European Politics discussion
How the killing of an abusive father by his daughters fuelled Russia's culture wars
Hundreds of social media accounts representing conservative movements are promoting an apocalyptic narrative that claims any moves towards regulating family affairs will lead to the disintegration of Russian families – and perhaps of Russia itself.
If stamping out domestic violence causes that kind of fall-apart, it's well deserved and long overdue.
The Patriarch also recently called all women prostitutes who live with a (male partner) outside of marriage.
That law change regarding domestic violence made beating your family an administrative issue rather than a crime. As long as nothing seriously broken you get a small fine and go on your merry way.
Supposedly the "rule by decree" crisis powers are only temporary, but I'll be very surprised if the "crisis" in Hungary doesn't last for numerous years.
It pains me to say it, since I do love that country, but one of two things have to happen there in the very near future - either regime change (highly unlikely, since Orban's government has rigged public opinion and elections to ensure they maintain power indefinitely), or the EU finally needs to grow some balls and finally throw them out of the EU - also as a warning to similar developments in places like Poland (EU) and Serbia (wants to be in the EU).
Trying to change behavior only through dialog with a bad-faith actor like Orban is like promising a carrot without the threat of a real stick.
Sure, the EU wants to prevent Hungary from turning increasingly to Russia, but that seems to be happening no matter what the EU tries to do via incentives and gentle slaps on the wrist. It's time to hit Orban where it hurts - free EU money.
Of course, he'll just blame Brussels, George Soros, homosexuals and migrants.
I lived in Hungary from early 2007 to early 2012. I remember when the socialist government fell because of Gyurcsány's speech in Balatonőszöd (which to my understanding was a call to action for his government to finally do something productive and beneficial to the country) and Orban's Fidesz took the reigns of goverment.
(I also remember the scary rise of the far-right Jobbik party and the formation ...and luckily outlawing... of its paramilitary guard).
At the time, when asked who I preferred - Gyurcsány or Orbán - I would say I don't know either well enough to choose, but I didn't really like either much - Gyurcsány seemed untrustworthy, but Orbán seemed like he would take the country in directions I was very strongly against.
The latter has definitely turned out to be true.
I seriously doubt Merkel will go for a fifth term. You really got the impression that she was increasingly keeping a low profile, even in instances when you really wanted her to take a stand - though at least she did in the election in Thuringia earlier this year, in which the new state leadership was elected with help of far-right AfD votes. That didn't last long after massive backlash.
Like the article states - the two figures besides Merkel that have really stood out during the coronavirus crisis have been Markus Söder and Jens Spahn. Söder (and the CSU) represent several political stances that neither I nor my wife would support, but she started following him on FB and I honestly tip my hat to his handling of things.......even if he has ruffled a few political feathers (most notably for announcing a lockdown in Bavaria two days before an agreed upon meeting during which all state leaders were to debate/announce one) in doing so.
Jens Spahn has been very steady in all of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Merkel doesn't support him whenever the time comes to pick a new lead candidate.
The crisis seems to have been a boon to the established "Volksparteien" CDU/CSU and SPD. These parties have traditionally always held the chancelorship, but have continuously lost voter share in the past decade or more - the SPD has even been in the mid teens lately. Come crisis-time however, voters seem to turn to the traditional powerhouses. The Green party, especially, has lost a notable chunk of voter preference after being in second place behind CDU/CSU since 2018. Others, such as the AfD, have also been feeling some polling pain however.
I see the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, is renewing his medical license to work part-time as a doctor during the crisis. That's a symbolically impressive and very important gesture, though I'm not sure how sensible it is - especially if he were to get ill and could not execute his government duties. Who takes over in that case? Coveney, Fitzgerald, or Higgins?
Is there anyone Italian on the forum who could give some insight into how Italians are feeling about the Eurozone right now?
From the outside it sort of looks like they are about to get screwed Greek style but I can’t tell if that is just because I can only read English language reporting.
Your first link is subscription-only, Axon.
I'm quite pro-EU, but EU really failed with the early Italy response, with support for their health care system. If there ever is a time to show the worth of working together it would be a moment like that, but apparently that wasn't meant to be. A bigger crisis for EU than Brexit could ever be tbh.
The financial response is complicated. It is not a great solution to show up and bail out Italy, Greece etc. every time they encounter a problem - they actually DO need to change some things themselves.
But the health crisis response should have been simple, and fast. Instead it was just embarrassing.
That is definitely a subscription-only link here; I've tried it in three different browsers. And my main browser stores almost no state between runs; only a few cookies are preserved. ft.com cookies are not on the to-be-saved list.
Subscribe to the FT to read: Financial Times Transcript: ‘We are at a moment of truth’ (English)
Soooooo.............................
As Neo-Nazis Seed Military Ranks, Germany Confronts 'an Emeny Within'
Germany has a problem. For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of “individual cases.” The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles with no real investigation.The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and the police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly. The nation’s top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront an issue that has become too dangerous to ignore.
Reads like an episode of 24 or Jack Ryan.
Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid
‘It would be ideal if you could hit a deer,” Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of Europe’s largest tabloid, Bild Zeitung, told his chauffeur. “Guardian readers could do with a bit more colour.” We had reached escape velocity out of ice-encrusted Düsseldorf. The Mercedes S-Class locked into place like a bobsled on the Autobahn. I sat shotgun with Reichelt’s assortment of sports gear, a hockey stick between my legs. “We are lucky in our driver today,” Reichelt said, deadpan. “Last time we hit a wild boar and the boar and the car went flying.”I was travelling with Reichelt on one of his publicity tours across Germany. For the past two years, he has made an appointment once a month to commune with groups of Bild’s 1.3 million readers. “You have to feel their emotions,” he told me from the backseat. “You have to listen to their hearts.”
Reichelt, who is 40, made his name as a war reporter in Syria, but today confines most of his battle courage to Twitter, where he enjoys needling the German political establishment and barging into leftwing echo chambers. In person, Reichelt exudes a twitchy exuberance, like a fighter pilot who has managed to smuggle champagne into the cockpit. His eyes restlessly gauge the world around him, clocking who he needs to avoid and who he needs to attract. Into his phone, he volleys directives to subeditors, assistants and the band of young male disciples he sends around the world to collect stories. “The leading populist in western Germany,” is how Albrecht von Lucke, editor of the prestigious left-liberal monthly Blätter, describes him.
Available at train stations, supermarkets, bakeries, kiosks, factories, Portuguese beach resorts, online, and everywhere else Germans buy things, Bild Zeitung squats like a large toad on German life. Bild, which was partly modelled on the Daily Mirror, is the largest newsprint publication in the world that uses Roman characters. Unlike its closest analogue in Britain, the Daily Mail, it has no real national competitors. Twenty regional editions seep into every pore of the country. Each month, its website attracts about 25 million readers. Bild is the prize battleship of Axel Springer, the German company founded in 1945 by the rightwing publisher of the same name. Today, Axel Springer is the largest media publishing firm in Europe, and is valued at about €7bn. Last year, the US private equity firm KKR acquired a 44% stake in the company.
For decades, Bild was an object of scorn for any self-respecting West German of social democratic orientation. In a political culture more conformist and decorous than most of its western peers, Bild functioned like the Las Vegas strip, concentrating all of the Federal Republic’s seediness in one place. Seven days a week, Bild pumped free-market mantras, alongside ads for car tyres and chicken wings, into the stiff arteries of cold war West Germany. Bild decried long hair on men and the marriage of its top models to foreigners. It genuflected before South African apartheid, Greek dictatorship, Bavarian sedans and American Pershing missiles. Above all, Bild dedicated itself to the destruction of communist East Germany, and fought a long battle against what it viewed as enemy collaborators in the leftist student movement at home.
Such was the stature of Bild in West Germany that in 1965, after the daily rose in price from 10 to 15 pfennigs, Axel Springer, who referred to Bild as his “dog on a chain”, proposed to Chancellor Ludwig Erhard that the state introduce a special 15 pfennig coin to make it easier to purchase the paper. Meanwhile, the East German Stasi was so impressed by Bild as a state propaganda tool that it crafted its own – imaginatively titled – NEUE Bild Zeitung, which was sold at the border with West Germany, where it conspicuously failed to wean class enemies off the original.
Today Bild is paradoxically less influential than it was in the 60s, but more politically important. “I read it first in the morning because it is the agenda-setter,” says Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the liberal weekly, Die Zeit. “Politicos in Berlin probably read it first in the morning as well.” The paper enjoys a close relationship with the German political elite. The former German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was one of the best men at the wedding of former Bild editor, Kai Diekmann, and in 2008, Diekmann performed the same role for Kohl at his wedding. “Kohl rules with Bild,” the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll wrote, and Kohl’s successor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, affirmed the practice: “To govern I need Bild, Bild Sunday’s edition, and the telly,” he once said.
As someone currently reading a book about the 30 Years' War and the various incompetent heads of state, this tickles my fancy.
Spain’s emeritus king Juan Carlos I to leave country amid tax haven scandal
Spain’s emeritus king Juan Carlos I has informed his son, King Felipe VI, of his “well-considered decision to leave Spain,” and his residence at Zarzuela Palace, where he has lived for the last 58 years. The decision comes after Swiss and Spanish prosecutors opened an investigation into bank accounts allegedly held by Juan Carlos in tax havens.In a letter to his son released by the Royal Household, Juan Carlos writes that due to the “public impact” of the investigation, he has decided to leave Spain in order to enable Felipe VI to act as head of state from a place of “peace and tranquility.”
The complete letter reads:
“Your majesty, dear Felipe, with the same zeal to serve Spain that inspired by my reign and faced with the public impact that certain past actions of my private life is causing, I wish to show you my absolute willingness to contribute to helping the exercise of your functions from the peace and tranquility required of your high level of responsibility. My legacy, and my own dignity as a person, demands it.
“A year ago, I told you of my willingness and desire to stand down from my institutional activities. Now, guided by the conviction to provide the best service to Spaniards, its institutions and to you as King, I am informing you of my well-considered decision to move away from Spain.
“It is a decision I take, with deep feeling but great calm. I was king of Spain for 40 years and during all those years I have always wanted the best for Spain and the Crown.
“With my loyalty always.
“With great affection, you father.”
According to the press release from the Royal Household, Felipe VI has told his father of his “respect and appreciation” for the decision.
Since when the hell did we have King Emeritus? Is it because I am an American? Because I've only ever heard of Professor Emeritus. What in the name of Crusader Kings are you people doing over there?
As someone currently reading a book about the 30 Years' War and the various incompetent heads of state, this tickles my fancy.
Spain’s emeritus king Juan Carlos I to leave country amid tax haven scandal
“Your majesty, dear Felipe, with the same zeal to serve Spain that inspired by my reign and faced with the public impact that certain past actions of my private life is causing, I wish to show you my absolute willingness to contribute to helping the exercise of your functions from the peace and tranquility required of your high level of responsibility. My legacy, and my own dignity as a person, demands it.“A year ago, I told you of my willingness and desire to stand down from my institutional activities. Now, guided by the conviction to provide the best service to Spaniards, its institutions and to you as King, I am informing you of my well-considered decision to move away from Spain.
“It is a decision I take, with deep feeling but great calm. I was king of Spain for 40 years and during all those years I have always wanted the best for Spain and the Crown.
“With my loyalty always.
“With great affection, you father.”
According to the press release from the Royal Household, Felipe VI has told his father of his “respect and appreciation” for the decision.
Since when the hell did we have King Emeritus? Is it because I am an American? Because I've only ever heard of Professor Emeritus. What in the name of Crusader Kings are you people doing over there?
1. I bet he wrote that in cursive.
2. This leaves him free to fulfill the prophecy and drive a Zamboni.
Busy week but wanted to close the loop on this summit as it's significant.
The EU’s leaders have agreed on a €750bn covid-19 recovery package
It seems short-sighted to take on bond payments for the next 38 years. What are they going to do when the next crisis comes in the next decade?
It is also surprising the EC is taking on the huge debt. What happens when a country leaves the EU, like Britain did. Does their 'portion' of the debt just transfer to the other states that are still members?
“It is a decision I take, with deep feeling but great calm. I was king of Spain for 40 years and during all those years I have always wanted the best for Spain and the Crown.
Ah yes, stealing from your citizens to line your own pockets in offshore bank accounts and tax havens to avoid paying taxes. Doesn't sound to me like he wanted what was the best for Spain.
Axon wrote:Busy week but wanted to close the loop on this summit as it's significant.
The EU’s leaders have agreed on a €750bn covid-19 recovery package
It seems short-sighted to take on bond payments for the next 38 years. What are they going to do when the next crisis comes in the next decade?
It is also surprising the EC is taking on the huge debt. What happens when a country leaves the EU, like Britain did. Does their 'portion' of the debt just transfer to the other states that are still members?
Short-term debt would seem entirely appropriate for this kind of crisis, but not long-term. That's a bad idea.
Yeah, so, Belarus!
Basically, they had an election, the officials said President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, won with 80% of the vote and everyone basically called bullsh*t.
So street protests have begun and the police have responded by beating the sh*t out of people, thus encouraging more protests.
Is this a tipping point for Belarus? Dunno, but this is definitely the biggest challenge Lukashenko has seen to his rule in ages. If there's any reason to be pessimistic, however, it's that he's in good with Putin, I believe, and if Putin wants him in power, he's staying in power.
G'luck, guys. Honestly. No snark. Good luck.
EU doesn't believe in the election results and will apply sanctions to Belarus.
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