Friday 6 July 2018

Macron fights Orban for Europe's soul

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Emanuel Macron is the most important and significant politician in the world right now and sees his career as a Manichean struggle of liberalism against the forces of what he considers darkness. 

He is right and his success or failure will have huge consequences. 
Ben Judah reports that he sees his term as an existential battle against populism in Europe trying to breakup the European Union and sees Brexit in this light. 

This makes sense, but is not good news for the wretched British government. Nor for the Hungarian government, though they seem to know what they are doing.

On June 18, France ambassador in Budapest, Éric Fournier, send a report to the Quai d'Orsay which was leaked to Mediapart on Friday. In it Fournier said Viktor Orban is not  a populist or an extremist. These things, he said, were press inventions.
He called Mr Orban the modern political world’s Real Madrid, because Viktor Orban has won the elections by landslides three times in a row, said the problem of anti-Semitism in Hungary is fiction that distracts from the anti-Semitism of Muslims in Germany and France and praised Orban’s migration policy as a model.
A journalist asked Emmanuel Macron about the memo and he replied that he completely disagrees with everything in it, that it would not have any consequences for M. Fournier because it was intended to be confidential, but that had he said it publicly he would have been dismissed. 

On Sunday we learnt that M. Fournier had indeed been replaced. Possibly by coincidence, but I do not believe in those sort of coincidences.

Here is David Goldman, who is himself Jewish, writing on the Affair Fournier. 

A Brezhnev-era joke asked whether it was a crime to say that the party chairman was an idiot. The answer was yes, because it’s a state secret. For those who miss Soviet-era humor, French President Emmanuel Macron has provided some consolation, by firing the French ambassador to Budapest for observing in a private memorandum that the president of Hungary is not an anti-Semite. Evidently that is a state secret in France.




1 comment:

  1. There is a sad and dangerous tendency for labeling anyone who is a nationalist, who wants to preserve his nations culture, as a Fascist and a Nazi and to assume that person is anti-Semitic. look deeper. this is the old communist propaganda line, Marxist internationalism. The left's choosing to see nationalism of any kind as dangerous and leading to conflict. Like anything else, that can be for good or for bad, nationalism can be a bad thing or it can be a very good thing. Note that those who hate jews and ISRAEL, ALSO SEE ISRAEL AS NATIONALIST AND THEREFORE WRONG.

    Reuben E

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