I was very encouraged this year by the French election and also by the German election. Although an extreme party did get in, at least Angela Merkel is still there. Even in the Netherlands it seems like some of the extreme parties that everyone feared would suddenly get into prominence have subsided, and we're hoping that this trend toward moderation will continue elsewhere.
We don't have a problem with extremism in Latvia. In that sense, we're a very moderate country, but we do fear this kind of populism. Even in the U.K., one of the reasons for Brexit was this fear of immigration, of uncontrolled immigration. I think one way we have to battle this is by doing a better job on this information warfare and on dealing with our social media space because so much disinformation is being spread that way, even about the migration. Two years ago when there were thousands of African refugees coming into Europe, there were rumours spread about mass rapes and other actions that were later proven to be totally false.
I think when we talk about strategic communications and dealing with information warfare, we can't banish lies. We can only defeat them. We can't censor information, but we have to do a better job of educating our own public. I think that's one of our challenges. Russia Today is everywhere, but does everyone know what Russia Today is? It calls itself RT. Some people confuse it with ET, Entertainment Tonight, since it does such a good job in having local announcers and so on. I think part of the challenge on these issues to fight populism is to educate people that extreme solutions really don't solve anything, that people have to be more critical in their analysis of the information they're getting, and that reasonable responses are the only way to go because extremism is not going to solve anything. All that extremism on one side does is just accelerate it on the other side.