European Politics
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Wow, this from a Green politician who is likely to be kingmaker in Germany. Are you listening Shaw, Genter and the rest of you?
Form The Times:
The figurehead of Germany’s high-flying Green party has disowned the moralising tendencies of the environmental movement and said that people should be free to make their own choices in their private lives.
Robert Habeck, who is likely to play the role of kingmaker and possibly even chancellor in the next government, also levelled strong criticism at Russia and China as he set out a muscular foreign policy agenda in an interview with The Times.
Over the past year his party has emerged as the rising power of German politics, doubling its share of the vote to come second in May’s European elections and at times overtaking Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in the polls.
He said the Greens had “a stronger claim than ever before” to govern the country. “The people sense there is a situation of political upheaval in Germany. The space and the hunger are emerging for a new political offer, for a new political culture. We have received an enormous vote of trust to deliver just that. The environment has gone from being a marginal, nice or feel-good topic to the dominant issue. Rightly so.”
While green parties have struggled to make much electoral headway in most other European countries, the German Greens are now the main voice of the opposition.
This is partly because they have skilfully channelled a wave of public concern about climate change, positioning themselves as the only sizeable party with bold answers. But it also owes a good deal to deft branding, with the fervid idealism and sanctimonious lectures of the past largely discarded in favour of campaigns that are heavy on positivity and pragmatic liberalism.
Mr Habeck, 50, shudders at the memory of “Veggie Day”, his party’s attempt during the 2013 election to withdraw meat from public-sector canteens every Thursday. He argues that it is not the state’s place to tell individuals how often they can fly, or what they can eat. “I personally find all intrusions of the state upon private lives highly undesirable,” he said. “When it is a question of bringing bureaucracy into the private sphere, I’m out. I don’t like it.
“It would be conceivable that you could have a personal travel budget, or perhaps a personal meat budget. Each week you could eat so many calories of meat but no more, and we would control that somehow; or you would be permitted to fly three times a year, but not four — all that is awful. I believe in freedom in the private sphere, and in that sense I am an absolute liberal.”
Unless the polls shift significantly before the next election, due in the autumn of 2021 at the latest, it is hard to see how Germany’s next federal government can be formed without the Green party, which commands more than 20 per cent of the vote.
There is much conjecture that it will supply the next chancellor. It has two plausible leaders in Mr Habeck, a charismatic novelist and literary scholar from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein who serves as the party’s public face, and Annalena Baerbock, 39, a career politician from Hanover who is its strategic and organisational brain.
Mr Habeck is studiously coy about his ambitions. “The question of who will run for the chancellorship is a serious question, and we’re not going to get into speculation right now,” he said.
Yet his party is clearly drawing up a serious programme for government. Where his predecessors might have leapt gratefully on an opportunity to lambast President Trump, Mr Habeck emphasises the importance of the transatlantic relationship, in the diplomatic tone of a man who may soon find himself managing it.
He is less guarded on other questions of foreign policy, urging Mrs Merkel, 65, to exclude Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, from Germany’s new 5G mobile network, and denouncing Russia’s “aggressive, quasi-expansionist” conduct.
He regards the German government as a “prisoner of daily events”, too busy reacting to ephemera to think deeply about how the country should position itself. “Frankly the way we deal with China demonstrates Europe’s political weakness,” he said. “Through the Belt and Road initiative China has an active influence over Europe, even [reaching] partly into critical infrastructure such as harbours and tram lines. It is actively working to divide Europe, seeking to forge contacts with the east European states against the EU, and Europe is doing nothing about it.”
Mr Habeck, however, is not an uncontroversial figure in Germany. In April he was heavily criticised by conservative commentators for suggesting that property speculators could be stripped of their flats to ease the housing crisis. He also withdrew from Twitter and Facebook in January after a gaffe in which he said the Greens were trying to turn the east German state of Thuringia into a “free, liberal and democratic” polity, prompting critics to question why he did not believe the state was already free and democratic.
The next central battleground in German politics could be the “black zero”, an informal rule against the state borrowing money that was introduced at the height of the financial crisis. It is a hallowed principle for the CDU, but Mr Habeck views it as a foolhardy anachronism in an era of negative interest rates and moth-eaten infrastructure.
Germany, he believes, is falling behind its competitors due to its stubborn refusal to borrow and invest in schools, railways, scientists, broadband and the electricity grid. “Germany is saving to make its own budget healthy at the expense of its European neighbours,” he said. “At a time when the global economy is weakening, that’s not clever.”
The Green party wants to do away with the black zero and instead give the state up to €100 billion of firepower for eco-friendly technology.
Even this may not satisfy the zealous young generation of climate activists whose votes it courts. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old founder of the Fridays for Future movement, has accused Europe’s green parties of being inadequately green.
Mr Habeck counters that his party’s policies are as ambitious as the country can afford.
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@JC Sounds super reasonable. I do wonder what the 'bold' climate policies are though. Kind of a genius move calling yourself the Greens campaigning on climate to keep the extremists from calling you Nazis while at the same time having libertarian and conservative policies. Hard to imagine a Green party interested in preserving the environment as opposed to creating a gulag archipelago.
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It's amazing that the massively influential long term prime minister of Malaysia called for the murder of millions of French people, but it's barely covered. The garbage ny times made it sound like he was being moderate.
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@Tim Australian is behind a pay wall, and I can't read French, but I assume this is about the stabbings and decapitation in the church in Nice?
Amazed this is getting ZERO coverage. Much like the poor French teacher who was killed a week or so back.
Is that because this sort of Islamic terrorism is now the norm and we're not shocked by it any more.?
Or has this year has just turned into an shitstorm of historic proportions and three random dying on the other side of the world doesn't phase us any more when competing against COVID and BLM and US Elections?
Or is there some truth to the conspiracy theory that MSN want to suppress and excuse these acts?
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
Jeez.... I was just supporting your choice not to breed. I appreciate you sharing your virtue and doing your bit to save the world. So many people don't have kids due to not being able to, or because they just don't like kids. Someone choosing to not breed to save the world is just so much more virtue signalling and interesting.
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..Some people are more interested in rugby than having kids.
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@pakman said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
Jeez.... I was just supporting your choice not to breed. I appreciate you sharing your virtue and doing your bit to save the world. So many people don't have kids due to not being able to, or because they just don't like kids. Someone choosing to not breed to save the world is just so much more virtue signalling and interesting.
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..Some people are more interested in rugby than having kids.
I reckon most of us are, it’s just that stuff happens
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@pakman said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
@Snowy said in European Politics:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in European Politics:
You chose not to have kids because of over population? I wish more people like you made choices like you..... I fully support your choice. The world needs more little me's than little you's.
Yes, as I said, partly. Comprehension not your forte?
Insulting type aren't you. How are your kids manners?
Jeez.... I was just supporting your choice not to breed. I appreciate you sharing your virtue and doing your bit to save the world. So many people don't have kids due to not being able to, or because they just don't like kids. Someone choosing to not breed to save the world is just so much more virtue signalling and interesting.
I guess some people just think having kids or not having kids is not a virtue..Some people are more interested in rugby than having kids.
@Baron-Silas-Greenback has left the building
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@majorrage said in European Politics:
France having a right wing President would be interesting ….
As will the meltdown at The Guardian....
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@majorrage said in European Politics:
French election looking very very interesting …
Decent write up here, but France having a right wing President would be interesting ….
I’ve been following some of Zemmour’s campaign over the last few months. He’s really shifted the overton window and even made Macron move on a few issues. That change in conversation has probably made the path for Le Pen slightly easier
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As expected it's Macron v Le Pen in the run off
How many of the Zemmour supporters move to Le Pen? How much of the left will turn up.. they'll probably need to be scared into an anti Le Pen vote rather than convinced to make a 'positive' vote for Macron
51/49 Macron according to polls
The breakdown according to age is surprising (Yougov poll):
18-24: Macron 44%, Le Pen 56%
25-34: Macron 47%, Le Pen 53%
35-44: Macron 47%, Le Pen 53%
45-54: Macron 49%, Le Pen 51%
55+: Macron 55%, Le Pen 45% -
@duluth said in European Politics:
As expected it's Macron v Le Pen in the run off
How many of the Zemmour supporters move to Le Pen? How much of the left will turn up.. they'll probably need to be scared into an anti Le Pen vote rather than convinced to make a 'positive' vote for Macron
51/49 Macron according to polls
The breakdown according to age is surprising (Yougov poll):
18-24: Macron 44%, Le Pen 56%
25-34: Macron 47%, Le Pen 53%
35-44: Macron 47%, Le Pen 53%
45-54: Macron 49%, Le Pen 51%
55+: Macron 55%, Le Pen 45%Seriously aging population if Macron is leading
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With 97% of votes counted, as expected and as in 2017 the last time there were Presidential elections in France, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen go through to the last two. The near total collapse of the Gaullist and the Socialists continues
The surprise was perhaps the strong third place of the left-wing candidate Jean Melenchon.
Macron 27.35%, Le Pen 23.97%, Melenchon 21.7%
Melenchon did not endorse Macron but said four timeslast night that not a single vote from his supporters should go to Marine Le Pen.
Macron, despite his flaws and despite France being hit hard by inflation at the moment, is the favourite for re-election in two weeks time. He is absolutely dominating what's left of the centre ground of French politics.
It will be closer than 2017's 66-34 result, but barring a major surprise, Macron will serve a second term as President of France.