My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica.

Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y".

After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data.

With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects).

And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today.

Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers.

It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.

We have to make the more traditional methods popular again.

The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated.

Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".

There was a disjunction around the late 90s/early 2000s when the internet got big. That was around the time that the corporate news sources started losing control of the news to more citizen reporter types running podcasts or whatever gets big on social media. What gets called "the narrative" split from being the consensus of journalists to a cacophony of random people who don't form consensuses.

Before that change, a scandal in the papers also meant you had to have lost political favour with the people who owned the media companies, ie, were losing big political battles. You also had no hope of being re-elected through a hostile media because if they didn't carry a favourable message there was no way to communicate with voters. I'd argue people like Jeffery Epstein never really made it to trial or public attention because stories got buried.

Afterwards the better approach is to point and shout "Fake News". There are multiple channels that reach voters and it turns out that the corporate media are actually much more unreliable and unpopular than were previously suspected. A lot more dirty laundry is aired and the Streisand effect takes hold.

CA wasn't the change, it was just one of the first big scandals to happen in the new era.

I don't know, I think there was definitely a turn around the mid 2010s when actions and consequences really started to diverge.

And to be clear, I don't mean that the exposure of CA was the cause, I mean that what CA and their ilk was delivering to their customers - detailed, real time, granular analysis of the reactions to actions.

Some time a bit before the public CA exposure would have been when analysts looking at the data delivered by CA would have first realised just how little what would until then have been "scandal" actually moved the needle of their supporters, without having to infer from slow and inaccurate techniques like polling and focus groups.

Yes, and this trend is self-reinforcing since politicians generally do not actually receive any punishment for their bad behavior. At best the party slowly loses voters but that is over much longer timeframes than individual politician's careers - and meanwhile all other parties pull similar shit anyway because the short-term benefits incentivize that.

In Greece, we recently elected as representatives for the EU Parliament:

* a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever.

* a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general

* a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video

* a convicted criminal

It's impressive to manage to fail as a politician.

Hello neighbor. You will never win the competition for choosing the worst possible politicians as long as Turkey has Erdoğan :)

You forget they have Mazedonia and Bulgaria as neighbors ;)

Hi, Malakas.

Also ->

YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo

Yup that's the problem with PR: people actually get what they vote for. And people are idiots.

Truly frightening that these are the people who'll be contributing to the decisions made on the future of the internet for the entire rest of the world.

You are overestimating the real power of the EU parliament, everything is finally decided in the EU council. The parliament is more or less kind of a political theatre without the powers you would expect a parliament to have.

I don't know much about Greece and don't follow Greece at all. Every time I hear something about Greece, it sounds like a hot mess.

I think this sums it up pretty nicely. It's a failed state with corrupt people at the top of the government.

The parliament, i.e. the majority, i.e. these people, are also the ones who appoint the judges of the top courts of the country, which all but ensures their immunity.

Their immunity is also enshrined in the consistution[4, article 86] - only the parliament can take an MP to the courts, but guess who controls the majority

Also, they are in the pockets of the local oligarchic mafia [1]: A few families that control the vast majority of the media AND the big construction companies AND the energy companies. They are also the ones that own big part of the shipping industry in Greece. For their sake, back in 2022 when the EU was considering to ban oil shipments from Russia, Greece vetoed that [2]

Oh, and just to be safe, the oligarch's tax exemptions are written in the constitution[4, article 107]

So, the people in the government have an almost complete immunity from everything, which makes them extremely arrogant.

If you add to that mix the total disregard of public services, even hospitals during the pandemic, you get a very beautiful-to-look-but-terrible-to-live-in failed state.

A state that even the EU can no longer turn a blind eye on[5]

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/159252/noor-one-vampire-ship...

[2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/23/how-greek-companies-and...

[3]: https://rsf.org/en/country/greece

[4]: https://www.hellenicparliament.gr/UserFiles/f3c70a23-7696-49...

[5]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240202IP...

This reminds of https://www.politico.eu/article/23-kookiest-meps-european-pa...

Goes to show how disengaged the voters are.

Quite difficult to be engaged with the selection of candidates. It’s really quite the struggle to find someone halfway decent these days

> struggle to find someone halfway decent these days

Would you want to deal with those voters as, effectively, your boss?

I don’t think the voters are the problem. I think the established parties keep growing in all the worst ways, and I don’t think any decent candidate would be able to be successful in this setting.

Would happily work with voters to figure out a path forward.

And why are the established parties doing this? Why is it in their interest to keep advancing terrible candidates?

I dunno. I kinda do think voters are the problem. Or at least a link in a chain of problems, the next link up being corporate controlled media.

I'd say barriers to entry - being an established party gives you more revenue, supporters to do campaigning, influence, etc.

One place that tries to do it better in my opinion is Switzerland. It has a lot of controls to reduce the ability of politicians to act poorly and limits the power of higher levels (if something can be resolved well locally, there's no need to have a higher-level regulation). A lot of process is thought through and in place to enable direct voting on issues. Additionally, it has many levels to get engaged, which lowers the barriers to entry, by being able to have an impact on a local level.

While your other examples are damning, I see nothing wrong with an elderly politician without social media profiles.

You'd be 100% correct if that was the case.

However, the problem is that she is not a politician and she has no public presense whatsoever.

She was chosen by her party, and eventually elected because her last name starts with A which put her near the top of the ballot paper.

Ouch, that's bad!

Almost nothing is. Local politicians fail upwards to the EU (at least in Germany) or some private job, if they fail at all. Most of the time, you can do what you want, and the voters don’t care.

"and the voters don’t care."

Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something?

Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.

That's precisely the thing. Whenever EU does something people don't like, they hate EU, not the council members who voted for it.

Because it is exactly the EU governance that lacks democratic representation, enabling unfavoured politicians to remain in significant power. You can only elect MEPs (via party lists) locally. The majority of legalislation is drafted by the technocratic European Commission and legislation is mostly passed through parlaiment unchanged from there.

There are many nationally disgraced politicians seating in the EP, EC or council. Only the ones in the EP were electible.

The people have correctly identified that a massive supranational unaccountable government is the problem, enabling corrupt people to keep ruling which undermines the core functioning of representative democracy.

In this specific case I believe that it's the EU Council that pushes for the current iteration of the law, which is formed of the head of states for each EU member.

So, even if they might not be explicitly elected to be in the EU governance, most of them have reached that spot through more or less democratic means. "More or less" because Prime Ministers are usually nominated not elected, but that's still as part of each country's democratic process.

Only direct elections are democratic. Everything else is at best semi-democratic.

The level of indirection is very important and you can only elect a very small part of the council. There are a lot democratic deficiencies.

It lately became en vogue to deny the problem completely and EU politics only got dumber from that.

Can you tell me what democratic deficiencies you see in this? Why is the process of having a prime minister/chancellor/etc as head of state fine in a national democratic process, but not on a european level?

If I see any issue with the way EU passes laws is with the terrible overhead of having three to four bodies that govern the whole process, from proposal to legislature, not necessarily with the way some participants get there.

> Can you tell me what democratic deficiencies you see in this? Why is the process of having a prime minister/chancellor/etc as head of state fine in a national democratic process, but not on a european level?

Well for one because people already vode with the head of state in mind when choosing the party. Even if they were aware of the EU politicians of said party (which is never part of the campaign materials) then they now have even more things to compromise on with a single vote.

> If I see any issue with the way EU passes laws is with the terrible overhead of having three to four bodies that govern the whole process, from proposal to legislature, not necessarily with the way some participants get there.

Actually that's the EU's saving grace. The more people are affected by new legislation the more difficult and slower it should be to push that legislation through. The EU should be slow moving but instead we are constantly in a situation like this where bad laws are not far from being passed.

> Even if they were aware of the EU politicians of said party (which is never part of the campaign materials) then they now have even more things to compromise on with a single vote.

Maybe I'm thinking too hard about the problem, but my impression is that the role of the head of states in the Council is to represent to the best of their abilities their own countries. In that, there's nothing to compromise on when a citizen votes. If you think that person is the best to head your state, it tracks that they can do that once in the Council's chambers. I understand this can sound naive, but meh, European politics is already pretty complicated, having yet another corps of people that needs to be voted democratically feels like it adds another snag in the existing democratic process. And personally I strongly believe that anything that can be done to make it easier for citizens to materialize their democratic options the better for their nation and the EU.

I think Europe as a whole (alongside many other nations, really) suffers from having a disenfranchised and apathetic majority that prefers not to participate in elections, because they don't find representation, because it's an inconvenience, because "what's the point?", etc. All of these paper cuts lead to the results we see today after the EU parliamentary elections ended: more and more support for divisive politics. A better democratic process would drown these voices in the vast majority of moderate people in my opinion, and that's what we should strive for.

Having semi-elected officials as Councilmembers is such a small inconvenience in front of that.

Anyway, sorry for the long(ish) rant. To sum it up, I think the solution to assholes representing their countries in the EU Council is not yet another democratic process, but making it easier for everyone to cast their vote, so extreme options are less likely to crop up.

How is voting different from other federal states? EP frequently alters EC proposals. Council consists of heads of state, commission is appointed by council and parliament, and the parliament is directly elected.

Not terribly different from how prime ministers ate appointed.

Yes, this is called a representative democracy. The fix is to vote for representatives who represent your values. Or run yourself.

There are many different types and implementations of representative democracy. And the supranational technocracy-driven particracy of the EU is only representative in name. It is on the oligarchic end of the democracy-oligarchy spectrum.

Representative in what way? 700 MEPs for about 450M people means each one has 640k "constituents". Those "constituents" are really a fraction each person all smeared about. Lastly if they were actual people and an MEP were to hold a consultation to get their views it gives each person less than 1 minute each year assuming the MEP was available 24/7/365.

Well if they're modeling if after what we have in the US they pretty much nailed it. 435 representatives for 330M people or around 758k constituents per rep.

By voting for the members of parliament, and the parliament then deciding everything else... Ideally things should work out as the people want it. Otherwise it would mean that democracy just doesn't work...

Supranational/federalist "representative" particracy does not work.

Representative democracy works better with increased locality, where policy and politicians are directly beholden to constituents.

> There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot.

That really depends on your point of comparison. Compared to their 22% high in February, they lost a lot with 16% actual votes (more than 25% down). 84% voted something else.

https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/europawahl-2024-sonnt...

How many people did actually bother to vote in Germany?

Here in France, the "extremists" got a bit over 30% of votes. But turnout was only 51%.

According to [0] average turnout is 51%. Some countries have very high numbers (IIRC voting is mandatory in Belgium?), others ridiculously low. This, to me, means pretty much that "voters don't care".

[0] https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/turnout/

> This, to me, means pretty much that "voters don't care".

This is simplistic. Some have simply lost confidence in their representatives and/or cannot find a decent candidate.

Would be interesting if voter turnout somehow had an effect on the government. For example if the required consensus for new laws would be scaled by the turnout - e.g. for if there is only 51% turnout then any laws that need a majority consensus would need almost all politicians to agree. Could provide interesting incentives for politicians to care about voter engagement and political education.

> How many people did actually bother to vote in Germany?

64.78%, or over 40 million in absolute terms.

> How many people did actually bother to vote in Germany?

People (including me) doesn't want to bother with voting when the whole thing is a farce - it's beyond my understanding why would someone be enticed to vote for incompetent politicians who get parachuted into EU parliament to earn hefty wage - very often as a reward for outrageous behavior, there are multiple examples of this, influencer from Cyprus, that polish MP who got expelled from Poland's parliament for outrageous behavior - surprise surprise - he got comfy EP seat. Absolutely disgusting.

> People (including me) doesn't want to bother with voting when the whole thing is a farce

This is an incredibly juvenile post-rationalisation for laziness.

I find a better action than not voting is to vote for the smallest most extremist fracton you can find even if you don't agree with most of their policies. Low voter turnout doesn't make headlines, the "bad" parties gaining traction does.

> Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU?

Like the parties (again, here in Germany, don’t know enough about other countries) that manage to be even more corrupt? That actually supports my point. The biggest winners here were the anti-EU-pro-Russia AfD and the pro-EU CDU both with the biggest corruption scandals in recent years, and the CDU is even the party that sent the horror that is EU commission president von der Leyen.

> Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU?

Is the EU really a benefit to the people? Or is it a shit pool full of scum bags providing quite some damage to societies?

All things considered I think that’s a strong yes. Open borders, free trade, technological collaboration, and shared health, industry and consumer regulations help accelerate economic development. Can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Economic development? Which countries?

Erm, all of european states are quite better off, than their neighbors?

First two have been utter disasters however, and are directly affecting people on a daily basis now. Here in Scandinavia it’s coming to a head but it’s a similar story further south, in Germany in particular.

Oh look a brexiteer brain. What exactly is the problem with reedom of movement and trade for EU citizens?

Immigration, which I assume is what you’re hinting at, has nothing to do with open borders between EU states.

Unchecked cheap labor from eastern european countries has had a dramatic effect. That's directly related. But illegal immigration also does because the moment you get in to one lax EU country with open borders to another, your movement is a lot easier.

I live this reality and have family in law enforcement. You might not want to believe it but it's absolutely the truth on the ground. We need to control our borders much more strictly.

At least for Germany that situation is not imposed by the EU but is entirely due to the choices of the local politicians.

Pretty much all the environmental protection legislation we have in Ireland came from the EU. So yes, a benefit

On the otherhand, Ireland's corporate-friendly laws are a negative for other EU countries.

> Is the EU really a benefit to the people

Obviously, yes.

> Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU?

That is one of the issues, no EU election would have changed what the commission is doing at all.

Most people probably don't even know the EU policies of the candidates they are voting for and are just going by national party lines. Why nationalist parties are winning when the current and previous governments have been going full steam ahead in the other direction while ignoring the entirely valid concerns of the populance should surprise no one.

And, on the flip side of the coin: once you are sufficiently disliked, almost anything can be taken as the trigger point for a scandal.

But when was the last time a "scandal" has resulted in actual negative outcomes for a politician?

Those not yet brain washed voters do actually care.

But then there are the „Wahlhelfer“ who openly proud themselves in Twitter to invalidate votes for parties they disagree with.

This is democracy?

Sources?

Same in Spain.

Absolutely. It only works because they claim it's for the protection of children.

They ride the wave and find always some excuse. It was fighting the terrorists until a few years ago, now it's children again. Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights.

> Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights.

Unlikely—this would actually benefit people.

Chat control would benefit people, if they say it's for climate or lbqtg++ protection?

But it won't benefit if they say it's to fight the terror or protect the children?

If you really think that spying is OK, if they have "good enough" excuse, no wonder we get all this shit enacted.

Ahh, I misunderstood. No, I don't see climate or lgbtq+ concerns being used in this manner.

Which is a very interesting asymmetry, if we're stipulating that these are merely excuses. It implies that "think of the gays" will lose you more votes than it gains, compared to "think of the children". Terrorists and children are apparently the optimally intersectional bogeymen and helpless wards respectively.

Well, people wanted even more alt-right representation in parliament, MEP support for the entire package of policy "Chat Control" is part of is now higher than ever. There is a lot more "for the children" policy coming up.

This isn't necessarily true: the Identity and Democracy faction is explicitly pro-privacy, digital rights and against Chat Control.

- https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site)

- https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview)

- https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site)

The ID group is opposed to EU-wide surveillance measures, and promises to protecting individual privacy and national sovereignty.

FYI, 84% of ID has voted pro chat-control in 2021.

https://mepwatch.eu/9/vote.html?v=134463&eugroup=ID

I stand corrected. Guess all that posturing about privacy was all empty election promises then.

Seems like only the Greens, the left and within ID the AFD voted against.

Yeah, although really no-one of the 'regular people' (well, I have even educated programmer friends saying it's good to catch criminals) care/know (they glaze over when I talk about 'another tech blah') about this, they did vote the people in who like this kind of stuff (and probably are somewhere making $ with it).

It's their job and goal in life to hurt the population

They can literally just sit there and it would be better…

They have to justify their existence and maximize growth and headcount. In this case I’m not sure if it’s the politicians themselves as much to blame as the EU apparatchiks and lobbyists

More control is the objective.

The populace is clueless and/or ignorant, and Brussels has a well earned reputation for being a popular toxic waste dump for unpopular politicians. To give some examples from Germany, we dumped Günther Oettinger and Ursula von der Leyen there in the last two elections, and this year our far-right party managed to place a suspected traitor on the top of their list.

Thanks for that Germany.

Won't you take her back and make her Minister for Castles or something,

One of its champions, Ursula von der Leyen, is pretty popular. One of the main reasons for that is that people don't understand what she is saying.

Popular or infamous? Never heard the nickname Zensursula?

I mean, if you asked many people "is it ok if the government can read some of your chat messages in exchange for catching a bunch of child pornographers," this will be a very popular "yes" vote. People are generally very willing to trade some rights and freedoms for safety. Or don't realize the trade-off they're making.

We need to define "politicians" first. I can see your point if "politician career" means "being repeatedly elected" (even though other people pointed out what are the problems in this case). But the EU Commission isn't elected. These people are appointed by some fucked up complicated process. They definitely seem to have pretty good careers, but what are these careers — I wish I knew.