(Internationally it's more complicated because you have people like Morales or Ortega or those two idiot Irish MEPs who are legitimately on the left, arguably even Fico and that German woman whose name isn't Krankenwagen but that's all I can think of)
Do you mean Merkel?
Wagenknecht
Vietnam rolled out the red carpet for Putin, cmon.
I don't think you can really read read a developing country attempting to balance great power politics giving a foreign dignitary a warm reception as "ideological support" as nelson Mandela said "your enemies must not be our enemies too" every developing country either has sone or would do the same
Lula, then.
I mean its still the same thing- Russia is a major economy and is very close to a sine-qua non for countries which want to be militarily independent of the US, Lula is relatively neutral on Russia-ukraine, he's not sending arms or supporting Russia!
india is much much closer to Russia and I wouldnt use it to claim theres some right wing ideological tie to Russia, (there is obviously, but its not what is happening in India!)
Russia is a near useless partner to Brazil. It's far away, their economy isn't that big and their main exports aren't stuff Brazil particularly needs. (Maybe the fertilizers?) Triangulating on Russia is certainly not worth any drop in relations with the EU. There's a trade deal under negotiations.
what triangulating? Lula seems to mostly be avoiding involvement and continuing normal diplomacy- the only thing that comes to mind is saying america provoked it but thats really marginal!
I mean that’s triangulating. He won’t vote against Russia in the UN - he’ll abstain. He won’t sell weapons to either side. He won’t sanction Russia - had has apparently no opinion on the conflict. Contrast with Boric!
Lula has been better than ICS by sticking to the ICC rules and saying that Russia should withdraw but basically he’s trying to keep good relations with both sides, as if there isn’t one side blatantly violating international law
However this is more a Brazil thing than a Lula thing since Bolsonaro followed the same course; it’s just more noticeable with Lula because he is better eg on Palestine
I don't expect anything out of thugs like bolsonaro. Lula torching any antifascist credentials by sucking up to a belligerent warmonger to little tangible benefit is different.
He's given interviews, this isnt some inscrutable thing. He told Biden he wouldn't help in any way because he saw it as pointless and figured it was better for ukraine to just roll over.
He said that Zelensky shares the blame for starting the war. He floated together with Xi a "peace mediation" proposal that didn't mention Russian withdrawal from occupied territories and was annoyed at the frosty Ukrainian reception of said proposal.
Ukraine is if not losing the war then at least is in a weaker strategic position, any reasonable peace negotiation is going to have to take that into account! There’s a pretty big gap between recognizing the LOAC vs giving Russia additional gains
You gotta admit it's not a good sign they were taken aback by Ukraine's frosty reception.
I dont know the details about it but how much of that is genuine surprise vs unhappiness that the (admittedly pretty stupid) peace plan you worked so hard on is bombing
Tbh he also said that Saddam Hussein shared the blame for the Iraq war so some of this is just general BR cluelessness about war.
It's *zizek sniff* ideology
Some of it is indeed Old Left ideology (with Russia=USSR) but I think it's mostly a throwback to his first 2 terms in the 00s, with its low levels of geopolitical rivalry.
He gets honorary revolutionary treatment pretty much everywhere you'd expect
Melenchon had to be dragged kicking and screaming by the greens to promise not to submarine aid to ukraine last year, they literally threatened to blow up the popular front to wrangler him
iirc LFI's Foreign Policy spokesperson said some pretty stupid shit on this wrt the 'peace process' the other day too
Until they got shamed out of it in 2022 they still openly referred to russia as an ideal partner
If I post what I honestly think about these people I'll be suspended in record time
Die Linke (which unlike Wagenknecht is in the Bundestag) is Putinist and runs on opposition to NATO. The Spanish left is pretty Putinist and so are some of the EFA side parties of G/EFA (but most of G/EFA is the Greens and we loathe Putin unreservedly).
Die Linke literally worked arm in arm with AFD earlier this year to attempt to block the aid ramp up to ukraine lol
Parts of SPD are pretty bad on this too, tbh
As long as they suck it up and vote right it's liveable, do they do that?
welp www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacj...
I mean this is bad but are they actively shooting down air defense, ammunition procurement, etc? Merz bailed on Taurus as well and he spent a year all but calling scholz a coward for not delivering them.
I mean, I'd say rejecting the proposed Taurus delivery does count as "actively shooting down".
Yeah, but that's not SPD, that's Germany. Three likeliest explanations: * The Bundeswehr doesn't want to. * The system isn't functional and the Bundeswehr is hiding its incompetence behind malice. * Both of the above simultaneously.
Must be embarrassing. Merz looks like a 🤡 today, just like 'Donald the #Emperor'
Yes. Their main badness is that they're trying to appear to do the least possible on the theory that there will be normalization with Russia soon and the big businesses that buy Russian gas will want their commercial relationships with Russia repaired.
not just that tho tvpworld.com/76470201/ger...
FDP criticizing SPD over this is so rich. FDP is a more Putinist party than SPD, which has business-Putinist factions and geopolitical- and human rights-Atlanticist ones whereas FDP is all business-Putinist (and the Greens are all human rights-Atlanticist).
and www.reuters.com/world/europe...
The usual pattern is, G/EFA, S&D, EPP, and Renew are reliably pro-Ukraine; LEFT, PfE, and ESN are Putinist; ECR depends. There are some exceptions, like FDP and its love of gas deals, but usually it's mainstream vs. both extremes, with the extreme right larger than the left.
within S&D you still have some SPD people who align with Schröder on his love for Russian oil industry money
The American pattern is in that sense the same as the EU one, it's just that within liberalism and the Democratic Party, foreign policy is delegated to New Democrats and not to the Progressive Caucus so it doesn't matter how bad Jayapal is on the subject.
Meh, by 2024 nobody was willing to vote against ukraine aid on the left flank and Omar was meeting expat delegations for photo ops (and taking a bunch of shit from dsa influencers for it)
It's the House, they vote the way Pelosi tells them at the end of the day. I forget if they testimonially voted against military aid to Israel in the same package but in either case they had no real ability to torpedo it, because the institutional party dgaf what they think on foreign policy.
They voted for Ukraine & Taiwan and against aid for Israel