hot take: all those "the democrats would be right-wing in europe" takes (or pretty much anything else that tries to compare politicians or parties in one country against another) seem to imply that (1) political positions are easily transferable between countries with different rules and traditions of government, (2) that there is some sort of "center" of politics in each country that consists of specific positions, and that's just wrong, imo

a "centrist", in my view, is someone who, if put in power, would either change nothing or do things in a way that doesn't impact the balance of power between different groups, as opposed to someone on the left, who wants to elevate marginalized groups and act against current inequalities and hierarchies of power, or on the right, who believes the current hierarchies of power should be actively protected

it's a relative movement, not an absolute position, and comparing things between different countries always has to take into account the two countries' political cultures

politicians and people in a country that lived through a dictatorship and wants to avoid that really hard (like germany) or one that started off with a rebellion against centralized power (like the u.s. or france) would have a different attitude towards different laws than one that didn't have a strong democratic culture (like turkey) or a more mixed attitude towards its authoritarian past (like a lot of post-soviet countries)

the u.s., for instance, would be absolutely shocked at the idea of having its own armed forces serve as police, imagining it as something out of a dystopia, and yet in some countries, the existence of the gendarmerie is seen as absolutely normal

similarly, folks in europe imagine that the lack of universal healthcare in the u.s. was some sort of century-old machination, whereas in reality the reason for that is that up until the 1980s most people there didn't need to care about healthcare, and employers provided people and their families with comprehensive health plans as a bonus (i've been told that the labor unions were strongly in favor of that as well), and it's only in the more recent atmosphere of political inaction + weakening of unions + accelerating corporate greed that this started being a problem (the idea of comprehensive healthcare reform was even proposed by bill clinton in 1993, but failed to progress due to heavy criticism and government gridlock)

let's be honest: if you put the u.s. democrats into the british parliament, or the german social democrats into the american congress, what you'd get in reality is a bunch of people who would embarrass themselves by proposing laws that come across even to sympathetic voters as dystopian, pointless, poorly-thought-out or multiple at the same time