Short 🧵 about 🇨🇵
I don't understand the media-sponsored doom & gloom over the French parliamentary election. It looks like nobody knows how the French political system works. 1. France is a presidential republic, with separate elections for the president & parliament.
They are voting now for parliament, not for the president. This means that until Macron is president (next 4 years) there will be no major shifts in French foreign policy anyway. 2. France has mixed double turn elections. Whatever happens in the first round may be easily undone,
in particular when the "wings" are involved, because the wings are less likely to attract votes in the 2nd round. The only way for right-wing RN to win a majority is getting a lot of votes from the left, which seems obviously unlikely.
3. The large support for RN was expected and is mostly based on immigration & palestine protests. The French, as most Europeans, are fed up with uncontrolled immigration from hostile communities that have no intention to integrate. This is a wake up call for the left.
4. I am convinced that the decision to anticipate the parliamentary election is to prevent russian meddling. With less than one month of campaign, russia couldn't mount any propaganda stunt or cause any crisis like they did with EU elections or any other elections in the EU.
5. RN, as all populists, largely benefits from being an opposition force. Always finger-pointing, never facing reality, never proposing viable solutions. It is necessary to put them on the front line to unmask their lies. Giving them more space in parliament will deflate them.
6. Western media has become totally detached from reality. They are always going for the cheap doom & gloom, because fear sells. They are drifting from information to pure entertainment, with no accountability. This is our main challenge for this decade.
Note how the media tends to always be critical of moderates (booooring!), inadvertently sponsor populists (exciting! Outrageous!) then when people switch to populists/extremists because of that the media start scaremongering (OMG democracy at risk! No shit, Sherlock!?). Insane.
The media were the watchdogs of democracy, but they are now so committed to profit and private interests that they can barely perform their duty. There's a general lack of morals in the media, profit over principles, and no accountability whatsoever. We have to fix this.
End.
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1/ Short 🧵
I am happy to see that Europe is stepping up its support for Ukraine: artillery shells, rocket launchers, warplanes, missiles, IFVs. That's a lot.
We are reacting to the US betrayal of democracy, and we are doing it collectively. Europe is taking its place on the
2/ international stage as a union, rather than a loose bunch of countries. The US is committing suicide like Europe did in 1914. When European powers finally fell, the US stepped in. Western Europe has been in the US sphere of influence for almost a century, and it was not
3/ allowed to have its own armies, its own nukes, its own strategy. Americans complaining that the EU neglected its armies forget that it was part of the US plan. After WW2 only the UK and France were allowed to have real armies & their own nukes. Italy & Germany were not.