China’s best friends in European Parliament fighting for political lives back home in Ireland
- MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have attracted global attention for their anti-US views and support for Moscow and Beijing within the parliament
- They have attracted favourable coverage in Chinese media, but many voters at home and members of their parliamentary Left Group are increasingly concerned
What have Hollywood superstar Susan Sarandon and the Chinese Communist Party got in common?
The chances are, they are both rooting for two Irish politicians, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, to be re-elected to the European Parliament this week.
In a video that went viral last week, the Oscar-winning actress pointed to the two lawmakers’ vocal support for Gaza, contrasting them with her own country, the United States, which is “in a very pro-war time”.
“There are very few voices for peace in places of power and we need them more than ever now, especially with what’s going on in Gaza,” Sarandon said, in a video that has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
“So, I beg of you this June, don’t forget to give your number one vote to Claire Daly in Dublin or to Mick Wallace in Ireland South.”
The pair have become Ireland’s most recognisable political figures outside the country thanks to Wallace’s distinctive pink shirts and straggly grey hair combined with Daly’s ferocious polemics against American hegemony and European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who has become Beijing’s bête noire in Brussels.
Their huge followings on X, formerly Twitter, (376,411 at the time of writing for Wallace and 422,776 for Daly) dwarf more mainstream Irish politicians – the current Taoiseach, or prime minister, Simon Harris has 248,559 followers – while their videos on TikTok have racked up millions of views.