Hello everyone,
so I’m not actually from New Zealand, but from Europe and I’m currently very worried about the rising popularity of facism and alt-right politics in my country and europe in general. I’m very scared of experiencing physical violence and I’m now very seriously considering moving to another country before the facist parties are elected into power. One of the countries I’m considering is New Zealand, because there wouldn’t be that big of a language barrier and also because I haven’t heard of a lot of problems with facism in New Zealand. So I wanted to ask you if my judgement is correct and what the political situation regarding the alt-right is like in New Zealand.
Thank you for reading. I really appreciate your help :)
There are a couple of hard right parties right now but they don’t have enough voted to overcome the threshold. They do however have influence to pull National and Act to the right.
Just on this, it’s extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.
Several major parties this election have list candidates who’d not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It’s not as if we haven’t had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren’t as stupid as some people like to think.
If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who’d simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.
Sure why not? Anybody can join any party and then work to lobby to change the policies the party supports. That’s how democracy works.