Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 4 – The deputies
of the European Parliament who form Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for
Europe (ALDE) at a meeting in Amsterdam say that Russian President Vladimir
Putin and his American counterpart Donald Trump along with the Islamic state are
the main threats to the liberal values that form the basis of Europe today.
ALDE leaders declare that they have
achieved many victories over the past year but that there continue to be
serious challenges to the world as they would like to see it, and the European
liberals say that “the most serious” of these are “Putin, Trump, and the
Islamic State” (ng.ru/politics/2017-12-04/1_7128_putin.html).
“To a certain
extent,” Aleksey Gorbachev of Moscow’s Nezavisimaya gazeta says today, ”the
unity of European liberals has been promoted by the foreign policy of Putin and
Trump, one in which many see an effort to undermine the unity of the European
Union.” And Ukrainian participants at
Amsterdam draw a parallel between Putin and Ukraine and Trump and Europe.
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine
has united its people as never before, they say, while Trump’s attacks on
European governments have “clearly strengthened European identity.” Indeed, the European liberals say, their
recent victories in the European Parliament became possible because “Europeans
understand who Trump is.”
While Europe’s liberals are
committed to countering Russian propaganda, many of them told Gorbachev that in
their view, the Russians themselves must take the steps necessary to produce
regime change in Russia. That may seem a
distant dream now, one of them remarks, but “one day people will simply be fed
up, and if the Russians demand freedom, they’ll get it.”
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