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by knbknb 560 days ago
Read the article - This is not the EU commission or some bigwig requesting a hearing or an investigation.

Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .

In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.

Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.

1 comments

Does it matter in the end?

The way I see it, it's a parliamentary member from France from the Renew group in the EU parliament who is not happy with the results and thinks that the democracy needs to be saved because the results do not align with their expectations.

The decent thing to do would be to take this vote into account and accept that not everyone wants the same thing.

> Does it matter in the end?

Yes, it does. It matters very much. The difference between a governmental body ordering you to do something and a single employee making one comment is tremendous. Maybe the latter can lead to the former, maybe, but they’re very far from being the same thing.

ok, let's follow your logic there to the very end.

Your argument is that we should not pay attention because whoever the MP who made this comments is, she is not part of the EU commission and she is not a big wig as you put it. So we could assume that whatever she says does not carry much weight.

But the website reporting this news does not agree with you here, otherwise, why report it in the first place? To them, it matters and it is important because she is part of the Renew group. The Renew group is staunchly opposed to the far-right and pro NATO and pro Ukraine, that is to say the complete opposite to this Romanian candidate.

Furthermore, the MP in question is a close ally of the French president which means she could have the means to convince other MPs to join her and maybe get some support from Macron to jump start some kind of investigation into this matter.

Macron is/was the de facto leading figure in Europe (before becoming a lame duck in the last election) and his words still carry a lot of weight at the EU level.

If she was a random MP in a small fringe party on the sidelines of the EU parliament, I would have agreed with you but not in this case.

Maybe you are right and nothing will come out of it but to me this is not nothing and it should not be dismissed as easily as you think.

> Your argument is that we should not pay attention because whoever the MP who made this comments is, she is not part of the EU commission and she is not a big wig as you put it.

No, that was not my argument at all. I didn’t call anyone a bigwig. You’re not replying to the same person and are starting from an entirely false and incorrect premise, thus reaching a wrong conclusion.

I don’t think this should be dismissed, nor have I claimed it. My sole point is that the difference as it exists is meaningful. One is a certainty, the other is a possibility. Possibilities may be avoided, with different degrees of probability.

No, Macron lost his credibility and influence in the last elections, and by refusing to let his opponents try to form a coalition first (wether or not it would have succeeded is irrelevant here.), he is sometimes viewed as an anti-parliementarist by some of his allies. Being part of renew and batting for 'democracy' is quite ironic,and my guess is that she'll be ignored.
It matters in the sense that the title makes this sound much bigger than it actually is. Every parliament has a spectrum of members, some of them being relatively edgy/extreme in what they say. And most of the time what they say doesn't have any later consequences - apart from, I guess, affirming their voter base - which is why they are there in the first place.