constitutional conservative. I tend to support the Tea Party Caucus and not the GOP-elite. I am a registered conservative (The Conservative Party) in New York State.
Your idea that people like us, who believe in smaller, more efficient government, less confiscatory taxes, individual responsibility, and the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution in our Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, and the free exercise thereof, the right to keep and bear arms, due process, bottom up not top down government, support free enterprise capitalism, not collectivism, etc, and are anti-authoritarian/anti totalitarian, are in any way similar to the beliefs of the FN in France is absurd.
I did take your test, and tried to answer with my own opinions, as clearly as I could. My husband did as well. We both came out unambiguously UMP. We were not surprised.
I realize it is extremely difficult to compare French with Americans; our fundamental concepts from our founding on, about the size and scope of government, and the relationship between the individual and the state are so fundamentally different.
You would have to stop reading the biased sycophantic media and go yourself to a Tea Party and talk to people there to have a real idea of what’s yapping in America. You would meet people from all walks of life, of every race and ethnicity, of all ages.
Nothing like the FN, which is anti-immigrant, xenophobic, anti-semitic, anti-free enterprise, statist, simplistic, and extremely anti-American. I see it as fundamentally a National Socialist Party using populist rhetoric to gain adherents.
Cincinna, I have some comments to make on what you’ve written here but will not give them until you have read – and to the end – my post on ‘Le Pen and America’ and commented on that.
I will also request that you identify yourself by name, as have almost all my regular commentators (see my comments policy on this).
Arun,
I read your article and updates, and find it far from convincing.
If Marine le Pen does not want to be viewed as a fascist, she shouldn’t dance, as an honored guest, as she did, at a neo-fascist New Year’s Ball in Austria last year. Her contacts with the interconnected networks of neo-fascist groups all over Europe is well known.
I don’t use my entire name for privacy and security reasons. My name is recognizable in the US and France, and I never use social media or post under my full name. If you can’t respect that, then I won’t submit to your dictatorial rules, and I won’t post on your site. à vous de choisir!
So you find my article unconvincing but don’t give a single reason as to why. This is, to put it mildly, an inadequate response. I wonder if you actually read what I wrote and to the end. I will continue to weigh in on this subject – on the striking parallels between the GOP right wing and French FN – but this is as much as I have to say to you personally on it.
About Marine LP at that Viennese ball. If she hadn’t attended it and decided, for public relations reasons, not to associate with other European extreme right groups, but changed not one iota of the FN’s program or her own discourse, would this make her and her party not “fascist” in your view?
By way of analogy, the mere fact that I may have gay friends and have drinks with them in gay bars does not ipso facto make me gay, no? (though maybe it does in the Tea Partier world-view, who knows?).
I can’t deal with ridiculous hypotheticals. MLP is known, as is her father, to be associated with, and connected to, many of the network neo-fascist groups in Europe. She is tailoring her current discourse to seduce voters. I’m not fooled.
Are you equating, in any way, shape or form, being a fascist, or associating with fascists with being homosexual? Conservatives I know, including tea party people could not care less about an individual’s sexual preference. Many are not even drawn to the Tea Party by the so called “social issues” and are interested mainly by economic and fiscal policy, issues of government waste, and especially in protecting the freedoms guaranteed In our Constitution.
What would you ever do if we were talking about President Ted Cruz? A brilliant legal scholar and debater, Magna cum Laude from Harvard Law School, with published articles, voted the top debater in the country, former law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice Rhenquist?
Arun, my friend, I think in your irrational, blind hatred of George Bush, the GOP, and the Tea Party, you have clearly lost all objectivity, perhaps just lost it, period.
I don’t hate anybody for their views different from my own. It blurs the vision and corrupts the soul.
What you’ve written here contains at least five different fallacies of argumentation and reasoning. Intellectually speaking, it’s quite breathtaking. That’s my final word.
Cincinna, as you were saying…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/rick-scarborough-lawsuit-homosexuality_n_4124195.html