Word: populist
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...there are signs that a populist, anti-copyright movement may be gaining strength. Earlier this month, Sweden voted a member of the Pirate Party, which campaigned on an anti-copyright platform, to the European Parliament. The party, which won 7.13% of the vote, is named after Swedish file sharing website Pirate Bay. Earlier this year, a Swedish court sentenced four of the Bay founders to a year in prison each and a fine of approximately $3.6 million for "assisting in making copyright content available." There is no formal connection between Bay and the Pirate Party but there is little hiding...
...Adopting the style of a populist demagogue, Ahmadinejad hasn't allowed facts to spoil a good argument. In public appearances, for example, he has repeatedly claimed that Iran's inflation rate is 15%, whereas the country's Central Bank puts it at 25%. He insists, against the evidence, that unemployment and the country's disparity in wealth are both on the decline, and he casts himself as an Iranian Robin Hood, depicted on banners as bowing to poor old farmers and deprived children. And in a neat trick for an incumbent, he styles himself as an insurgent outsider: "For four...
...trying to unseat Ahmadinejad." There are also plenty of people who want the current President to stay, and Ahmadinejad has styled himself as the candidate of change itself, the anticorruption revolutionary the Islamic republic needs for its revival. But while an Ahmadinejad victory would mean more of the same populist economics and antagonism toward a "hostile" U.S., a Mousavi upset could herald the revival of reformist politics in Iran. (See pictures of the long shadow of Ayatullah Khomeini...
...extent to which the country's lower classes feel the revolution's economic promises have been fulfilled. If they still are not satisfied, a theocratic democracy that gives one vote to every one of its 70 million citizens - Supreme Leader, manual worker and democracy activist - may see a populist government like Ahmadinejad's rewarded at the polling booths...
Indeed, voters in Utrecht seem more concerned by the antics of Dutch anti-Muslim populist Geert Wilders than they are with, say, the E.U.'s plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Wilders wants to abolish the European Parliament altogether. "Every voter who wants to signal that the European Union is good for nothing in its current form can do so by voting for Geert Wilders," he said. His PVV party, like other political outliers, is expected to benefit from mainstream voter apathy. The Trotskyite anti-capitalist movement of Olivier Besancenot could muster 10% of France...