Uncomfortable debaters should be questioned – not silenced

This is a column. Analysis and opinions are the property of the author.

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Should France have a far-right president? It cannot be ruled out when there is a little more than a week left until the second round of elections. After years of changing power between the ruling right-wing party and the Socialists, the French political landscape has changed radically.

In my suburbs south Paris I got Jean-Luc Melenchon More than 40 percent of the vote in the first round. The leftist Melenchon – or the “radical left candidate” if you talk to the Swedish bourgeois leaders – was a breath of fresh air from making it to the last round. Marine Le Pens Expenses. This is despite the fact that, like Le Pen, he has shown a conciliatory attitude towards Vladimir Putin for several years, to say the least.

It’s really hard to put things in order On the general attitude of the French towards Russia. Perhaps even an ancient colonial power better understands another country with imperial ambitions. Jean-Luc Mélenchon was now far from being the most radical of the twelve candidates in the first round of the presidential election. To his left was high school teacher Natalie Artaud, whose party is called “Arbetarkampen” and has a clear revolutionary agenda. Factory worker Philippe Bhutto is the leader of the “New Anti-Capitalist Party” and in addition to these two parties, the PCF was also represented. At the far right we find Marine Le Pen and even the most radical Eric Zemmour, who have made the idea of ​​a continuous “personal exchange” of French ethnicity in favor of the Arabs into a kind of public thought. The former journalist Zemmour was convicted three times of incitement against ethnic groups, despite the fact that it was not canceled by French TV channels.

I think about all this when I read that debater Kajsa Equis Ekman is no longer allowed to write in the left-wing Dagens ETC newspaper. equis ekman Posted a text this week It questions Kyiv Independent’s links to a Ukrainian battalion with a neo-Nazi past. At the same time, she claimed in a social media comment that the Kremlin-controlled RT (formerly Russia Today) is more than just a propaganda channel. At that time, the boundaries of editor-in-chief Andreas Gustafsson were gone. It’s an amazingly narrow boundary.

I may be offended by my surroundings, but these are opinions which I hear on the right and the left in France, warrant that I have read in the newspapers and watched on TV which inevitably encounter objections. Because this is how you also conduct discussions with morbid intellectuals who are testing new theories and stretching the boundaries of public discourse. You listen well if they have something new to add, which Ikes Ekman definitely added. You argue against it and take it, if necessary, in the ear. For God’s sake, they weren’t fired.

In the newsstand at the passenger train station Outside of Paris – incidentally on Lenin Street – you can buy the newspaper “L’Omanite”, which commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolution in 2017 and is distributed in close cooperation with the French Communist Party. I had a look at “Valeurs actuelles”, a conservative magazine that in recent years has become increasingly radical in its right-wing image. And of course there is also the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which prides itself on insulting Catholics, Muslims, presidents, feminists, sexual minorities, priests, capital and all other conceivable institutions in the ugliest caricatures imaginable.

And he would obviously have calmed down a bit had the French press marketed only Fokus, Amelia and Men’s health. But it wasn’t fun.

I live in a country where a far-right president might be in a little over a week, but in a city where you can at least breathe.