While I don't have any pictures related to this week's topic to show you, I wanted to share some from my recent trip to Slovenia alongside this journal! I hope you enjoy the scenery from this beautiful country as much as I did, and also find the following topic interesting and informative.
This week in my Democracies at Risk in Europe class, we are completing a FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) workshop in which we were given the task of identifying an EU country, its vulnerabilities, and using that to create a misinformation video that exploits those vulnerabilities. My group is working on a video that targets France. France is an interesting case study because of France’s significant role in the EU, its upcoming presidential election in 2027 and the current student protests. Students are protesting the underfunding and understaffing of French public schools along with the rising cost of living, amid looming public spending pressures as France continues to have a significant budget deficit, which means its debt is 119% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product, or how much money a country makes every year).
