Brexit: Leaving the EU with the idea of cherry-picking
As the vote for or against a brexit is getting closer I really start wondering why anyone would vote for an exit of the EU. I understand that many people are not always happy or agree with the decisions and actions the EU makes, but then there are also many advantages the EU grants you.
So who actually favours a brexit? Mainly its right-wing politics, who want to make their country great again. To them this is especially achieved by keeping immigrants out of their country. Unfortunately, this right-wing trend is rising in all parts of the world and is not just a specific phenomenon happening in the UK right now. Scaring examples for this are the increased votes for the AfD in Germany ,rising right-wing parties in Denmark, Sweden or Finland, Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party running for the presidential election and the consistently upcoming debate of whether a country should stay within the EU or not.
According to the Washington Post, there is nothing more dangerous as unmet expectations, which were found out to be a big factor when it comes to explaining the rise of the right-wing extremism in the 1930s. Economists state that it would not be a question of how fast you were moving toward where you thought you’d be, but rather how far you were from it. Unfortunately ,most countries now are doing economically even worse than during the Great Depression, which can be seen in the charts below.
Thus people are poorer than they expected to be. Immigrants and other burdens, seemingly such as the EU, do not seem bearable creating a nationalistic increase. With this idea of nationalism the U.K. Independence Party wants to leave the EU “in hopes of coming to terms on a new free trade pact with the now-27-nation EU that wouldn’t require them to follow Brussels’ diktats on, say, how strong vacuum cleaners are allowed to be, or, more saliently, how many immigrants they have to accept from the rest of Europe (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/31/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-that-explains-the-rise-of-far-right-politicians-everywhere/).”
In other words they are asking for all the benefits of the EU membership without the “bad parts”. I think this “cherry-picking” is really naïve and very unlikely to be turned into reality. If it were, then everybody would want this and the EU would not be able to survive. As Brussels probably won’t play along to their fantasies, the UK would probably have to continue to pay into the EU budget, adhering to EU regulations and allow free movement of the people to have market access even if they are no longer in the EU eventually leaving them poorer off then before. In the end we can only wait for their decision and hope they really thought their vote through.
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