(MON 4/25/22)
EU Score: Democracy 2, Authoritarianism 1 … By now you know about incumbent French President Emmanuel Macron’s (pictured) decisive, but relatively narrow, 58.5% to 41.5% victory over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s runoff elections (Associated Press). Macron had won his first term over Le Pen in 2017 by a 66% to 34% margin.
It was just one of two victories for liberal democracy over authoritarianism. Also on Sunday, in Slovenia the opposition liberal party had received nearly 34% of the vote while the governing conservative party had just 24%, with 97% of the ballots in the parliamentary election counted, the AP says. The winning Freedom Movement can now form a new coalition government with the New Slovenia party (7% of the vote), Social Democrats (more than 6%) and the Left Party (4%).
Of Le Pen and Jansa: France’s Le Pen has ties with the Kremlin going back to her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen and 1968, when Russia ran the Soviet Union (which says something about the bi-polar political philosophy of populism). Just days before Sunday’s French runoffs, she laid out some foreign policy priorities, according to Salon.
They include an attitude toward NATO that sounds very Trumpian:
•Limit military support to Ukraine.
•Leave NATO’s integrated command.
•Relaunch “strategic rapprochement” between NATO and Russia as soon as peace between Moscow and Kyiv can be secured (really?).
Slovenia’s defeated incumbent prime minister, Janez Jansa, is an ally of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the authoritarian populist who won a fourth consecutive landslide just three weeks ago, and he is an admirer of Donald J. Trump, who is still trying to win the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Jansa has been in office just two years, clearly not long enough to smother the local free press as Orban has.
Name to watch: Leader of Slovenia’s winning Freedom Movement and thus likely the nation’s next prime minister is Robert Golob.
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Speaker fixed? … Late last Friday The Hustings initiated a weekend Twitter poll (@NewsHustings) that asked whether House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would become next speaker, replacing Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) assuming, as everyone does, that Republicans will win the chamber’s majority in November’s mid-term elections. Our poll was a response to McCarthy’s denial that he had called on Donald J. Trump to resign as president after the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
Quell surprise – a recording surfaced.
Scroll down to the next center-column headline, “Speaker Blown,” for the whole story.
Shortly after we posted our poll, The Wall Street Journal published an interview with ex-President Trump, who said he wasn’t pleased to learn of McCarthy’s comments in the January 10, 2021 House GOP leadership call, but said that the California congressman ultimately never advised him to quit and quickly reversed his stance “once he found out the facts.”
That must have been one helluva visit to Mar-a-Lago McCarthy made later that month.
Anyway, our poll predicted overwhelmingly that McCarthy was “toast”, with more than 80% for the affirmative, until news of the interview spread. It would still look bad for the once and future speaker…
•McCarthy becomes speaker: 23.2%
•McCarthy is toast: 76.8%.
This is of 155 votes cast. It should be clear this is not scientifically balanced. But it is a good gauge of our readers’ thoughts. Twitter reader comments appear in the left and right columns.
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Former Sen. Orrin Hatch … (R-UT) served in the upper chamber from 1977 to 2019 and has been remembered for his ability to his friendship with liberals, especially the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). But the longest-serving Republican senator (sixth overall) also allied with President Trump and was one of the key figures in assuring the Supreme Court’s conservative majority (per The New York Times). He died Saturday in Salt Lake City, at the age of 88.
--Todd Lassa