UnHerd: How the gilets jaunes could save Macron’s skin

President Emmanuel Macron, stunned at first by the vehement hatred of the gilets jaunes, is fighting back. He is rising in the opinion polls for the first time in nine months (although his popularity remains at historically low levels). His performances at a series of marathon debates with small town mayors have been impressive. A man who glided serenely to the highest position in the nation before the age of 40 might yet survive, even learn from, his first great ordeal by public loathing. [...]

What is evident, driving around France in recent days, is that the movement has wilted in its rural and outer-suburban heartlands. In mid-November, 40% of the cars in my part of Normandy displayed yellow high-vis vests on their dashboards. My own unscientific poll of the yellow splodges in car windscreens in rural Calvados now averages 14 per cent. [...]

They insist that they are peaceful but they refuse to condemn the violence at the weekend protests in Paris and other cities. Like the more militant yellow vests, they see the movement not as a protest but as an uprising that will end when they have overturned existing democratic institutions. [...]

There is an undoubted influence from the far-Right: several prominent gilets jaunes “spokespeople” have connections or sympathies. Absurd anti-semitic and alt-right conspiracy theories proliferate on gilets jaunes social media. France has been “sold” to the United Nations. Alsace and Lorraine have been ceded to Germany. The Russian economy boomed after Vladimir Putin threw out the Rothschild banks.

There is also an attempted hijacking by the ultra-Left. Some gilets jaunes leaders speak of the movement as a “class war”. The most violent of the “weekends only” protesters are bourgeois, metropolitan youths who belong to antifascist, anticapitalist militias. [...]

The latest polls show his party jumping ahead by five points to recapture the lead in the European elections in May from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If part of the gilets movement does run candidates of its own, they will take votes away from the far Right and the far Left. The great beneficiary would, paradoxically, be Emmanuel Macron. In other words, the French part of the EU-wide poll in May will be the most interesting European elections in European history.

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New Scientist: We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it

However evidence has been growing that the function of amyloid proteins may be as a defence against bacteria, leading to a spate of recent studies looking at bacteria in Alzheimer’s, particularly those that cause gum disease, which is known to be a major risk factor for the condition.

Bacteria involved in gum disease and other illnesses have been found after death in the brains of people who had Alzheimer’s, but until now, it hasn’t been clear whether these bacteria caused the disease or simply got in via brain damage caused by the condition.  [...]

In the new study, Cortexyme have found the toxic enzymes that P. gingivalis uses to feed on human tissue – called gingivains – in 96 per cent of the 54 Alzheimer’s brain samples they studied. They also found the bacteria themselves in all three Alzheimer’s brains whose DNA they examined.[...]

Some brain samples from people without Alzheimer’s also had P. gingivalis and protein accumulations, but at lower levels. We already know that amyloid and tau can accumulate in the brain for 10 to 20 years before Alzheimer’s symptoms begin. This, says Lynch, shows P. gingivalis is a cause of Alzheimer’s, not a result.

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Social Europe: Can Italy survive its self-inflicted wounds?

Italy’s stand-off with Brussels over its 2019 budget deficit ended a few days before Christmas, after two months of intense negotiations, forcing the Italian Parliament hastily to approve the budget law on December 30th 2018. Many commentators spoke of a law ‘decided by the European Commission’ and the main opposition party—the Partito Democratico (PD)—filed a claim to the Constitutional Court against the government for rushing it through the Senate without allowing due time for debate. While the court eventually dismissed the claim, it warned that similar ‘law-making procedures should be abandoned as they may not survive future constitutional claims’. [...]

The Italian crisis with Brussels was completely self-induced, created and pushed by the populist forces solidly at the helm of the government: the Five Stars Movement and the League. The commission’s preoccupations did not stem from the size of the Italian public debt (131.2 per cent of GDP, according to the Italian statistics institute, ISTAT) nor the extent of any target deficit (whether 0.8, 2.04 or 2.4 per cent of GDP)—think about Japan, which has a public debt of over 235 per cent of GDP, or France, which is running a deficit of 2.7 per cent of GDP (OECD data). Rather, Italy has been on the brink of losing the confidence of domestic and foreign investors, and the European Commission, because of the budget choices the government made in the budget law. [...]

According to the latest figures published by ISTAT on November 30th, economic indicators are worrisome: the country’s output shrank by 0.1 per cent in the third trimester of 2018—the only EU country where this happened. Unemployment has grown to 10.6 per cent and youth unemployment to 32.5 per cent. In October, Moody’s downgraded Italy’s credit rating to one notch above junk, while Standards and Poors revised its outlook from stable to negative. A recent Goldman Sachs report forecast the economy to ‘flirt with recession’. The Bank of Italy has cut its growth forecasts to 0.6 per cent for 2019 and 0.9 per cent for 2020, from prior estimates of 1 per cent and 1.1 per cent, respectively. And the International Monetary Fund has revised down its own forecasts to match those of the Bank of Italy, since ‘concerns about sovereign and financial risks have weighed on domestic demand’. [...]

For example, the League has created the perception that Italy today has a problem with immigration, when the numbers say otherwise. It connected its proposal to curb immigrant arrivals with values of fairness and a sense of identity, supposedly under threat by immigrants taking Italians’ jobs. Similarly, the Five Stars Movement campaigned for the introduction of universal basic income as a measure of equity, easily connecting with the public need for economic justice, but insufficient to create the conditions for more and better jobs, the real problem suffered by Italians. Those policies were powerful drivers of a populist narrative which won handily at the March 2018 general elections.

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openDemocracy: Nicolás Maduro, the usurper

Between 2009 and 2012 we carried out a research on political leaders in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela. We interviewed 285 leaders, including former Presidents, former Vice Presidents, acting Vice Presidents, mayors, deputies, senators, political party presidents, political journalists and trade union officials.[...]

The second type of leader is ambivalently democratic. He respects the rights of citizens, works cooperatively, but seeks to accumulate personal power. He is the type of leader who believes that in order to strengthen his position he needs to negotiate and make concessions.[...]

Unlike the democratic leader, the ambivalent one respects but does not strengthen democratic institutions. In fact, he can end up weakening democracy in his bid to increase personal power.

The weak usurper of power wavers between challenging and accepting the rule of law and State institutions. The historical context is crucial here, for it can allow, or block, the leader's capacity to increase his autonomy.[...]

His recurrent lies, the shortage of goods, administrative corruption, the profound deterioration of the economy, the rampant devaluation of the Bolivarian currency, political control, the empowerment of military sects, all come together in the usurpation of power and the establishment of a regime showing clearly totalitarian, militaristic and undemocratic tendencies.

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euronews: Far-right lawmakers in Germany walk out on Holocaust survivor's speech

"A party is represented here today that disparages those (democratic) values and downplays the crimes of the National Socialists," Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and President of the Jewish Community in Munich, told the regional assembly. [...]

"The so-called AfD bases it politics on hate and exclusion and doesn't abide by our democratic constitution," Knobloch said in her speech, given in remembrance of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. [...]

"It is scandalous that the president of the Jewish community in Munich abused a memorial service for the victims of Nazism to defame the whole AfD and its legitimate and democratically elected faction using evil blanket insinuations," she said.[...]

Two years ago, Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD's leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, triggered anger after he told supporters that Berlin's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a "memorial of shame" and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

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