At the #presidentielles2022 debate last night Marine Le Pen showed a print-out of an old tweet.
My team at @article7news have been looking into Rassamblement National officials' tweets over the last few years...
There's a lot in there she wouldn't want us to see 🧵
2/ Let's start with ones on Ukraine. Here's Jean-Michael Cadenas, calling #Euromaidan a coup - on 24 February, as Russian paratroopers were trying to seize Hostomel airport
3/ And here is Thierry Mariani, an MEP from the RN, with the same Kremlin line
4/ They've held this position for a long time. Here's Andréa Kotarac, complaining that the Trump Administration (!) is too pro-Ukrainian and arming Ukraine too much
5/ It's not only Putin they like. Here's Jean-Paul Garraud, another MEP grateful that Marine Le Pen got Viktor Orbán's blessing.
6/ And who does Orbán not like, that's right, George Soros. Here's MEP Gilles Lebreton, cooking up a conspiracy with Soros, the UN (ONU in French) and *checks notes* Time magazine involving "American soft power agents"
8/ His colleague Catherine Griset can't get over the "globalist agenda" of the UN and NGOs. I suppose we should concede the point about the UN, whose purpose is to promote peace across the globe...
9/ Where media is controlled by "globalist billionaires, patrons of the majority of Western states", the @WHO and Council of Europe (funded by Gates and Soros of course). So says our friend Cadenas
10/ If "globalist billionaires" isn't a codeword, howe about "The metropolises are peopled by 'nomad' populations". No we haven't heard that kind of language before, certainly not from the European far right
11/11 Le Pen herself has shown a lot of campaign discipline but the true face of Rassamblement National shows through, and thanks to @article7news's semantic search technology, we've been able to unearth it extremely fast. Follow @article7news for much more.
12 We've found more, this time about RN officials' support for the banned extreme-right Géneration Identitaire (@julie_renbe's written a brilliant book about them). The organisation was banned for incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence. How did RN people react? 🧵
13 Here's a member of the RN National Bureau, saying he endorses Generation Identitaire and he'll never be part of the anti-racist "Generation Adama"
14 MEP Helen Laporte saying that if GI were banned, it would be impossible to criticise immigration. Funnily enough their proscription hasn't stopped her leader from running an anti-immigration presidential campaign.
15 Gauthier Bouchet, complaining about the sentences for GI members convicted of impersonating police officers on the Franco-Italian border in order to scare off immigrants
16 If we were in revolutionary times, Philippe Eymery, tells us, the government would have resorted to guillotine. Which is ironic, since it is Le Pen herself who suggested putting the death penalty to a referendum
17 Scratch the surface of the RN's campaign and you find the old extreme right, doing what it's always done. ENDS
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Why does the US organise a missile wall for Israel, but not Ukraine?
And not just the US — France, and Arab states were also involved.
🧵
2/ Obama ran his foreign policy policy on the principle: “don’t do stupid stuff”.
Biden’s is “don’t allow stupid stuff to get out of hand”
3/ Or in the jargon, “escalation management”. This is a cold, strategic world view that doesn’t take morality or values into account - that’s a weakness in my view, but not what I’m getting into here.
2/ Fico's SMER party topped the poll in the weekend's elections in Slovakia, giving him the first choice to form a government
3/He ran on an aggressively pro-Russian, anti-NATO and fiscally irresponsible campaign promising to cut off aid to Ukraine and spend money Slovakia doesn't have (Slovakia is in the Eurozone)
Why has Britain been in decline in the last few years. This graph provides a clue. 🧵
2/ Everyone knows Britain has a two-party majoritarian system. The aim is to bring together about 40% of the vote and win more than your opponents in enough constituencies to govern.
3/ These Tory/Labour switchers are political gold. Identify them, persuade them, and you can win elections with relatively small amounts of the vote while your opponents pile up huge majorities voting for ridiculous caricatures in, say Islington North or Somerset and Froome
Orbán's Hungary has vetoed the latest EU aid to Ukraine €18 billion.
What can be done about it? Thread.
2/ Hungary already has a procedure against it, under Article 7 of the EU treaties, for violating the EU's founding values, including democracy and the rule of law
3/The process is stalled because the PiS govt in Poland, also in the dock for rule of law violations, is backing Orbán.
.@UKSupremeCourt rules the Scottish Parliament doesn’t have the power to hold an advisory referendum on Scottish independence.
I’m preparing a paper for @MartensCentre on Brexit and Scotland that addresses it, here is a thread on its political implications
1/
2/ The court didn’t buy the argument that only the purely legal effect of the referendum should be considered in applying its judgement. It argued that political effects mattered too.
3/ Since this was about legislation proposed by an SNP government that wants independence, the court was not convinced by pretence that it was only a glorified opinion poll.
It upheld one of the central legal principles of British law: “don’t take the piss”
Setting aside Brexit, the Truss govt has an excellent* policy agenda including increased defence spending, increased immigration, enterprise zones , even hints of planning reform. Why did it all go wrong so fast?🧵
*excellent = things I’ve called for in my @conhome columns, ofc
2/ Labour supporters say it went wrong because it lowered taxes on the rich; others promote bizarre conspiracy theories about hedge fund manager tory donors engineering a run on the pound so they can short it.
3/ If you support Labour you might disagree with the effects of Tory policy on distribution (that’s probably why you support Labour in the first place). It’s not the same as saying it doesn’t work.