4 ms·

Marine le Pen doesn't give a shit what language the EU uses, that claim is a distraction. Her and others like her think France needs to care about the EU a whol

Marine le Pen doesn't give a shit what language the EU uses, that claim is a distraction. Her and others like her think France needs to care about the EU a whole lot less, and the EU should be much less important in France, so she's really the last kind of person who would expend political capital on such a thing. BTW the EU sucks at peace and settling disputes. If it was good at the whole "peace in Europe" thing it wouldn't be constantly rolling boulders down the hill at the UK and Switzerland but rather, find ways to work amicably with them as productively as possible. It doesn't of course, it just threatens them and tries to force them into the EU's power structures regardless of popularity or the creation of resentment, which is exactly why the "ultra-right" as you put it (lol) is constantly gaining ground. Someone has to care what voters think, after all.

toyg 5y ago
The point is precisely that LePen's platform claims the EU is a net negative because it ignores French interests. By pursuing the old Mitterrandist project of having an EU under French leadership, Macron is trying to negate that platform. As for the "constantly rolling boulders", I think you're not being objective. Both Switzerland and Britain agreed on a set of rules decades ago, and are now reneging on them. Surely it's their responsibility to find solutions for the new problems they've created? And once solutions are agreed, surely they should implement them? The only answer from the Anglo press is "no, because everyone must accommodate us", which is frankly embarrassingly juvenile. Even inside the UK a lot of people don't agree with this English manoeuvreing, and absolutely everyone in Northern Ireland knew that the Brexiteers' promises were as unrealistic and unrealizable as they turned out to be. The attempt to unload responsibility for their own actions on a third party is like a child shouting "It wasn't me!" when caught with a hand in the jar and jam all over his face.
- thu2111 5y ago
  LePen is not going to change her opinion of the EU if it changes which language it uses because that's a surface level issue that doesn't affect any of the actual governance issues she or her voters care about. Neither Switzerland nor Britain have ever reneged on anything. The problem is the exact opposite: Brussels has been changing, in big and important ways. The nature of the EU is that less and less is subject to veto over time, and the EU institutions never cared much what the treaties said anyway. Thus the "rules", such as they are, are constantly changing and often in ways that nobody agreed to. Indeed the whole blowup with Switzerland is due exactly to that: the EU wants to keep changing the rules without getting the Swiss to agree and has been trying to force them to drop the previous separate bilateral agreements in favour of "dynamic alignment" i.e. accepting whatever the EU changes the rules to be at any time, without any pesky referendums. And in the UK, a constant source of frustration in London is due to the impression that the UK argues against bad rules when they're being proposed but when passed it follows them, whereas other EU countries agree with the rules (easy) and then ignore them when they are inconvenient. See: Germany deciding that EU law isn't actually superior over their constitutional law, despite that being a supposedly inviolable aspect of EU membership. It's easy to find people who voted to stay in the EU (or EC as it was then), in the original Brexit referendum in the 70s, but who voted to leave in the 2016 referendum with a justification of "this isn't what I voted for back then, I was misled". The EU changed the rules of the game but people weren't consulted until much, much later.

toyg 5y ago

The point is precisely that LePen's platform claims the EU is a net negative because it ignores French interests. By pursuing the old Mitterrandist project of having an EU under French leadership, Macron is trying to negate that platform. As for the "constantly rolling boulders", I think you're not being objective. Both Switzerland and Britain agreed on a set of rules decades ago, and are now reneging on them. Surely it's their responsibility to find solutions for the new problems they've created? And once solutions are agreed, surely they should implement them? The only answer from the Anglo press is "no, because everyone must accommodate us", which is frankly embarrassingly juvenile. Even inside the UK a lot of people don't agree with this English manoeuvreing, and absolutely everyone in Northern Ireland knew that the Brexiteers' promises were as unrealistic and unrealizable as they turned out to be. The attempt to unload responsibility for their own actions on a third party is like a child shouting "It wasn't me!" when caught with a hand in the jar and jam all over his face.

thu2111 5y ago
LePen is not going to change her opinion of the EU if it changes which language it uses because that's a surface level issue that doesn't affect any of the actual governance issues she or her voters care about. Neither Switzerland nor Britain have ever reneged on anything. The problem is the exact opposite: Brussels has been changing, in big and important ways. The nature of the EU is that less and less is subject to veto over time, and the EU institutions never cared much what the treaties said anyway. Thus the "rules", such as they are, are constantly changing and often in ways that nobody agreed to. Indeed the whole blowup with Switzerland is due exactly to that: the EU wants to keep changing the rules without getting the Swiss to agree and has been trying to force them to drop the previous separate bilateral agreements in favour of "dynamic alignment" i.e. accepting whatever the EU changes the rules to be at any time, without any pesky referendums. And in the UK, a constant source of frustration in London is due to the impression that the UK argues against bad rules when they're being proposed but when passed it follows them, whereas other EU countries agree with the rules (easy) and then ignore them when they are inconvenient. See: Germany deciding that EU law isn't actually superior over their constitutional law, despite that being a supposedly inviolable aspect of EU membership. It's easy to find people who voted to stay in the EU (or EC as it was then), in the original Brexit referendum in the 70s, but who voted to leave in the 2016 referendum with a justification of "this isn't what I voted for back then, I was misled". The EU changed the rules of the game but people weren't consulted until much, much later.