Ishaan Tharoor writes: The escalating crisis between Turkey and the Netherlands is a startling example of how this year’s crucial election campaigns can flare into international incidents.
The Dutch go to the polls this Wednesday for a parliamentary election seen as a bellwether for Europe’s political future, and all eyes are focused on far-right, Euroskeptic, anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders. Meanwhile, Turkey will hold a referendum next month on constitutional revisions that would scrap the country’s parliamentary system in favor of an executive presidency under the powerful President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In their electoral bids, Erdogan and Wilders have found useful bogeymen in one another’s nations.
“The explanation for the Dutch-Turkish ‘crisis’ this weekend is pretty straightforward,” wrote Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde in a message to Today’s WorldView. “Both countries are currently engulfed in electoral campaigns that are dominated by authoritarian nativism.” [Continue reading…]
For our nation it should be easy to understand what it is all about. Imagine that our nation has laws which allow double citizenship and allow such US citizens to vote not only in our elections but in the elections of their other citizenship. Now imagine that the country of their second citizenship wants to change its constitution by popular votes and that a diplomat of that country comes to US cities to hold political rallies to make the attendants vote for those constitutional changes. My bet: the law of dual citizenship would disappear in Congress before that diplomat’s plane even lands in the USA.