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Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
@RnaudBertrand
Jun 13 • 24 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
These have undoubtedly been the wildest 72 hours in French politics in my lifetime. Pretty incredible stuff.

A 🧵
So after losing big time in the EU elections to Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly, calling the French to elect new MPs on the 30th of June 👇
This started what can only be called a movement of total panic throughout the French political class, because parties only have until this weekend to present candidates, and therefore decide on a strategy, who to ally with, etc.
The left got their shit together fairly fast, almost immediately announcing the creation of a "Popular Front" that gathers all the left-wing parties 👇
Hilariously, Raphael Glucksmann, the head candidate of the Socialist Party for the EU elections, tried to prevent the alliance by going on TV to list some ridiculous pre-conditions for it, but literally no-one listened to him and they went forward with it.
Many memes on Glucksmann effectively putsching himself out of the French left (he was never actually on the left anyhow)...
It's on the right that things really started to go wild after Éric Ciotti, the president of Les Républicains, the party of Chirac and Sarkozy, announced that they would do an alliance with Le Pen
Almost immediately top officials in his own party started saying that Ciotti was speaking in his own name only and said he needed to resign from the party's presidency.
Image
Image
Ciotti reacted by literally shutting down party headquarters to prevent his destitution. This is Aurélien Pradié, a Républicain MP in front of the closed doors of the headquarters saying they'll get emergency services to break open the door for them 😅
So many memes around this on French twitter 😅
Finally, the general secretary of the party @AnnieGenevard, who had spare keys, got to the party headquarters and managed to open the doors.
The "political desk" ("bureau politique") of Les Républicains announces that they've met, decided to fire Ciotti as President of the party and that he is not a member of Les Républicains anymore.
Ciotti begs to differ and says that the meeting that fired him didn't conform with the rules of the party so he in fact "is and remains president of [the party]"...
The infighting in Les Républicains continues, it's still completely unclear who actually manages the party at this stage and whether they'll ally with Le Pen. Ciotti claims that 80 Républicain MPs are with him and ready to campaign under Le Pen's banner...
One thing is sure though, Ciotti still controls Les Républicains' twitter account: "The President of the Républicains is and will remain Éric Ciotti."
He also has the Vice-President of the party @GuilhemCarayon on his side: "With Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, we share 90-95% of the same ideas."

All in all, the party seems extremely divided and is imploding in real time...
Further right, things are pretty wild too. Marion Maréchal (granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen who had joined Zemmour instead of her family), announces on live TV that she wants to ally with the RN, next to a Zemmour whom apparently hadn't been consulted.
Later that day, Marion Maréchal announces that she met with the RN and heavily hints that the condition they set for an alliance is to get rid of Zemmour... Bear in mind that the party Reconquête that Maréchal and Zemmour are part of was founded by Zemmour
Zemmour goes on TV and calls Marion Maréchal's behavior "the world record of betrayals" and says she's surrounded by a team of "betrayal professionals"
Zemmour decided to not to go for an alliance and to present his own candidates. Marion Maréchal calls it "a triple mistake" and calls on everyone to vote for those candidates that did ally with the RN.

In short Reconquête just imploded...
Meanwhile Macron shoots at the newly formed "Popular Front", essentially saying that those who join it are antisemites🤦 Because LFI (Mélenchon's party) campaigned a lot for Palestinians so obviously that makes them and everyone with them antisemites...
In other wild news, Alain Finkielkraut, one of France's foremost Jewish intellectuals says he might be "obliged" to vote for Le Pen in order "to block antisemitism".

As a reminder Le Pen's party was co-founded by Pierre Bousquet, a former Waffen-SS... Image
There you go, 72 hours in France's political life... And that's not even half of it!

No doubt that this circus show will continue for the next 2 weeks until the elections. It's widely entertaining but obviously shows just how dysfunctional and lost France is right now...
Interesting late addition to the thread on what voters actually want.

Huge majority of voters on the left favorable to the "popular front" alliance (97% of LFI voters want it, as well as 86% of Socialist voters and 77% of Greens)

Les Républicains voters about half split on an alliance with Le Pen (53% agree so presumably 47% disagree).

Overwhelming support among Zemmour voters for an alliance with Le Pen (89% want it) so it looks like Marion Maréchal represents voters' will more than Zemmour with her move.Image

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More from @RnaudBertrand

Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Dec 17
This 👇 potentially changes everything, it looks like Trump envisions a U.S.-China G2.

He says that "China and the United States can together solve all the problems in the world".
x.com/kyleichan/stat…

From the point of view of a citizen of the Earth, I'm all for an improved relationship between the U.S. and China. And so far, despite some of his hawkish appointments, all of the statements by Trump himself point to that. Actions must follow of course, which is anything but a given: U.S. rhetoric often bears little correlation to their actions...

From the point of view of a European though, a US-China G2 would be a strategic disaster of the highest order. In fact it's long been something that many European strategic thinkers have warned about: if a US-China G2 materializes without Europe at the table, it will be on the menu.

A U.S.-China G2 would effectively mark an end to the undeclared world war we've been witnessing these past few years and declare the U.S. and China to be the 2 winners, setting the new rules of the game together the way the winners of WW2 did. Europe had a De Gaulle and a Churchill back then to defend its interests, there's virtually no-one today...

Which is why I've long said it was so strategically dumb for Europe to blindly follow the U.S. in its hostile strategy against China as one day (which looks like it may be coming soon) the U.S. would be bound to flip its position, leaving Europe exposed and with a damaged relationship with China. The smarter approach would have been to maintain an equally balanced relationships with both powers while building up European strategic autonomy. Instead of following Washington's lead on chip restrictions, decoupling initiatives, and confrontational rhetoric, Europe could have carved out its own path...

The question now is whether Europe can still recover its strategic position. And unfortunately the challenge appears nearly insurmountable: years of strategic complacency have left Europe vulnerable at precisely the moment when strength and independence are most crucial, with a complete absence of leaders of the caliber needed to navigate such tricky waters...
Love how this is already being mischaracterized by "China watchers" as Trump playing into Beijing's hands: the "G2 that Xi Jinping has hoped for".
x.com/BonnieGlaser/s…

When actually the concept of a G2 originates from the very heart of the U.S. establishment, from people like Fred Bergsten, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Kissinger: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_…

And China has actually historically been very critical of it, even rejecting the very concept. Here's for instance what Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Barack Obama when the idea was floated during his administration (gov.cn/ldhd/2009-11/1…): "The main reasons we don't agree with the concept of a 'G2' are: First, China is a developing country with a large population, and we remain clear-headed about the long road ahead to build a modernized nation; Second, China pursues an independent and autonomous peaceful foreign policy and does not ally with any country or group of countries; Third, China maintains that world affairs should be decided jointly by all countries, not dictated by one or two countries." (original Chinese: 我们不赞成有关"两国集团"提法的主要原因是：第一，中国是一个人口众多的发展中国家，要建成一个现代化国家还有很长的路要走，对此我们始终保持清醒；第二，中国奉行独立自主的和平外交政策，不与任何国家或国家集团结盟；第三，中国主张世界上的事情应该由各国共同决定，不能由一两个国家说了算)

And again now we have the proposal coming from the U.S., not China, and we can quite safely assume it will likely again face quite a lot of opposition from China.
This is getting a lot of attention in China 👇
Read 4 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Dec 3
This is crazy... So let me get this right:
- Yoon lost recent parliamentary elections
- He's invoking national security to justify emergency powers
- He's labeling the opposition as North Korean sympathizers
- He is strongly aligned with US policy (even strengthening ties with Japan, which is deeply unpopular with the population)

This sounds like a bad remake of the classic transitions to right-wing military dictatorship we saw in so many US vassals during the cold war.

Hopefully South Korea will be strong enough to prevent history from repeating itself...
Couldn't be more appallingly undemocratic: martial law can be lifted by a vote in parliament but he's blocking access to it 👇
Yoon's martial law declaration. Really reads like the ravings of the very worst military dictators, truly crazy stuff!
Image
Read 4 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Nov 29
Goodbye Uniqlo China business (22% of their revenue!) 👋

It's a virtual certainty that Chinese consumers will stop shopping at Uniqlo after this. A *Japanese* company that publicly chooses to align with the West's Uyghur narrative against China (which not a single Chinese believes in, even those most critical of the government): it's the closest you can get to corporate suicide in China.

Puzzling why they'd do that.
The last company that said it'd stop using Xinjiang cotton was H&M. Their sales in China immediately decreased by 41% ()bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
To be clear the choice made by Uniqlo is not about whether to use Xinjiang cotton or not: it's about communicating about it. x.com/GearoidReidy/s…

Maybe they never even used Xinjiang cotton and that's their choice. But given how sensitive an issue this is in China, they'd also chosen for years to not communicate on this issue because it was obvious that if they did it'd instrumentalized by Western media in headlines just like the BBC article...

I don't why they suddenly decided to change position and and start communicating on this, but they did and it did generate headlines. That's the issue...
Read 5 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Nov 15
Absolutely perfect illustration of what we enable with the way the media and the Western political class framed what happened in Amsterdam.

There was a football match between Israel and France yesterday and this 👇 happened at the beginning of the match: a horde of Israeli supporters openly lynched some French supporters in the stands.

Macron himself was in attendance at the match to show his commitment to "fighting antisemitism" after Amsterdam... He made no public comment that I know of on these French supporters getting lynched in front of his eyes. And the police made no reported arrests.

Had the reverse been the case, had this been some Israeli supporters getting lynched by a horde of French supporters, you can absolutely bet 100% that he (and all the French media) would have made a huge deal out of it.

You cannot overstate the absurdism of it: because we've so gaslighted ourselves around "antisemitism" and so distorted the meaning of it, Western countries would literally rather let our their own citizens get lynched on their own soil - in front of the president's eyes (!) - than face accusations being "antisemitic" in their own definition of the term.
French TV interviewed after the match an Israel supporter (wearing an IDF t-shirt) who participated in the lynching, who commented that "the security [in the stadium] was magnificent. I'll even say even too much... We had a small problem in the block K, directly it was settled, the police came and directly they solved the problem".

No comment...
Another video where French fans explain to the police, with video for proof, that the Israel supporters started the fight and that they arrested the French victims.
Read 5 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Nov 9
This is hugely important and no-one is paying attention.

Philippines President Marcos Jr. just signed 2 new bills (the "Maritime Zones Act" and the "Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act"), backed by the U.S. State Department (via a press release by the infamous Matthew Miller: state.gov/on-the-philipp…), that claim to implement "international law" but actually are a direct violation of international law in that they attempt to legitimize expansionist claims at the expense of virtually all its neighbors.

Let me explain 🧵Image
Image
First, some context.

The Philippines exist as an independent country since 1946 when they gained their independence from the United States. They had never existed as a country before.

The establishment of the Philippines was officialized by the Treaty of Manilla.
Crucially, the Treaty of Manilla also defined Filipino territory as based on the earlier Treaty of Paris, when Spain ceded the Philippines to the US at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

You can see these boundaries as defined in the treaty of Paris illustrated here 👇 Image
Read 30 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Nov 8
This is crazy: Israeli police arrests 2 French military personnel ("gendarmes") with diplomatic status in a Christian church (the Eleona Church) that has officially belonged to France for 160 years and is protected by diplomatic immunity: x.com/sambklf/status…

To make things worse the church is located in occupied East Jerusalem - theoretically Palestinian territory - and the arrests occured as the French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot was due to visit it. He cancelled his visit due to the presence of Israeli police on site and the breach of diplomatic immunity.

Yet another unarguable proof that Israel respects absolutely zero rule.
Live reaction by France's foreign minister, who looks very shaken: "I will not enter the Eleona domain today because Israeli security forces entered it armed without first obtaining authorization from France and without agreeing to leave today."
x.com/sambklf/status…

In normal language, given this is officially French territory, it's called an armed invasion of sovereign territory...
In this other video you can see the French side asking the Israeli police: "Are you sure you want to arrest French military personnel, in France, on French territory?"

Their reply: "Yes".
Read 6 tweets

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