🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Securing Europe's Future
Twitch stream this week, Macron prepares for second Sorbonne speech, Mélenchon forced to fight against antisemitism critiques, and Rima Hassan summoned by police about potential terrorist apologia
👋Hey guys, Julien here.
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This week
🎥Twitch stream this week
🇪🇺Macron prepares for second Sorbonne speech
✡️Mélenchon forced to fight against antisemitism critiques
👮Rima Hassan summoned by police about potential terrorist apologia
🎥Twitch stream this week
Right, as you read this, I’ll be running around Brussels in a 10km race, but I’ll also be taking on another challenge this week: booting up my Twitch stream to discuss some politics.
As you’ll see from our next story, Macron will be giving his second Sorbonne speech this coming Thursday, and it’s the best opportunity to give an explainer on all of this and have some question-and-answer sessions.
Barring technical issues, I’m planning this for the evening of Thursday 25 April, so if you’re interested, comment below and/or head over to Twitch.tv/JulienHoez to follow me and be notified of when I go live!
I’ll also give you guys a quick nudge in your inboxes when I’ve confirmed the time!
And worst case, I’ll throw a video up on YouTube
🇪🇺Macron prepares for second Sorbonne speech
Let’s start the week off with a big piece of news:
This coming Thursday, Emmanuel Macron will follow up on his landmark speech on European autonomy and the need for EU Strategic autonomy in the same place he initially gave it.
Pledging to “give a bit of an overview of what the country has done and what we are heading towards and especially for the years to come”, he also promised to make the case for Europe from his point of view.
“I will have the opportunity, obviously, as I did five years ago, to get involved in this campaign, to express my conviction for Europe which, to my eyes, is an essential subject in the true sense of the term for our country”
There are two ways we can read this initiative ahead of the speech.
Firstly, there’s the generous/presumptive position that the pro-Macron or pro-EU Strategic Autonomy crowd would take: that the French president is looking to give an extra push to his drive to prepare Europe for an increasingly dangerous world.
You could argue that he sees the writing on the wall; he’s afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t achieve what he has made the goal of his time as the leader of one of the EU’s largest member states, and he wants to give it a push.
On the other hand, however, you can make a cynical argument that his political opposition will likely make: that he has sees the Renaissance campaign crashing and burning, that he may not trust Valérie Hayer to win this, and that he’s taking over by repositioning the elections as a campaign between him and his beliefs and those of Marine Le Pen.
Stay tuned to find out what exactly he discusses next Thursday, and if you’re not already, subscribe to
.✡️Mélenchon forced to fight against antisemitism critiques
Aside from the above-cancelled events, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party colleagues did manage to organise one event in Roubaix this Wednesday, and while the Israel-Hamas war wasn’t the main theme, many participants thought it was the most important topic of the event.
Following the cancellation of the “Libre Palestine” event, Jean-Luc Mélenchon chose to get his own pound of flesh, stating that the “unfortunate people” who had worked to cancel the event had “ruined” his day.
“They know that they are lying, that Rima and I had not planned a racist conference, because anti-Semitism is racism and we are not racist”
- Jean-Luc Mélenchon in Roubaix, on Wednesday 17 April
This is despite having accused former PM Elisabeth Born, from a family of holocaust survivors, of adopting a “foreign” point of view. He has also repeatedly overstepped himself, notable having told the non-practising Jewish president of the Assemblée National, Yaël Braun-Pivet, to go and “camp in Tel-Aviv” and to “not speak in the name of French people” following her trip to Israel last year.
And he did this knowing the repeated harassment and death threats that Braun-Pivet and Eisabeth Born have received for years, as well as the troubling behaviour towards Jews throughout history.
Naturally, the far-left firebrand behaved as if he had done absolutely nothing wrong and that it was all a conspiracy against him.
Coming back to the present, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s speech was not only circulating around the war in Gaza but also touched upon everything from “capitalism” to “the financial sphere.” He couldn’t help himself from taking a final swipe against the parties he disagrees with.
He called those attending the event to cast a “peace ballot” against the “criminals and their friends”, which was clearly an allusion to those who are pro-Palestine and those who are pro-Israel.
The issue with this kind of statement, as you can imagine, is that linking parties as pro-Israel to criminality and collusion does nothing to abate the regular antisemitism that Jewish citizens, or even people who “look Jewish”, are forced to suffer.
While it undoubtedly played well for the crowd there, this event showcased yet another problematic trait of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his fellow far-left firebrands:
A lack of critical thinking, an overabundance of short-term thinking, and the chasing of political soundbites at all costs.
👮Rima Hassan summoned by police about potential terrorist apologia
And to finish up the week, something very interesting popped up regarding Rima Hasan, the high-ranking candidate for La France Insoumise, on top of all the above.
French police have summoned the Franco-Palestinian lawyer gone politician under the accusation of advocating for terrorism on social media, and she will be heard on Tuesday 30 April.
The police have said that they intend to allow her to be “heard freely on facts of public apology for an act of terrorism, committed by means of a communication service at public online” in publications she made between 5 November and 1 December, before being a candidate.
Naturally, this has been politicised with reckless abandon. Rima Hassan has done her best to benefit from this situation as much as possible by linking it to the recent event cancellations.
Hassan’s lawyer, Vincent Brengarth, has come out and said that he finds it “truly astonishing. It criminalises Rima Hassan's expressions warning of the urgency of the situation in Gaza. It is clear to everyone that it comes in the middle of an election campaign and is designed to weaken Rima Hassan, in a context of multiple pressures".
Further to this, Hassan made a statement that she would “take this opportunity to express my concern about the ambient climate which weighs on activist and political voices on the Palestinian subject” and fight against “the political pressures aimed at compromising [her] freedom of expression. These pressures threaten our freedoms and the state of our democracy and occur especially in the context of the European elections, a crucial political moment for the future of the French people.”
While she has said she is confident in her ability to defend her statements and her person, the problem here is that, in attempting to investigate these potential infringements on French law, the possibility for abuse from irresponsible politicians who are doing everything to win a nice job leaves us all vulnerable.
But, we’ll have to wait and see what the police decide after they have interviewed her.
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The term "strategic autonomy" is more of a buzzword than (geopolitical) reality or possibility. For example, there is not national nor European sovereignty as regarding AI and climate change problems, challenges and effects. Even areas as migration, economy and energy need more global and regional integrations.
If Macron was smarter, he could have focused on federalism from global to local level. For example, France is over-centralised while the EU has governance problems and lack of decentralisation.