"Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau justified its ban on Georgescu with the allegation that the candidate “violated the very obligation to defend democracy”. This is preposterous. The right to vote and to stand for election is exactly that: an unearned right automatically afforded to anyone with the correct passport and the capacity to breathe. Unlike a medal or a university degree, it is not an award or a privilege to be earned. The moment anyone — a judge, a commissioner, even a wise philosopher king — acquires the power to limit that right, a new power is created to restrict the franchise which is by definition anti-democratic.

Before anyone reaches for the “naïve liberal” or “useful idiot” labels, hear me out. I grew up under a fascist totalitarian regime. I know ultra-Rightists better than most. As a kid, I watched them beat my mother, abduct my father, and imprison my favourite uncle. If given the chance, these people will happily set up authoritarian regimes while luring the masses with toxic delusions of grandeur. Yet nothing reinforces them more than the sights and sounds of liberal totalitarianism at work: ideological judges and electoral commissions banning them as if to prove that everyone is in on it, and that democracy is just a cover for the stealthier form of authoritarianism.

To those who are prepared to turn a blind eye because Georgescu is allegedly a Kremlin plant, I have a question: can you really not see what a magnificent gift this ban is to Putin? How he is loving the spectacle of liberal Europe copying his methods of eliminating a political opponent?"

https://unherd.com/newsroom/liberals-should-be-outraged-by-calin-georgescus-election-ban/

#EU #Romania #Georgescus #Democracy #RadicalCentrism

"La France Insoumise MP David Guiraud told Jacobin in January that France’s manufactured deficit crisis was part of a premeditated plan to cut social spending.

“French capitalists have never tolerated social security,” Guiraud said then. “When it was created . . . it was hundreds of billions of euros which escaped the logic of the private sector, hundreds of billions of euros which they couldn’t make a profit off of. They know that they’re breaking social security. They know it. I think they do it deliberately for the most part.”

Boosting military spending while trying to maintain “fiscal discipline” will result in the same thing. A column by Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times on March 5 titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state” gave away the game even more directly.

“[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt,” Ganesh wrote.

The threat of war is a useful motive.

“Chronic discomfort isn’t enough,” Ganesh elaborated. “An element of real fear has to come in, as perhaps it has now.”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/france-eu-defense-spending-austerity

#EU #France #Macron #RadicalCentrism #Rearmament #WarfareState #WelfareState #Austerity #PublicDebt

"Introducing the NFP parties’ no-confidence motion on Wednesday afternoon, France Insoumise MP Éric Coquerel insisted that this was not just a vote on Barnier’s minority government. He promised “today we sound the death knell of a term in office — the president’s.” Macron may not depart the stage just yet, with parliament unlikely to impeach him, and voters may still not get their say on his replacement before 2027. But if the president called a snap election in June promising a return to stability, he has merely sped up the collapse of his authority."

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/france-government-barnier-macron-nfp

#Macron #France #Macronism #RadicalCentrism #Politics

"Progressives, Yglesias says, are “detached from practical reality.” But here we have someone who advocates readying ourselves for a war with China, even if in doing so America hurts itself economically, who wants to embrace fossil fuels without taking climate science seriously (he thinks beating China is also more important than climate change), and whose political advice for Kamala Harris was that “she should pivot to the center” (she did, and got creamed). I think it’s very clear we should not listen to such a person, and that if America is to have a future worth living in, guys like this are going to have to be ignored. Because Yglesias, for all that I’ve dwelt on him personally, is not the only smug centrist in the world. There is an entire class of people like him, all posturing as experts, consultants, and pundits of one kind or another. And these people try to pass themselves off as merely offering data and common sense, when many of their positions ignore relevant data and conflict entirely with basic common sense. We should show the same level of respect for the opinions of Matt Yglesias and his ilk that he shows for the “socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe,” that is to say, none at all."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-opinions-of-matt-yglesias-should-be-ignored

#USA #DemocraticParty #PresidentialElection2024 #KamalaHarris #RadicalCentrism

"Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-trump-elites-centrism.html

#USA #Trump #Politics #DemocraticParty #PresidentialElection2024 #WorkingClass #Populism #ClassWar #Neoliberalism #RadicalCentrism

#USA #KamalaHarris #RadicalCentrism #Clinton #Trump: "For weeks now, it’s been clear the Harris campaign has decided that it’s going to rerun the Clinton 2016 strategy on the off chance that that year really was a fluke, and that Trump really is so hated that Americans will have no choice but to vote for his opponent. It didn’t work in 2016, but this time . . .

What does that look like in practice? It looks like dropping the “negative” label of weird and performing civil disagreement instead. It looks like giving up on exciting the party’s progressive flank — actively thumbing your nose at them, in fact — and explicitly pivoting to trying to win over Republicans instead. It looks like rolling out white papers and policy positions that few will read, while rarely talking publicly about what you would actually do when given the chance at a public forum. Like running to Trump’s right on immigration and foreign policy, even calling Iran, absurdly, the country’s most dangerous adversary and suggesting you might launch a preemptive strike on it.

Okay, Democrats would say, but what about some of Harris’s policy announcements? Like her housing platform, for instance, which pledges to build three million homes and to give first-time homebuyers a grant of up to $25,000? Or what about her recent announcement that she would expand Medicare to cover home care services, vision, and hearing? Doesn’t that point to a different, more progressive policy–based direction than Clinton’s 2016 run, even if she barely talks about it?

The answer to which is, not really, because this platform is actually a major step backward from the Biden years."

https://jacobin.com/2024/10/kamala-harris-hillary-clinton-2016/

#France #Macron #RadicalCentrism #Democracy: "Did standing down in favor of Macronites in order to defeat Le Pen perhaps reflect gullibility on France Insoumise’s part? No. For years, Macron has cast this left-wing force as at least as dangerous as the far right, and there was no chance of smooth collaboration with him. It is unsurprising that he will not nominate an NFP-led government, and nor is there sufficient pressure to force him to do so. France Insoumise asserts the Left’s right to govern in order to expose Macron and to show that it is not interested in protest alone.

There can be no doubt that it faces a steeply uphill path. France Insoumise remains easily the biggest “left-populist” force in Europe, and France has not become one of those many countries where politics is reduced to a conflict between liberals and nationalists. Clearly, a major factor in this is the working-class mobilizations over living standards. But as well as forthrightly championing demands like a return to retirement at age sixty, France Insoumise has also positioned itself as the defender of republican values and an open vision of French identity.

This is also tied in with a vision of democratic change. The current gridlock, and the risk of a technocratic and even austerian government, point to the need for a different constitutional model based on greater control from below and a proportional representation of the electorate." https://jacobin.com/2024/08/france-macron-nfp-left-govern