Category: VIEWS

The trial is ongoing. It’s been almost three weeks that morning, noon and evening the French have been reliving the Charlie Hebdo shooting on all their news channels. Five years later, each testimony twists the stomach and it is on this occasion that Friday morning a young Pakistani boy throws himself on two people who had gone out for a smoke at the foot of what had been the headquarters of Charlie and wounds them with a butcher knife and then runs away covered in blood and is soon arrested.

It comes to me every now and again. I’m ashamed of it because it’s a really twisted and totally unholy idea, but here it is. I am thinking to myself: if Trump were to be re-elected, massively, clearly, indisputably, it would actually come with many advantages.

The temptation is strong, Mr. President, but beware! You can tell yourself, of course, that all you would have to do is save Alexander Lukashenko to be able to force him to agree to an “integration process” between his country and yours, because he has his back to the wall after five weeks of demonstrations.

This can lead to wars, even though it is not ready for them. This can fracture it to the point of breaking up. Conversely, this could also close its ranks and finally turn it into the political power it is still so far from being. We don’t know. It is far too early to say, but the fact is that everything forces the European Union to become a player on the international scene today.

This aspiration knows no boundaries. It was this aspiration that brought down the Iron Curtain in 1989. It was the one that led the Iranians to demonstrate for six months in 2009. It was also the one that sparked the Arab Springs of 2011, whose strength and provisional failure are so reminiscent of the European Spring of 1848. It is again the same one that had raised Hong Kong before giving the Belarusians the courage to defy their despot, and this aspiration for freedom announces, without a doubt, the awakening of a Russia that we feel so tired of living too long in a state of constantly going backwards.