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Von der Leyen criticises European far right for being ‘Putin’s proxies’
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Antidemocratic bad actors can't take part in a democracy (if the current system could be even called that with its flaws). It's not about banning parties (or opinions as they like to frame it). There's an apparent lack of safety mechanisms to prevent abuse
But the way Europe works today, that's a national issue.
Hungary and Poland had weak constitutions and lacked democratic guarantees because their constitutions were designed to be subject to change; the idea was that democratically elected officials would draft new and better conditions after a transition period, rather than having the communist parties at the table when drafting them. Unfortunately, the social democrats never bothered to change the constitution, leaving them unchanged until far right parties came to power.
In Italy there's a long tradition of election reforms from far right parties, and their politics has always been a mess. Italy has always worked in spite of, not thanks to, its political leadership, so having a de facto MSI member back in power is not such a radical change.
And bad actors have always taken part in democracy, people just need to have access to education and information to make them not vote for the Le Pens, Farages, Berlisconis, Melonis, and Orbans out there. They should be kept from controlling the media (like Berlusconi), and we need to do better to prevent foreign interference, but we cannot prevent them from participating.
Ideally yes, education would be enough, but as these systems lack national and EU level safeties, education is being dismantled and information warfare has a greater efficiency. There's no time to rely that people will self correct just by improving their knowledge, people generally don't have a motive for being informed when they're trying to survive.
Yeah, and social media makes them good subjects to foreign propaganda as they get older and they get more vulnerable. Education can only achieve so much.
I think there is absolutely a need to better regulate both traditional and social media. The EU is better positioned it the latter in the short term, and I think they're doing a decent job lately.
And for sure, there are many other areas where the EU could hypothetically play an important role. It's just that it cannot just decide to give itself the authority to do so, and if it did that would constitute a democratic problem of comparable magnitude. So I think we need to go to the national level to find politicians to criticise for not doing enough in this regard.
Yeah I'm definitely also criticizing national lack of action