The push for authoritarianism seems to come purely from above. My intuition, from personal anecdotes, is that after 30 years of widening gap between the haves and the have nots, the haves are increasingly terrified buy their own populations.
I agree there's ulterior motives too though.
Apologies if it isn't, but since this is a new account only writing anti-EU comments so far, seems like troll army astro turfing. (I think it's worth calling that out, since we don't need HN poisoned by that stuff.)
Porn is not such a big deal but social media flooded by Russian/Chinese/American propaganda is destabilizing our societies. The least we can do is try to keep our youth from losing their minds over it.
People do not realise how dangerous the situation is. We are already in the kinetic phase of a world war with conflicts erupting everywhere, any major financial problem will trigger a chain reaction.
Just recently:
- A lot of people don't want to hear this but Trump just wiped the floor with Ursula with the new trade deal. It will collapse the EU economies even more.
- At few days earlier China humiliated the EU just by packing the official delegation in a bus with nobody to welcome them.
- And of course the EU inherited the Ukraine situation and is loosing a major war.
Once a major power find itself in this situation it get challenged from the inside. Individual countries will be tempted to elect Euro skeptic leaders and breakaway from the sinking ship by making deals with Russia, the US or China to save themselves.
The initial idea and force of the EU was "stronger together". But if a succession of strategic moves by its leadership make you weaker then the deal is off.
Europe is going to have to swallow (probably choke) on the pill that the avg US worker works four hundred more hours a year than their German counterparts. Two hundred more than the average Frenchman.
If the EU is going to boost defense spending to cover a gap in the US funding of staving off the EU's bad neighbor, there is going to be pain. Either more working hours, less social programs, higher taxes, or some combination.
They'll probably reach for more draconian regulations to squeeze as much money from industry as possible, and likely kill it in the process. Then they will complain that they are beholden to foreign companies.