Hillary Clinton has called on the nations of Europe to curtail immigration to stem the tide of right-wing sentiment on the continent.
In an interview with The Guardian, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate suggested that "Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame." Clinton drew attention to the "rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas."
She suggested that politicians like Angela Merkel, the architect of Europe's open-door immigration policy, were "very generous and compassionate", but insisted that the EU must clamp down on support for refugees because "if we don't deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic."
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The former Democratic presidential candidate, who lost the 2016 vote to Donald Trump, accused him of campaigning on the immigration issue to score political points. She maintained the Democratic Party's narrative of Donald Trump "colluding" with Russia and violating the freedom of press. "The use of immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one's heritage, one's identity, one's national unity has been very much exploited by the current administration here," she said.
"There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements."
Clinton's message was met with criticism, to say the least. Many sceptics recalled that Clinton was one of the most vocal defenders of the 2011 Libya military intervention while in office, which is widely believed to have been a prelude to the refugee crisis that rocked Europe.
Clinton was also reminded of her role in the Arab Spring and in the Syrian conflict, as well as the overthrow of Libya's former head Muammar Gaddafi, of whom she joked, "We came, we saw, he died."
Some people insisted that making concessions to make political gains is nothing new to the Clintons — and that this point can be reduced to absurdity.
That Hillary Clinton gave the interview on the eve of Thanksgiving, a holiday that celebrates immigration, was deemed ironic by some netizens.
Others argued that Clinton, like her fellow left-wing politicians, has been paying attention to the wrong things, and branded her a 'discredited centrist superstar'.