Arnaud Bertrand
This 👇 is insane and really illustrates how far France has fallen. France's Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, now says that anyone "who is distrustful of the European Union" is basically a useful idiot for Putin. The implication being that distrust or criticism of the EU is not a legitimate democratic position anymore but a form of collaboration with "the enemy." Which is absolutely insane given France's recent history: De Gaulle was famously opposed to the very kind of supranational Europe that the EU has become, and so have been a number of major French political figures both on the right (like Philippe Séguin) or the left (like Jean-Pierre Chevènement). Not to mention the 55% of French voters who rejected the EU Constitution in 2005 (and whose vote was ignored because that very constitution was adopted later on regardless under the Treaty of Lisbon). In effect, by Barrot's criteria - heck, by the current French government criteria since he is speaking as the government's Foreign Minister - De Gaulle, Séguin, Chevènement and 55% of the French population would be classified as Russian agents 🤦 The craziest aspect of it, if you take a step back, is that, fundamentally, people like De Gaulle who opposed EU integration did so because they cared first and foremost about France - about its independence, its sovereignty, its right to govern itself. Calling that a form of foreign allegiance is just absurd and a complete inversion of reality: love of country and patriotism is being rebranded as treason. More worryingly, this also shows the current state of the "democratic debate" in France, which is neither democratic, nor a debate. Not democratic because this is the French government treating legitimate and reasonable positions as treason. And not a debate because there's nothing left to debate: the EU has become a dogma, and distrust of it has become disloyalty and taboo. One can legitimately be afraid that this is the road to a form of totalitarian ideology across Europe, dressed up as centrism, where the only acceptable position is unquestioning loyalty to supranational institutions whose defenders, tellingly, would rather question the patriotism of their critics than submit themselves to the verdict of the people.