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It seems to me that representative democracy is quite capable of producing outcomes that the populace does not actually want.
The city of Minneapolis held a referendum on whether to abolish its police force. The referendum lost, unequivocally. Not even remotely a possibility of passing.
The same populace that voted overwhelmingly against a referendum to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department, elected a city council that is overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department. This same populace also voted, in the same election, to reduce the powers of that city council and vest those powers in the office of the mayor, whose position on police abolition could be described as "are you fucking serious?", instead.
Despite anti-policing sentiment clearly not being a position that can win democratically, the city is nevertheless governed by an anti-police city council, and is still recovering from anti-policing riots that dealt over half a billion dollars in damages to homes and businesses.
I have no trouble believing that Europe could elect politicians who proceed to pass policies that would never win as referendums, or that devastating riots could emerge from a minority sentiment.
Yes, but mass immigration has been a problem for at least a decade now in Europe. By this point, European populations have had plenty of time to hold politicians' feet to the fire electorally and ensure that they actually curb immigration.
No European electorate has ever voted for mass immigration.
European powerbrokers have systematically lied and deceived their populations about the nature and scale of immigration - for example, the wave of post-Soviet states joining the EU in 2003 with "guarantees" that it wouldn't disrupt local labour markets - which it of course did.
All polling, in all EU nations, in every decade going back to the 1950s (Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech polled at around 75% popular agreement when he made it), has consistently shown a clear rejection of more immigration - even Germany in 2015, at the height of pro-refugee mania, had a consistent majority polled saying the country could not handle the influx of people and that it would harm the country in the long-term.
Establishment parties ranging from Macron's centrist LREM/Renaissance all the way to Meloni's "neo-fascist" FdI consistently make reducing the most undesirable forms of immigration a centre-point of their political campaigning, only to drop it the moment they enter elected office.
Even when elected leaders actually decide to push through popular anti-immigration reform, they instantly falter before supra-sovereign EU institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, which they could of course easily contest or ignore, like Poland and Hungary did without issue, but mysteriously always choose to give up without a fight.
The main thing holding European electorates back from going all-in on anti-immigration politics is our bourgeois chauvinism against the extremely prole-coded far-right, which is loathed and despised less because of their specific politics, but because they represent and proudly adhere to the trashy, unsophisticated, non-college educated Kevins of European working class society. Most bourgeois/college-educated Europeans would probably literally rather have more immigration which they increasingly openly hate than be ruled by a segment of European society they consider irredeemably beneath them.
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Has anyone in the West ever actually voted for mass immigration? It seems instead like no population ever wants mass immigration, but whoever they vote for it happens anyway.
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Which British party would you have voted for in the 2019 general election, in order to achieve this goal?
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