And then treats them like trash. He constantly misgenders one of them and is actively supporting a government that is making them have to flee the country. What a wonderful dad…

Understandable, it’s all a matter of perspective. There’s no ideal way of democracy and any way has it’s pros and cons. I’d say that overall my gripe is a somewhat minor one but it does lead to big issues sometimes, especially during election times because the biggest party gets first dibs on creating the government. More fragmentation on your side of the political spectrum (left vs. right) can therefore lead to splintering of the votes and losing out on being the biggest.

This is more or less what happened last time. The leftist parties tried to prevent it by joining forces shortly before the election but the amount of leftist parties we have still meant that votes were somewhat splintered; that is (among other factors) how we ended up with another right-wing government after people clearly seemed to be done with over 10 years of right-wing Rutte politics.

I’d love to be able to vote for some fringe leftist party knowing I’ll not waste my vote

But in a way it will. Many of these fringe parties never have a chance to make it into the government and will forever be in the opposition, meaning their impact isn’t very big. The PVV started off like this as well and their leader, Geert Wilders, has only ever wanted to be the person shouting at stuff from the opposition side of the fence. Even now, when he has the biggest party, they had to come up with some wicked solution where he’s not the PM and not in the government itself. Instead, it’s a neutral PM with some ministers and everyone else is in the opposition and constantly criticising their own “government”. It’s ridiculous and so far they haven’t gotten much done.

In my opinion, a cutoff of 5% is a bit high but I also think that parties should have more than 1 seat to even make it into the chamber, otherwise it’ll turn into a mess real quick.

Just make sure not to take it too far if you do proportional voting. We have a system in the Netherlands that works like that but the result is that we now also have about 30 parties running for government, most of them being fairly pointless. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than the US shenanigans but you can also go too far.

As a Dutch person we’d happily welcome the more sensible Americans over here 🙂. I can’t guarantee our government wouldn’t try to stop a mass migration wave given their anti-immigrant policies though.

It’s funny, my partner and I were actually talking about moving to the US for a while to spend more time with my American in-laws but I think that’ll be out of the window for the next four years.

It depends on the country you’re in I guess but I would say that generally speaking the EU right wing parties are a bit less extreme than Trump appears to be going to be this time around. I don’t know of any EU countries where they are planning to get rid of all immigrants among other things. Tbh, the person you can compare Trump to most is Hitler. And he has compared himself to Hitler too, which makes it even more crazy.