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In this mailing:
* Guy Millière: France: A 'Field of Ruins'
* Jonathan S. Tobin: Prosecuting Political Foes Is Incompatible With Democracy


** France: A 'Field of Ruins' ([link removed])
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by Guy Millière • April 5, 2023 at 5:00 am
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* France, once again, is on the verge of chaos.
* The subject of the discontent is the adoption of a law reforming the pension system in a minimal way: the legal retirement age in France has been set at 62 since 2010; the law raises it two years, to 64.
* Neither members of the government nor economists on television dare to speak the truth: The French pension system is collapsing. The reform just adopted will not be enough to save it; just allow it to survive a bit longer.
* The system has been bankrupt for years, but its bankruptcy is growing more costly.
* The French pension system is not the only system collapsing. The country is facing a much larger crisis.
* The French health insurance system, also based on mandatory contributions deducted from salaries, also is in terrible shape.
* Food prices in 2022, meanwhile, increased 14.5%.
* The center-left and center-right parties are dead. Neither the Rebellious France Party nor the National Rally Party would be able gather enough votes to constitute an alternative majority. The political situation is blocked.
* France seems deadlocked, the possibilities of unblocking it nowhere in sight.
* "A modest reform based on an implacable demographic observation has tipped France into an existential crisis in which everything is wavering... A much deeper malaise is rising to the surface. That of a country haunted by its decline". — Vincent Trémollet de Villers, Le Figaro, March 23, 2023.
* "Have we hit rock bottom?" asked journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert. "No, not yet."

France, once again, is on the verge of chaos. The French pension system is not the only system collapsing. The country is facing a much larger crisis. Pictured: Rioters in Nantes, France, on March 28, 2023. (Photo by Sebastien Salom-Gomis/AFP via Getty Images)

Paris, France. March 23, 8 p.m. A demonstration took place; as usual now, riots followed the demonstration and swept through the center of the city, then to other cities. Cars were burned, shop windows smashed, garbage dumpsters set on fire. A garbage collectors' strike began two weeks earlier; nearly ten thousand tons of garbage, still strewn on the sidewalks, almost completely block some streets. The proliferation of rats threatens disease. Oil refineries are shut down; gas stations are running dry. More demonstrations took place March 28 -- and more riots.

France, once again, is on the verge of chaos.

The subject of the discontent is the adoption of a law reforming the pension system in a minimal way: the legal retirement age in France has been set at 62 since 2010; the law raises it two years, to 64.

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** Prosecuting Political Foes Is Incompatible With Democracy ([link removed])
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by Jonathan S. Tobin • April 5, 2023 at 4:00 am
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* Their [the left's] claim is that both Trump and Netanyahu are enemies of democracy. That makes achieving their downfall... a righteous cause.... Actions that would easily be seen as an abuse of power are justified because of a supposedly higher purpose....
* [B]oth men are political leaders being singled out by prosecutors for charges that weren't so much tailored to their circumstances as they were invented for the sole purpose of taking them down.
* [T]he only reason any prosecutor is looking for a way to charge him is because he's a hated political foe.
* [T]heir foes justify using the legal system against them because they claim they are enemies of democracy but whose main purpose appears to be toppling the government.
* [T]he willingness of so much of the chattering classes to justify attempts to jail political opponents is antithetical to the survival of democracy in both countries.
* Such prosecutions only serve to undermine public confidence. They convince supporters of those charged that there is a two-tiered system where political foes not favored by the legal apparatus are treated differently.
* [D]emocracy, which relies on both sides, accepting each other's legitimacy, is in real jeopardy of failing. The real threat to it doesn't come from conservatives in either country. It can be found in a political culture that has been embraced by the left that is willing to stop at nothing to crush opponents.

As different as the cases against Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are, what they have in common is that both men are political leaders being singled out by prosecutors for charges that weren't so much tailored to their circumstances as they were invented for the sole purpose of taking them down. Pictured: Trump and Netanyahu meet in the White House on September 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)

These are heady times for those who hate both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The news that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had persuaded a grand jury to indict the former president was greeted with chortles of satisfaction from the Jewish left, which was already celebrating the recent setback suffered by the Israeli prime minister after he put judicial reform on hold.

Trump being booked in New York is not only being celebrated by those who call Netanyahu "crime minister" because of the long-running legal case on corruption charges that he has been fighting in and out of the courts for years. It has also allowed them to see the pair, despite the obvious differences between the two men and the legal stratagems that have been deployed against them, and their predicaments as part of a common struggle against what Haaretz called the way they both attack their respective countries' democratic institutions.

To the left, that's the important point.

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