Concrete Achievements

Tag: france

  • Glucksmann and Citizen Convention on Immigration

    The French presidential candidate Raphaël GLUCKSMANN has published proposals for how he would run the country – in book form, of course, this being France.

    A striking proposal highlighted by Le Monde today is a Citizen Convention on Immigration. This would be a design challenge (to say the least) but, given how toxic and deadlocked the immigration issue is in France and elsewhere in Europe, it might be a way to change the conversation.

    It’s the sort of issue for which citizen assemblies/conventions are well-suited – big picture, politically deadlocked, with a strategic or moral question at their heart.

    It’s not simple, though. Given how immigration is used as *the* core issue by anti-system parties, it would be a challenge to disentangle the actual question from side-questions about rural depopulation, economic changes, demographic shifts, and people’s sense of the past.

    But European mainstream politicians seem to have no solution to the immigration issue other than “copy the far right” and “hope it goes away” – this at least might move the conversation forward.

  • My phone setting is French and iOS 15 Siri used to read me English language texts in a…

    My phone setting is French and iOS 15 Siri used to read me English language texts in a very amusing “‘ow you say zees” accent. iOS 16 Siri just tells me “this message is not in French”. But I know that Siri knows English…

    On the topic of phones and language, I belatedly saw “Decision to Leave” last night and I think it’s the first film where on-phone translation is used to say something about a character rather than just for practical purposes. Soo-Rae (a Chinese

    immigrant in Korea played by Tang Wei) uses phone translation at particular moments because she is uncertain about how to express herself in Korean. But only for certain things, with (without spoiling the plot) a particular emotional significance.

  • Links from the week of 27 June 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • I’m getting a bit weary of this sort of thing.

    I’m getting a bit weary of this sort of thing. Are there people in the FR, DE etc political systems who think this? Probably. Is that the official position of any of those countries? No. Are they objectively behaving in pro-Putin ways? No. twitter.com/anders_aslund/…

    A few misquotes out of context (as is pointed out in the replies) don’t mean France is pressuring Ukraine to surrender. Slow action from Germany is not great but not a sign that they want Russia to win (listen to scholz’s speech last night).

    And the country that is actually blocking things – Hungary – never gets a mention. It’s all the bad old Western Europeans. (Or, for Brexiteers, the evil EU undermining heroic British leadership).

    Maybe I’m wrong, maybe stuff is happening behind the scenes that we don’t know about. But I would expect that to be sourced better than a few viral misquotes, unsupported by countries’ actual actions.

  • C’est fini pour le PS alors.

    C’est fini pour le PS alors. Ces arguments sont exactement les mêmes que les Britanniques en Irlande du nord, Orban ou Kaczynski. Céder le respect des lois pour quelques conscriptions. Vraiment, c’est honteux. twitter.com/PierreLepel/st…

    « Désobéir la loi internationale dans un rayon spécifique et limité » – ces sont les mots du ministère Britannique en essayant d’éviter les conséquences du TCA en Irlande. Et que dirait un MAÉ socialiste en réponse? « Ah ouais c’est pas mal comme idée ça »?

    J’en ai marre avec les politicos français qui prétendent que l’Europe est un grand méchant ogre que la France ne peut jamais influencer. Qu’ils aillent voter pour Le Pen et son Frexit!

  • 45% would be disturbing new high for the French far-right but …

    45% would be disturbing new high for the French far-right but …
    (and this is not criticism of Mij, who is v level-headed on it)
    1. Not all those votes are far right votes. Some are anti-system votes, some are anti-Macron votes. twitter.com/Mij_Europe/sta…

    2. Vote rot = inevitably more anti-Macron votes when he is defending his record after five years.
    3. Zemmour did Le Pen a favour by staking out even farther right positions
    4. Le Pen is a figure that people are more familiar with now and cost of living crisis is good for her

    5. Electoral system is handling Dutchification v badly. 2-round means representative of the universal 25% anti-system voting bloc will always get to run off against a fragmented mainstream.
    6. Le Pen vote will be the 2022 high point for RN. Assemblée elections will not go well.

    None of this is to say we shouldn’t be worried, but this is not “one more heave” and then the far right win. The non-extreme parties have five years to reconfigure themselves into a winning format for the post-Macron era. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t but they can.

  • If Hungary result stays as it is, chances of meaningful reform of EU are strongly down.

    If Hungary result stays as it is, chances of meaningful reform of EU are strongly down. Several more years of Orban and PiS blocking action against each other will use up the Scholz-Macron window of opportunity. After it, Macron can’t run again.

    Might even lead to revival of the small-core Rutte model, either within or outside the current Treaty framework, particularly if HU continues down path of being the Russian asset in Council.

    All in all, it’s extremely depressing. I would say “ah well, that’s democracy”, but given what Fidesz have done to electoral system and media, it’s not that.

  • Common EU borrowing to get round the debt brake?

    Common EU borrowing to get round the debt brake? German coalition negotiations are giving me policy whiplash.

    (From @POLITICOEurope morning briefing)

    “Back in his Berlin hotel room, Emmanuel Macron smiled as he removed his Christian Lindner mask. His plan was almost complete.”

  • Post work solo cinema trip and the first thing showing is Bond in French.

    Post work solo cinema trip and the first thing showing is Bond in French. I’ll give it a go …

    Bond dubbed into French was surprisingly good. I usually have FR and NL subtitles on-screen when watching in English, so having dubbed audio means no words on screen and I can focus on the visuals, which for Bond matter more than the dialogue.

    The strangeness of the dubbing/lip unsyncing isn’t too bad – and it helped that in this one Léa Seydoux did her own dubbing.

  • It has been depressingly educational to see how the media have taken one line in Macron’s…

    It has been depressingly educational to see how the media have taken one line in Macron’s speech that triggers their refugee crisis memories, taken it out of context from all the things Macron said about taking refugees and a better European strategy, framed it

    As the main point of the speech, and now Twitter is screaming that French voters have a choice between a male and female Le Pen. It’s notable that the only French media that made it the main theme was far-right rag Valeurs Actuelles.

    I would have liked to hear a different speech but this was not the speech Twitter thinks it was. If we allow this situation to be reframed for us into the 2015 refugee crisis it will become the 2015 refugee crisis and the far right will be delighted.

    Macron promised a new initiative with Germany very shortly. It needs to be of the right level of ambition and to focus on making the process more welcoming and more collective in Europe while protecting people from traffickers.

    The full speech is here: elysee.fr/emmanuel-macro…