The review of magazines. 2024 is a unique election year. Citizens of seventy-six countries are called to vote. Although certain elections are particularly scrutinized, such as the presidential election in the United States, this phenomenon has nevertheless become commonplace. Because “there is no longer a clear distinction between the electoral campaign phase and that of government”notes the writer Giuliano da Empoli, who directs the new paper opus of the online magazine The Great Continent.
In the past, governmental realism followed the lyricism of electoral conquest. “We campaign in poetry but we govern in prose”, summed up Democratic US Senator Mario Cuomo (1932-2015) in one breath. Today, we have entered into a logic of permanent campaign, observes Giuliano da Empoli. Poetry – even political poetry – has not, however, become the rule of democratic life since digital media maintain the public space in a nagging agonistic climate.
It must be said that the world is fractured. Divided between supporters of the ecological transition and climate skeptics, Europe sees two opposing “lifestyles”between “multiculturalists and progressives on one side, and conservatives and identitarians on the other”analyzes the political scientist Jean-Yves Dormagen.
The European Union, an essential objective
The conflict in Ukraine has strengthened the European belonging of this nation led by Zelensky, this “Churchill with an iPhone”but Europe must help more, believes British historian Timothy Garton Ash: “Ukraine has made its European choice. Europe must now make its Ukrainian choice coherently. »
The conflict in Gaza is increasing divisions within the European Union (EU). “The concomitance of these two conflicts poses problems of coherence for us (…) towards the rest of the world”, recognizes Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy. In summary, writes this supporter of a ceasefire in Gaza and a two-state solution, “our lack of unity” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “weakened our credibility in defending international law”.
A particularly strong impression of “double standards” in the Global South, a notion criticized by political scientist Bruno Tertrais. He sees a “intellectual and political trap” Who “values the idea of a political confrontation with the West”while researcher Aude Darnal on the contrary defends the“the most polysemous and neutral expression available” to designate the Southern States, despite their heterogeneity.
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