Can you imagine that I took no single image in three days? And still, I had enormous stress. Visiting relatives, shopping, planning kitchens, finding out if a new door between two rooms in the new apartment will leave us enough wall space for our books, and when I managed to squeeze out some time for programming this afternoon, I undid it all in the evening, when I mistakenly deleted it all again. Oh dear 🙂
But I wanted to answer Thomas’ comment to “1453 - Laugh And Grin Blues”. He wrote
If I got it right, then the election results in Vienna are absolutely devastating, with more than a quarter of the votes going to the far-rights ☹️ Equally bad to the election results here in Sweden.Yes and no. The Social Democrats are in a very comfortable position now. A coalition of all the others, which would have a majority, is impossible, because although Conservatives and Greens probably could work together, and although the same could be said of Conservatives and populist / extreme Right FPÖ, it is nothing but unthinkable that Greens and FPÖ would ever join forces. The pariah FPÖ is biggest of the three, almost double the size of the two others, and each of the two smaller parties, Conservatives and Greens, is eager to participate in government, and each of them alone would suffice for a nice majority.
Now everybody hopes that the Social Democrats have the guts to go into a coalition with the left, progressive Greens, which of course would endanger their national coalition with the Conservatives. On the other hand, Red/Green seems like the only chance for people to actually see a change. I recently read (in some FPÖ ad, but it’s true nevertheless) something like “The specific of Austrian democracy is, that - regardless of what people vote - they always get a coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives”.
I think that many people who voted far right, actually voted for a change. Admittedly, Red/Green would not be the change that most of them voted for, but then, the overwhelming majority did NOT vote far right, so why compromise?
I think it’s very similar to the situation in the US. Most people are simply disgusted with politics. They did not vote for Obama, they voted against Bush. Now that they have the Democrats and the Democrats fail to keep their promises, they will vote Republican again. I dare say most of them don’t approve of war, torture and totalitarianism, most are against tax presents for the rich, but they will still vote for the party that brought them all that only a few years ago. Democracy is a strange beast.
The Image of the Day is from little over a year ago. It was one of those rare days when I use my Sigma 150/2.8 Macro on the Streets.
The Song of the Day is “Democracy”, originally from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 album “The Future”. I bought it today in one download together with “Death Of A Ladies Man” and “Recent Songs”. YouTube has quite some versions of the song, but of course I can’t help but link to the one from the recent “Live In London” album.