“We do not harbor any special hopes” for improving ties with France, Moscow said.
Russia’s hopes for smoothing over relations with France were dashed by the results of the French legislative election, a Kremlin spokesperson said Monday.
France’s far-right National Rally, which has been criticized for its Russia-friendly positions, was unexpectedly trounced at the second round of polls on Sunday, with a leftist alliance snatching the most seats in a hung parliament.
“The victory of political forces that would be supporters of efforts to restore our bilateral relations is definitely better for Russia, but so far we do not see such bright political will in anyone, so we do not harbor any special hopes or illusions in this regard,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday.
In my experience, in Europe older lefties who had their ideological growth during the days of the Soviet Union still have knee jerk pro-Russia reactions.
That doesn’t mean they can’t be brought around by logic, for example by pointing out aggressor-victim structure of that invasion or the similarities between the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the invasion of Iraq by the US (as those people also have anti-US knee jerk reactions, hence universally saw the US invasion as imperialistic aggression, this is a perfect reference to use to get them to seen Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from a principled viewpoint).
Still, the more tribalist and sloganeering lefties of the old school (mainly traditional Communists) can’t really be reasoned out of their pro-Russia posture in my experience (hence the Tankie phenomenon).
I wouldn’t draw much from Melenchon’s support for the 2014 invasion of Crimea since back then even the mainstream politicians in Europe didn’t really care much about it.
I would be curious to know what his posture is now, though.