Europeans are so retarded that Merkel started an open borders policy for Germany 3 months after the Bataclan attack because she accidentally made a Palestinian girl cry on live TV and it embarrassed Merkel.
The entire Western continent is the equivalent of countries run by humanities majors who never had to live in reality. Only reasonable ones are Bulgarians, Hungarians, Polish, in that area. Albanians are also somehow gaining intelligence.
Neoliberalism in a nutshell. Even Conservatives are captured by it without realising it simply because they don't view themselves as "liberals". Emotions spike, media tries to capitalise on said spike for views/money, they keep the spike high for as long as possible, this becomes "important" to government.
What doesn't help is how
close government buildings are to universities, where students with too much free time can walk from their campus to their government in the hundreds if not thousands, protest, and give the impression of this sentiment being nationwide and organic.
Democracies simply cannot handle trying to appease millions when said millions are easily swayed more by osmosis and vague half-understandings of the subject they feel "strongly" about. When the most emotion-driven (the young) will actually act on this, you get governments that feel schizophrenic.
There's some correlation between the physical size of a country, the number of people within, and the concentration of universities—the distance between the capital building and the nearest university is also a factor. All of Berlin's universities are within an hour drive of the Reichstag and have a combined total of 100k+ students both domestic and international who can just throw together a protest. There's something similar in the UK and France. Most government officials are most strongly affected by voices they hear in the capital with decreasing levels of importance depending on distance, which is bizarre given the internet is now a thing. They'll prioritise student voices over a more median-representative voice they hear over the news for the most part, with more candid/honest voices from people online having the least importance.
University students act almost like radiation. The more concentrated in the capital, the more rapid that ideological cancer grows.
Smaller countries with greater population density tend to be better representative due to the proximity of "normal people" to the government itself. Israel/Luxembourg/Liechtenstein/Denmark are probably more faithful to what its people want from its government than the likes of Germany following this logic. Large countries, smaller density, high population probably have to get creative. Pragmatically you ignore the people and just do what you got elected for and abide by ideological principles. Trying to "react" to short-term bursts of emotion from students is a fool's endeavour.
