In this edition, we take a look at the protests in Turkey, the crackdown on the annual gay parade in Budapest and the broken ceasefire in Gaza.
We are joined this week by Shada Islam, the Brussels-based commentator on Asia and on EU affairs and Director of the New Horizons Project, Ken Godfrey, Director of European Partnership for Democracy and Jerome Bellion-Jourdan, a former European diplomat who is based in Geneva.
The panel react to the protests in Turkey that were triggered by the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor and presidential candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu. Thousands have been taking to the streets to show their anger at the political repression and the cost of living crisis but the response of Brussels has been muted.
“We’ve been supportive of authoritarian regimes in all regions because we wanted to have access to raw materials, to oil, gas, because we wanted to sell weapons, because we wanted Erdoğan or others to stop migration flows”, Jerome Bellion-Jourdan told the panel.
Another story up for discussion was the Hungarian government’s decision to pan this years annual gay pride parade and let police use biometric facial recognition to identify people in order to enforce the ban.
“The right to protest or right for people to freedom of assembly in the streets, it should be allowed. It should be there. It’s in the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Here, in my opinion, these type of moves are actually designed to take the conversation away from issues linked to democracy and the democratic behaviour towards things related to culture, and the so-called culture wars that many of these leaders”, said Ken Godfrey.
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