| I can understand that from far you could have this impression that they have good will and for them "the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it". But make no mistake, this is just communication/propaganda and what makes me say that it is hypocrisy. Politics here are champions of double talk. Despite pretending to be democracies, a lot of leaders are now trying to grab the maximum power and undermine citizen decision power. For example, in France, normally the President and government is just here to execute the laws decided by the national assembly. But in the past decade, majority members of the national assembly are now in a party whose purpose is to "support the president" and so, you could be excluded if you would not vote like the president want you to. Also, more and more the government decide new laws unilaterally, sometimes in secret or after secret negotiations with lobbies, and will do everything needed to force the assembly to approve it. Sometimes it is just pressure, sometimes it is manipulations like presenting multiple time the same law, even if it is rejected, until it will pass. Or a present it at a specific time, like at night when there are other events, so that opposition will not have time to come to vote. They are also more frequently using anti democratic tools when they can't manage to have their law to pass, like something call 49.1 that enact a law without vote of the national assembly. And lastly, we have seen the case a lot with "fake news" and "hate speech", where governement or governement member will spread "fake news" or send bad "hate" messages. But when you have breaking news of bad behavior of them, then they will pretend that it is "fake news"/"hate" message, and that the state should be able to censor that.
In this regard, they are very similar to Trump. To give one last example, during the first part of the covid crisis, the government knew that they did not have enough mask, because of bad management, and instead of telling the truth, they said that pharmacy were not allowed to sell them, because people would not know how to use them and that they are useless to deal with the covid. Later the proof was given that they were voluntarily lying. |