Populist politicians are too late with their nationalist messages.
byLeonid Bershidsky
12/9/2017
Yet another Eastern European country is about to get a populist, anti-immigration, euroskeptic government: Billionaire Andrej Babis’s ANO party enjoys a wide poll lead ahead of the October parliamentary election in the Czech Republic. The central European country would join Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. If that sounds ominous, there is at least one bulwark against extremism in the region: Western European capital.
Indeed, Western investment plays such an important role in economies of all these countries that nationalist politicians make their countries look more like truculent colonies than partners in a grand integration project.
In a recent paper, Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman bluntly call Eastern European nations “foreign-owned countries.”
Read more at https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-12/how-western-capital-colonized-eastern-europe
Also read La Germanisation de l’ Europe
