Category: VIEWS

Do you know any Putinists, even a single one? No, of course not. There are people who are similar to Putin, like Xi Jinping. There are others who take their inspiration from him, like Viktor Orban. Still others, like Lula, congratulate themselves on having avoided – thanks to Putin – a tête-à-tête with the American power. That makes a lot of allies and like-minded people, but not a crowd, and that is the big difference between Russia and the USSR.

Everything is going wrong. Yes, yes, listen carefully, read the newspapers, hear the most authoritative voices, they are saying that all is lost, because the next French presidential election would be won by Mrs Le Pen; because Netherlands has become ungovernable since its invention of anti-green populism; because poverty is spreading across Europe up to Berlin; because a “Ukraine fatigue” is threatening Europe as much as the United States and because the Union has just shown itself to be more appalling than ever by failing to come to the Armenians’ aid.

She was wrong, totally wrong. Before she won the election, just a year ago, Mrs Meloni was making a point of resolving the migration issue by the national virtue of a “naval blockade”. Now that the number of migrants has quite simply doubled under her government, she is appealing for EU solidarity by having the President of the Commission come to the island of Lampedusa, where more than 7,000 people have arrived in one day for a population of less than 7,000.

This is no longer democracy. When a private individual, Elon Musk, can decide the course of a war simply because he controls an international communications system which he alone has at his disposal, it is no longer the power of the people but the power of one man.

Opinion column published in “Le Monde” on 1 September 2023

What if we were to talk politics, the real politics, the great perils, the great assets, the great challenges? What if the forthcoming European elections were an opportunity to go beyond national party competition and at the same time address, in each of our 27 countries, the storms that threaten us and the means of dealing with them?