You gotta ask the lemmygrad and lemmy.ml people. It makes perfect sense apparently, and they’ll explain it all to you and how you’re the dumb one (not just dumb but like openly malicious and lying and you’re trying to fuck up the whole world on purpose and you are bad) if you don’t get it.

I have to warn you, though, the middle step is “???”.

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 that invasion as imperialistic aggression, so 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.

Same for the left in germany. Previously it was full of people supporting Putin. Those people founded there own party now, calling for left policies only for germans. Social nationalism. The remaining people in the left claim to be pro Ukraine but are still against sending weapond to Ukraine, making them essentially pro russian.

I mean, he’s not actually a contender, is he? His party is on the fringe of the left wing coalition. The other parties said they wouldn’t make him PM and he said he wouldn’t demand it. Macronists certainly aren’t going to accept him.

To me, the only 2 outcomes are gridlock or someone non-controversial from the left. Laurent Berger is a name I saw come up but I’m not the world’s foremost French politics knower.

The link quotes him calling the Kiev regime a putsch, but that was back in 2014, and that was in fact a revolution. It’s not about Zelensky, but he does give all the current talking points (neonazis in Kiev, NATO provocations, Russia can’t have NATO at their doorstep…). BTW no one did anything about Russia stealing Crimea, either, everyone was still trying to justify not doing anything.

That was 10 years ago and he has been (very) slowly toning it down: when making the left alliance a few weeks ago, he finally relented on allowing weapons to be sent to Ukraine because the rest of the left made him, there’s still hope he’ll give up the anti-NATO talk… eventually. If he makes it to the government, when someone asks him about Russia bombing children’s hospitals, at some point he’ll have nowhere to run because he doesn’t actually support that. He shouts and curses quite violently at journalists who help out the far right, but on serious subjects in serious interviews, he actually has to be reasonable (and he is). On the last presidential elections, when he showed up to the round 1 left parties debates, he was all proper and serious and making his points properly and sensibly - and then he lost on round 1 and the next day in the street, he screamed his head off at the first journalist who put a microphone in his face.

Oh, and over this side of the world, no one claims Russia is socialist. But leftists do get mad at the EU and NATO for crushing the farmer class and playing the capitalist hand, that’s what that is about.

He has always been worshipping communism, and hates America. That’s it. He can give good speeches but he’s not that smart when it comes to anyone VS the USA.

Apparently Mélenchon supported the annexation but not the war, supported Putin’s foreign politics but not his domestic policies.

There is more to it than left and right. Orbán is mostly neither, Fico is a far left Putin supporter.