🇫🇷A new World

Tragic flooding in Spain, Trump wins The White House, Rassemblement National targets Reconquete MEP with sexism, Bardella’s book banned from rail stations, and Marine Le Pen risks political ban

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This week

• ❗Quick update

• 🇪🇸Tragic flooding in Spain - [Donation Links]

• 🇺🇸Trump wins The White House

• 👩Rassemblement National target Reconquete MEP with sexism

• 📖Bardella’s book banned from rail stations, chaos ensues

• 🏛️Marine Le Pen risks political ban

❗Quick update

Right, quick apology for you all:

Despite having set myself up last week to be able to publish your favourite newsletter regardless of the half-marathon I was running, a lot of things got in the way and I simply wasn’t able to make it work, on top of not finding the time to get it out of the door with what turned out to be a very busy week.

So, this week’s dispatch may be slightly longer than usual, but I wanted to make sure that you guys were getting the news you guys look forward to every week.

🇪🇸Tragic flooding in Spain - [Donation Links]

Photo’s taken from social media

So, as you have certainly heard, there were recently terrible floods in Spain, with countless people losing their lives, while others are lucky enough to get away with their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

This is why I’m including a list of donation links here for anybody who may want to donate to help with the efforts. If there are any i’ve missed, then send them to me asap and i’ll add them to the list:

• Croix-Rouge de Belgique - Link

• Global Giving - Link

🇺🇸Trump wins The White House

President-Elect Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

As many of you found out this week, Donald Trump handily defeated Democratic Candidate Kamala Harris, with 312 electoral votes and 50.4% of the popular vote to her 226 EVs.

Now, before we all get invovled in discussions on the roles of disinformation and misinformation, Musk buying twitter to encourage far-right rhetoric, the suitability of an electoral college system, or any number of other arguments, there’s one major issue that we need to focus on:

Europe’s security is now in danger, we didn’t prepare enough for Trump 2, and we now need to wake up.

While we’ve shored up our position somewhat, with pushes towards strategic autonomy, but we constantly suffer from internal divisions, member states prefering American dependence to taking the hard road and developing EU industry, or those who simply want to keep things as cheap as possible for themselves.

We need to do more, we need to wake up, and we need to start ignoring the naysayers and start coming together to actually fight for our own survival, because let’s face it:

Under Donald Trump, the EU now stands alone and we’ll be blackmailed to hell and back unless we stand tall on our own.

I will do a more in-depth breakdown about the issues at hand in the near future, but for now let me know what you guys think.

👩Rassemblement National target Reconquete MEP with sexism

So, we get to enjoy another fun story of the far-right behaving incredibly poorly, with this time an increase in the political civil war between Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Eric Zemmour’s Reconquete!

In an incredibly ridiculous tweet that was later deleted (pictured below), Malika Sorel (RN) decided to post a sexist message regarding Sarah Knafo (R!) targeting the fact that her dress was slightly see-through.

“Zoom in on the photo to see the bra. There are also the dresses that are close to the…as we used to say among engineers when I worked in that wonderful world. In fact, in parliament I adopt other modes of action”

Now, you’re no strangers to the drama between the far-right parties taking shots at each other, but it seems that the level is crashing through the floor.

📖Bardella’s book banned from rail stations, chaos ensues

Bardella in an incredibly rare appearance at the European Parliament (Photo by the European Parliament)

So, continuing on this trend: Rassemblement National President Jordan Bardella’s book, « Ce que je cherche » (What I’m looking for), is focused entirely aroundhhis concerns regarding national identity, his calls for unity for the right, whilst also being an autobiography that came way too soon at 29 years old.

Supported by the famous and reviled Vincent Bolloré, known billionaire and supporter of right-wing and far-right politics, many have been concerned about the impact this political book could have with all of the attempts to drum up support ahead of Christmas.

Unfortunately, their powerful ad campaign was hamstrung when the French advertising giant ‘Mediatransports’, which manages ad space across the majority of French train stations, pulled the book’s ad campaignn due to it violating their policy on political neutrality.

Which naturally gives Bardella, Bolloré, and the far-right the perfect platform to launch a little culture war battle about unfortunate wealthy white politicians not being able to spread political messaging regardless of policies or laws, because it’s all a witch hunt against them.

The Mediatransport terms and conditions are pretty clear that “any advertising message of a political, trade-union or religious nature, or whose text or illustration is contrary to public decency or prejudicial to public order, is prohibited.”

And it’s incredibly clear in it’s terms and conditions that in these cases, it has every right to refuse or abandon any ongoing ad campaigns, and this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this happen, with ads by Greenpeace having been refused in 2020.

Which clearly underlines a major targeting of far-right defenders of a Christian Europe, as you can all imagine.

and naturally, this led to Jordan Bardella taking potshots at the SNCF with the following tweet:

The original Tweet

“Far-left trade unionists, by putting pressure on the management of the SNCF, which submitted, managed to have the promotion of my book cancelled in the stations. I call on you not to let them do this. Let's not let censorship win!”

And no surprises that this sounds fairly Trumpist, because let’s face it, the Trump 2 presidency and the campaign that led to it will be used by the far-right for the upcoming elections in Europe, and most notably, in France.

Regardless, the culture war will continue, with bad-faith actors like Jordan Bardella and Bolloré, as well as their supporters, framing simple terms and conditions that are applied regardless of political affiliation in order to manipulate people who simply don’t have the education or the time to be aware of this.

But that’s the world we live in today, and this is why we need to keep building up defences in the education and information space to make sure that we’re not abandoning people to this manipulation.

🏛️Marine Le Pen risks political ban

Marine Le Pen (Photo by far-right Vox Espana)

Let’s keep the good times rolling: the Rassemblement National’s highly problematic trial surrounding embezzlement of European Parliamentary funds continues, and it could take a very big political head.

To keep a long-newsletter short: The RN are being accused of embezzling EP funds between 2011 and 2016 by siphoning this into fake jobs that were, in fact, actually funding political activity in France. This has led to Marine le Pen starting to panic over the fact that this will have genuine repercussions for her and potentially kill her presidential ambitions.

Under the Sapin 2 law of 2016, she would be ineligible for office for five years, unless she is somehow excused from this punishment by the court. This punishment has also become more and more likely throughout the process.

Which would mean that the deputy for Pas-de-Calais, who earned 13,288,686 votes (41.45%) in the 2022 Presidential Election, would likely see the end of her career and the rise of her protegé and litterary victim, Jordan Bardela.

With a younger, more dynamic, if less experienced, less policy-focused individual who is effectively a communications productm this could have some strong impacts on the political field.

However, will the rest of the RN be able to be lifted up by someone like Bardella? Or would it continue to struggle with the issue of much less media-friendly candidates?

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