This holiday season, Dimitri Medvedev wishes you a horrible new year, predicts the Apocalypse and sees you as “oozing piglets”. Before New Year’s Eve, the former Russian president lends himself, on Twitter account (1.1 million subscribers), to the game of predictions for 2023. And that, in the register of excess. Which undoubtedly aims to “shock the bourgeois”, as befits any punk worthy of the name – including in a skimpy bureaucrat costume. Admittedly, the ex-liberal in full drift takes the precaution of announcing that he is content, “like everyone in this period”, to “play the game of futuristic hypotheses, to distinguish the craziest, even the most absurd”. But implicitly, Medvedev describes, without excess of subtlety, the world of which he dreams. A world where the West would sink into chaos.
For this, his Twitter feed provides an eleven-point prescription. Dmitry “Nostradamus” Medvedev’s first prediction: “The price of oil will reach $150 per barrel, and the price of gas will exceed $5,000 per 1,000 cubic meters”. This is the least delusional prediction because historically, the price of oil has already approached this threshold (in 2002). But, from prediction number 2, Medvedev’s delirium goes up a notch. “The United Kingdom will rejoin the European Union”, hopes the former Russian leader, which will lead, without our understanding too well the logic, to prediction number 3. “The EU will collapse after the return of the United Kingdom; the euro will cease to be the currency of the EU”.
Then, imagine this close friend of Vladimir Putin, it will be discord all over Europe: “Poland and Hungary will occupy the western regions of the former Ukraine” (prediction n° 4). And, of course, he makes a “fixette” on Nazism: “The Fourth Reich will be created, encompassing the territory of Germany and its satellites, that is to say Poland, the Baltic States, the Republic Czech Republic, Slovakia, Kyiv Republic and other outcasts” (prediction #5). Better, a fourth Franco-German war, after that of 1870 and the two world conflicts, will oppose Paris and Berlin: “War will break out between France and the Fourth Reich. Europe will be divided, Poland being divided in the process” (#6). Back to the future! With, perhaps, a hint of nostalgia for the German-Soviet pact?
The final collapse of the world order
Seventh, the prophet of the Apocalypse announces a break-up of the United Kingdom: “Northern Ireland separates from the United Kingdom and joins the Republic of Ireland”. To evoke the other side of the Atlantic, Medvedev, pours (point n° 8) in grotesque register and displays his ignorance of America: “A civil war will break out in the United States, California and Texas becoming States independents,” he wrote. “Texas and Mexico will form an allied state. Elon Musk will win the election, in a number of states which, at the end of the new Civil War, will have been given to the Republican Party.” Entertaining.
Then comes – culmination of this hallucinated dream – the final collapse of the world order as we have known it: “All the biggest stock exchanges and financial activities will leave the United States and Europe to move in Asia” (prediction n° 9). As a corollary, a new Crash of 1929 is inevitable: “The monetary management system of Bretton Woods will collapse, bringing about the crash of the IMF and the World Bank” (n° 10). Finally, number 11, in the fantasy world of Dmitry Medvedev, “the euro and the dollar will cease to circulate as global reserve currencies” and “digital fiat currencies will be actively used instead”.
In case some imagine that, by this witty game, the former statesman intends to make himself friendly, this one concludes his “thread” (thread) on a sarcastic tone: “Happy New Year’s Eve to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and to their merry oozing piglets!”. What inspires this comment to a “follower” of his Twitter account: “But what are you smoking?” Good question.