❌An oversized table is one of the few non-lethal ways politicians can quickly assert their authority on the global stage.

What are world leaders really saying with their choice of furniture?

Thread 🧵👇
telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/…
🇷🇺🇫🇷On Monday, while eastern Europe continued to teeter on the edge of full-blown war, Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron met for crisis talks at the Kremlin.

You may have seen the photographs. They’re all in landscape, necessarily
There, at one end of a white conference table, sat the Russian president: hunched, obstinate and perhaps a little bored.

Meanwhile, approximately 43 miles away, across a barren Siberian tundra of glass, flowers and unspoken resentment, was his French counterpart
Putin almost never gives speeches in English. The Kremlin often complains that the Western world misunderstands it.

♟️Yet with one piece of furniture they told us all we needed to know about relations between Russia and Nato
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, what about a dining table the size of the Ever Given?

Incalculable.
Many jokes have been made about Putin’s overcompensatory fitment already.

➡️Badminton rackets, cats, megaphones and Alan Partridge have been photoshopped in

➡️One person called it the “mother-in-law” table
✍️“Table Space” actually has its own page on tvtropes.

“Often just a visual gag,” the entry reads, “in more serious uses the distance between the two is used to illustrate the emotional distance between them, especially if this is a result of their opulent but hollow lifestyle”
↔️Even if he didn’t necessarily read it on tvtropes, Putin knows about Table Space.

Bear in mind that this is a man who allegedly keeps his international guests waiting for as much time as he feels he wants to inflict on them, so it’s likely he’s aware of table-based froideur
There is a time and a place for soft power, but hard, high-gloss, elegant maple, triple-arched, 14-seater power is even more effective.

Read the full story 👇
telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/…

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