For over three years, European institutions have worked hard to develop and negotiate a groundbreaking EU supply chain law, with the aim of preventing and addressing human rights and environmental harm throughout companies’ supply chains. In mid-December, many celebrated the hard-reached agreement between the EU Council and Parliament on a draft law, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.
But now, just before getting the law across the finish line, it risks being tripped up by a German government coalition partner, the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei, or Free Democratic Party).
[Edit typo.]
Ah… Good old FDP doing FDP things where the holy economy is worth more than the lives of countless people and animals in pursuit of profits. Even seemingly going so far to potentially ruin the global ecosystem for everyone because earning lots of money wasn’t enough and they wanted to earn all the money.
Fortunately by the looks of it they won’t get voted back into a position of power again. Unfortunately however it looks like a different but equally bad (and worse) party will more than replace them.
Who even votes for the FDP? Is it the FinTech bros? Or is it small business owners?
The 1%, of course, and people who think they are or will belong to the 1% one day, but mostly it’s just idiots who fall for their flashy campaigns, which are typically targeting first time voters.
It’s a combination really, naive first time voters that have not experienced what they do or got blinded by their promises. Also mostly people who think that are wealthy enough to profit from voting for them but really are not. Then there are probably a few of the big business owners who actually profit from them.
Realistically, if you look at the FDP agenda, it’s a upper 1% of wealth party that manages to get people that will be worse off with them in the government to vote for them.
They will come back. They have been playing this game for a long time already and know exactly what they are doing. Whenever they manage to get into power they’ll ruthlessly abuse it to gain maximum benefits for their benefactors, no matter the (political) costs for themselves as a party. Afterwards, they lay low for a bit until people forget (most voters have a short memory), and lure the next generation of stupid first-time voters to vote for them via a flashy campaign. Then the cycle repeats itself.
That cycle is real indeed. Though I am not quite sure if it’s stupid first time voters or just naive people thinking that they are meant when they mention the economy doing good with them. In either case, I have seen that cycle in action too and I also don’t get why a party for the top 1% gets more than 5% of votes.
They are specifically targeting young people in their campaigns. Anyone who is old enough to have lived through one such cycle needs to be incredibly naive in order to fall for them again.
It is also absurd, that this is against the interest of the economy and over the past two years the FDP government has taken more and more of a position hostile to the economy as a whole.
We need “reshoring” of industries. In the past the EU managed to leverage its market powers to create standards, that were adopted globally as a result. Both things are giving companies a global advantage as early adopters and by allowing to get parts of the supply chain back into Europe, that before they had offshored because of a pure cost competition.
The whole thing will help the European economy in the long run. Also we now see with the German car industry and fossil fuel dependance what happens if regulatory frameworks are not improved and companies are not demanded to improve. They’ll get chewn out by global competition.
On the national level they are currently also harming the economy in Germany by upholding austerity measures instead of investing into the countries infrastructure. But fucking over the poor people, and helping the fascists to rise into power on this way is more appealing than helping the economy and technological development.
The Economy™ the FDP is helping are a bunch of dodgy finance jugglers and tax dodgers who don’t give a flying shit about long term prospects, as long as the figures for the next quarter make the line go up. Short term profits on The financial markets™ is all that counts for neoliberal scum like the FDP.
Damn, this is starting to sound a lot like the Tories
Economically, they are quite similar. But the FDP largely lacks the moral bigotry typically found in conservatives.