Haaretz: The Woman Trying to Oust Erdogan Picks Up Steam

Aksener, 61, rejects reconciliation with the Kurds and doesn’t like the presence of so many Syrian refugees in Turkey. Her supporters, like those of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, come from the nationalist, conservative and religious communities. But she also rejects the omnipotent presidential regime that Erdogan has entrenched with constitutional amendments barely approved in the April 2017 referendum. [...]

Publicly, Erdogan treats Aksener as a nuisance who poses no real threat. At first, the five parliament members who left the Nationalist Movement Party with her couldn’t run in the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections, which have been moved up a year and a half. Under Turkish law, a party must have at least 20 legislators to run, or branches in at least half the country’s provinces. Aksener’s party hadn’t fulfilled these conditions, but opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaraulo “donated” 15 lawmakers who quit his party to join Aksener’s, letting her contend in the elections. [...]

Still, to topple Erdogan, his opponents have been impressive in their willingness to concede parts of their ideology and join activists and leaders with different principles. Turkey hasn’t seen such a coalition for a long time. But even if they succeed, Turkey will plunge into intense wrangling over political and economic issues that would threaten the government’s stability.

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Politico: Barnier can’t succeed Juncker if French don’t agree

The pro-European former foreign minister and two-term commissioner belongs to the powerful European People’s Party parliamentary group. He narrowly lost out to Jean-Claude Juncker for its nomination in 2014. This time around, he has a job championing Europe that includes a campaign-style tour of the 27 countries that will choose the next Commission chief. It’s little wonder he’s been widely considered a front-runner for the position when it comes up for grabs in 2019. [...]

To secure the EPP’s nomination, Barnier needs to run as the choice of his French conservative party back home, which is unlikely to happen. And his ascent to the presidency would be nearly impossible without the support of French President Emmanuel Macron. And that’s less than a sure bet. [...]

When asked about his 2019 plans, Barnier says he’s focused on Brexit, but his ambition is an open secret in Brussels. He has the credentials for the job, with two stints in Brussels and four stints as a French Cabinet member. He is lauded throughout Europe for his his so-far successful negotiating tactics and his talent at keeping the EU27 united throughout the Brexit talks. And yet, it will take more than encouragements from Brussels and the rest of the bloc to secure the Commission presidency. [...]

Laurent Wauquiez, the arch-conservative head of Barnier’s French party, Les Républicains, is the deadliest difficulty. The youthful leader of the former moderately conservative party has steered it on a hard-right course, with little patience for anything that looks like European integration. In a 2014 book titled “Europe: Everything must change,” Wauquiez even suggests the EU go back to its six original founding members.

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Spiegel: Germany's Incredibly Shrinking Role on the World Stage

Germany has fallen into the background again, and this isn't solely the result of Merkel's tortuously protracted attempts to form a government following elections last September. That is the spin the Chancellery is now giving it. But in recent years, Merkel has frittered away much of her political capital -- particularly with refugee policies that were an affront to almost all of Germany's allies. Merkel has also seen her power in Berlin diminished significantly. For years, Horst Seehofer -- who heads the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's CDU -- gave the chancellor a free hand in foreign policy matters. But he now says there is no way he would have gone along with a military strike against Syria. "I would have used my veto," he says.  [...]

At the same time, the chancellor also felt thoroughly flattered. Merkel had long hesitated in announcing whether she would run for a fourth term, but she decided to do so just a short time after Trump's election, a decision that was linked to a feeling that her leadership was badly needed in a world that was coming unhinged. And then, in the middle of her campaign, she made her famous statement that made it sound as though Merkel was abandoning the postwar order. Europe, she said, had to be prepared to "take its fate into its own hands." [...]

Merkel would never come to the idea of seeking to assume America's leadership role. She's fully aware of the dilapidated state of the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces, and she knows that the German people don't want to become entangled in the world's conflicts. Merkel's pragmatism has always been the source of her success. It was only when she showed an apparently idealistic side during the refugee crisis that her popularity began to slip. [...]

Even if it is difficult for her, the German chancellor needs to establish better ties to Trump, and it would be correct to rebuild contacts at all levels. Macron has already demonstrated that it is possible to exercise influence on Washington. It's in Germany's interest that the United States remain in Syria in order to protect the Kurds there from Turkish aggression, but also to ensure that a Western presence remains and that the conflict is not left entirely in the hands of the Russians, Iranians and Turks.

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Political Critique: Germany’s Populist Temptation

In a March interview with the tabloid Bild, Seehofer declared, in perfect populist fashion, that, “Islam does not belong to Germany.” The purpose of such statements is to draw lines within the government and place himself on the side of the anti-immigrant voters who turned out for the AfD last year. Merkel, together with almost all of Germany’s political class, has had no choice but to push back. At the same time, the AfD has lost political ground on which to criticize Seehofer and the CSU. [...]

But, again, Seehofer’s “Eastern European” behavior does not come as a total surprise. In March 2017, while Merkel was preparing for her first meeting with US President Donald Trump, Seehofer went to Moscow to cozy up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since then, he has consistently opposed all sanctions on Russia on any grounds. [...]

Still, even if Seehofer’s populist gambit fails, he has already succeeded in pulling the government to the right. Germany is clearly acting to ease EU pressure on Poland, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries that are flouting the rule of law and undermining European solidarity with respect to migrants and refugees. [...]

The fact that Seehofer is embracing his inner populist does not necessarily augur what Dobrindt has described as a European “conservative revolution.” But it does suggest that Orbán and PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński’s “illiberal counterrevolution” is gaining momentum.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Memory of the Defeated

Even after the Fascist collapse in 1945, diehard elements defended the lost cause. Beyond the murky world of underground paramilitary groups, they also formed a new party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI). Named after the RSI, this party was by the 1970s Italy’s fourth largest electoral force, scoring close to 10 percent of the national vote. It was not just a far-right party, but one that explicitly claimed Mussolini’s legacy. [...]

The Resistance parties at the center of the new political order had long denied the “Italianness” of the Mussolini regime, referring to his supporters as the nazifascist’. This label totally identified them with the German occupier, and thus presented them as mere traitors who had sold out Italy to the Duce’s alliance with Hitler. The Resistance was not, then, one side in a civil war, but the representation of Italy itself. [...]

While De Boccard’s work was written for a subculture seeking exculpatory myths, such narratives could also take advantage of a wider Italian tendency to take responsibility for the Holocaust. Projected onto Germans alone, the Holocaust could be portrayed as external to Italian national history. Indeed, in the early postwar decades, specifically Jewish suffering was marginal to institutional memorialization of the German occupation. [...]

In this sense, Italy’s New Left began not in 1968 but in 1960 with the defense of what had not been won for certain in the Resistance. Yet the failure of the MSI’s conservative turn, and the strengthening of a militant left, also radicalized the neofascist base and fed the rise of paramilitary organizations active over subsequent decades. First forming in 1960, Stefano delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale was a leading force in this new galaxy. [...]

This harmful banalization of the Resistance was particularly notable under Giorgio Napolitano, the 2006–2015 Italian president. For almost five decades a Communist, and today a centrist Democrat, Napolitano drew attention to the crimes committed by partisans, breaking with the Communists’ once-staunch defense of their record. He used these incidents to highlight the dangers of “ideological blindness.”

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The Guardian: A French revolution that pushed immigrants to the margins

Let’s start with the real birthplace of May ’68. It was not ancient Paris at all, but the capital’s troubled outer districts where France was struggling to accommodate its former colonial subjects. More specifically, an American-style extension to the Sorbonne was being built in the town of Nanterre. Its campus model was meant to represent inclusion – a chance to open up further education. [...]

Revisionists have claimed that the 22 March student movement that occupied Nanterre’s main administrative centre in 1968 was concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised, but there is scant evidence to support this. Instead, the reasons for the action ranged from anger at the rough handling of anti-Vietnam war agitators to a demand for men and women to be able to sleep together in halls of residence. [...]

Yes, workers from minority communities participated in the strikes that accompanied the rioting, but lack of identity papers often excluded them from the trade unions that joined the students. As today, many from immigrant backgrounds stayed away from officialdom because of the constant menace of deportation.

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