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Macron Calls Snap Election After Far-Right Gains in EU Contests
"We live in a Europe where neofascism and absenteeism are on the rise—a combination that allows the oligarchs to plunder," said Yanis Varoufakis.
Jun 10, 2024
French President Emmanuel Macron called snap legislative elections on Sunday after his party suffered a major defeat in European Parliament contests, with Marine Le Pen's far-right, xenophobic National Rally scoring twice the support of Macron's Renaissance.
In a nationally televised speech following the elections, which saw the far-right make gains across much of the European Union, Macron said that "the rise of nationalists and demagogues is a danger for our nation and for Europe."
"After this day, I cannot go on as though nothing has happened," said Macron, who dissolved the lower house of France's Parliament and announced elections will be held on June 30 and July 7.
Macron's move was described as an "extraordinary gamble." As the Financial Timesreported, Macron's "alliance could be crushed, which would force him to appoint a prime minister from another party, such as the center-right Les Republicains or even the far-right RN, in an arrangement known as a 'cohabitation.'"
"In such a scenario," FT added, "Macron would be left with little power over domestic affairs with three years left as president."
Preliminary election data shows that the conservative European People's Party (EPP) is set to control around 190 of 720 seats in the European Parliament after Sunday's elections, maintaining its status as the body's largest force. But Politiconoted that "if the far-right were to form a single group it would be the second-largest force in Parliament" behind the EPP.
In addition to Le Pen's National Rally, "Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy similarly soared, with more than a quarter of voters backing the group," Politico reported. "The two groups in the European Parliament on the furthest right of the spectrum, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, will control 131 seats in the chamber. That's not counting the Alternative for Germany's 15 lawmakers, the 10 representatives of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party, the six belonging to Poland's Confederation party, or the three members of Bulgaria's pro-Kremlin Revival party."
Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25, whose political party was unable to secure a seat in the European Parliament, said after Sunday's elections that "we live in a Europe where neofascism and absenteeism are on the rise—a combination that allows the oligarchs to plunder."
"Tonight, I call on all the forces of the Radical Ecological Left that were not with us today to join us so that, while preserving our differences, we can respond to the yearning of the people of the Left and Ecology for united, militant unity on the basis of common values and a common program," said Varoufakis.
In yesterday's European elections, I suffered a crushing personal defeat - along with my comrades in Greece & Germany. Our sick societies, caught up between the radical centre & neofascism, cannot help a dying Palestine, a war-torn Ukraine, our own people. But fight on we must!
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) June 10, 2024
The far-right did not advance in every E.U. nation. The Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots, saw their share of the vote fall, lagging the Social Democrats, the Moderates, and the Greens.
Finland, meanwhile, "bucked a continent-wide trend of rising support for parties on the outer fringe of right-wing politics, with the Left Alliance and the National Coalition winning big at the expense of the nationalist Finns Party," the country's broadcasting company reported.
"Leftist leader Li Andersson received more votes than any other candidate has ever received in a European election," the outlet added.
Christian Christensen, a professor at Stockholm University, wrote on social media Sunday that there's "lots of talk about a far-right wave in Europe, but at least in the three Nordics (Sweden, Finland, and Denmark) it looks like a good night for the left and bad night for the nativist right."
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'Shameful': UK Conservatives Push Through Plan to Deport Asylum-Seekers to Rwanda
"The U.K. government could literally pay every refugee a £30,000 annual salary for life, and it would be cheaper," said one critic. "We're burning money just to enjoy the cruelty."
Apr 23, 2024
Legal and human rights experts on Tuesday said the British Conservative Party's decision to push through a bill allowing the government to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda—effectively overriding last year's Supreme Court ruling—represented a "desperate low" from lawmakers eager to exploit migrants ahead of elections expected later this year.
"A lot of this is performative cruelty," Daniel Merriman, a lawyer whose clients have included some asylum-seekers whom the Tories tried to deport after it first introduced its plan in 2022, toldNPR. "The elephant in the room is the upcoming election."
After a prolonged debate, the unelected House of Lords cleared the way to pass the Safety of Rwanda bill early Tuesday morning, after dropping several proposed amendments including one that would have required independent verification that the central African country is a safe place to send migrants.
The House of Commons then passed the bill, and King Charles III is expected to formally approve the legislation in the coming days.
The bill requires courts and immigration officials to "conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country" to send asylum-seekers, even though the Supreme Court ruled in November that people deported to the country would face a significant risk of refoulement, or being sent back to the countries where they originally fled persecution or violence.
The Conservative government signed a treaty with Rwanda last December to strengthen protections for asylum-seekers, including a provision that partially bans Rwanda from sending people back to their home countries.
But the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called on the U.K. to abandon the plan and instead "take practical measures to address irregular flows of refugees and migrants, based on international cooperation and respect for international human rights law."
"The new legislation marks a further step away from the U.K.'s long tradition of providing refuge to those in need, in breach of the Refugee Convention," said Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. "Protecting refugees requires all countries—not just those neighboring crisis zones—to uphold their obligations. This arrangement seeks to shift responsibility for refugee protection, undermining international cooperation and setting a worrying global precedent."
"The U.K. has a proud history of effective, independent judicial scrutiny," Grandi added. "It can still take the right steps and put in place measures to help address the factors that drive people to leave home, and share responsibility for those in need of protection, with European and other international partners."
Dorothy Guerrero, head of policy and advocacy at Global Justice Now, noted that "disastrous foreign and economic policies of successive governments have contributed to the need for people to seek refuge."
"These same people's lives are continually used as a political football, after years of being scapegoats for bad government decisions," said Guerrero. "Statements from politicians are now even more blatantly devoid of any pretense of care for human rights. We will not stop pushing for a change of course, with safe routes to seek asylum in the U.K. so that people no longer have to risk their lives in the Channel."
"The passing of the Rwanda Bill is a shameful day for the U.K.," she added.
Hours after the legislation was passed, French officials announced that at least five people, including a seven-year-old child, had been killed while attempting to cross the English Channel, bound for the U.K. in an overloaded inflatable boat.
At The New Statesman, associate political editor Rachel Cunliffe wrote Tuesday that the tragedy reveals "the flaws of the Rwanda plan," which proponents say could deter migrants from seeking refuge in Britain.
Proponents of the Rwanda plan will inevitably point to today's disaster as further evidence that strong measures are needed to address the issue of Channel crossings. They will accuse Labour and opposition parties of ignoring the human cost of letting this crisis continue and argue that lives are at stake if the government does not act.
[...]
The reality is that a substantial number of people who pay people traffickers large sums of money to crowd them on to a tiny boat do so because they feel they have no other option. Fleeing war and persecution, they are desperate. And so they are prepared to take desperate measures. Measures that sometimes lead to tragedy, but which are deemed necessary given the hopelessness of their situation.
It is hard to see how the threat to send a tiny fraction of those who arrive (Rwanda has said it will only take 150-200 migrants) changes this calculation.
The Labour Party, which is leading Conservatives in polls ahead of the expected elections, has vowed to scrap the legislation if it wins control of the government later this year, and critics have expressed doubt that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will actually secure deportation flights before Britons vote.
One flight was grounded in June 2022 after the European Court of Human Rights intervened, and on Monday the OHCHR warned aviation authorities that they would risk violating international law if they allow "unlawful removals" of asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
Critics have also pointed to a finding by the National Audit Office that the deportations would cost £1.8 million ($2.2 million) per person.
"The U.K. government could literally pay every refugee a £30,000 annual salary for life, and it would be cheaper than sending them to Rwanda," said David Andress, a history professor at the University of Portsmouth. "We're burning money just to enjoy the cruelty."
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