Grier's Notes: December 17, 2023
News from around the world
As 2023 comes to an end, the battle lines in Ukraine look rather like they did at the start of the year. Ukraine’s attempted offensive has gained little ground and similarly, Russia’s efforts to advance have seen minimal gains at a high cost.
In Ukraine, the apparent stall has led to a significant increase in criticism of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his strategy including from a top general. While Zelenskyy has not been particularly pleased the public debate is in some ways a healthy sign of how Ukraine still has a real political system where dissent is possible.
This is rather less true in Russia as illustrated by Vladimir Putin using his annual year-end press conference to spend four hours expanding on his belief that Russia would win in Ukraine with little pushback. Putin has been confidently able to announce his run for re-election with little fear that his embarrassing failures in Ukraine will prove a drawback in a campaign where all his most prominent potential challengers have been silenced. This is no doubt very comfortable for Putin but it is not a recipe to provide Russians with the best possible government.
Donald Tusk has finally returned as Poland’s PM after the Law and Justice’s efforts to form a new government predictably failed to find any coalition partners. Tusk spent much of the time since he was PM as a senior EU official so in contrast to the previous government’s prickly relationship with Brussels, he is expected to have a less combative approach.
It remains unclear whether Geert Wilders will be able to form a government in the Netherlands. If Wilders can win the support of all the right to centre-right parties, he would have a comfortable majority but there are very wide differences of views among those parties which will make coming to an agreement challenging. Expectations are already rising that this round of coalition negotiations could beat the record 9 months it took last time to make an agreement.
Italy has officially given notice it is withdrawing from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The move reflects PM Giorgia Meloni’s determination to tighten ties with Western allies as opposed to the attempt by her predecessors to take a more neutral stance.
Marine Le Pen will face a trial alongside with her father over allegations they misused EU parliamentary funds to finance their political party. If convicted she would face a 10-year ban from running for President which would block her plans to run in the 2027 election that will choose Macron’s successor.
France’s parliament has passed a bill to protect farmers from lawsuits brought by neighbours complaining about noise or smell from farming activity. Such lawsuits have increased significantly as urban residents have relocated to the country and discovered the less idyllic elements of living next to a farm.
Slovakia’s new PM Robert Fico is proposing to eliminate the special prosecutors office which has investigated several people tied to his political party. While his government insists the change will not result in an end to such investigations many are understandably skeptical.
Initial projections from Serbia’s parliamentary elections show a big win for the ruling Serbian Progressive Party which has nearly 50% support twice the amount of its closest rival. The opposition parties have made allegations of fraud boosting the government’s numbers.
Kenya’s Parliament has banned the wearing of Kaunda suits (a safari jacket with matching trousers) and traditional African clothing with a ruling from the Speaker that men must wear suits with ties while in the legislative chamber.
Former South African President Jacob Zuma has launched a new political party as he looks to break the power of the long-ruling ANC he once led. Zuma was forced from office over corruption allegations and despite having been convicted continues to have a following in South Africa. While the ANC faces big challenges given the frustration with voters in a struggling economy, the fractured opposition may have challenges of its own in capitalizing.
Zambia’s former President Edgar Lungu has gone to court to challenge the government’s decision to cut off his retirement benefits. His benefits were cut after he announced a plan to return to politics which the government has interpreted as meaning he no longer qualifies as retired even though he holds no current office.
Running for re-election the Democratic Republic of Congo President Félix Tshisekedi has aggressively raised his rhetoric against Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame whom he has compared to Hitler. Tshisekedi blames Rwanda for backing rebel groups that have thwarted his efforts to stabilize his war-torn country. While possibly helpful as electoral motivation it is less clear that such language will exactly improve the DRC relationship with Rwanda.
A mystery Presidential candidate who appears in a mask on launched a series of billboards promoting him as a candidate for the upcoming election in Ghana. The attention-getting campaign appears to be a bid to generate buzz for an as yet unrevealed campaign rumoured to be a prominent businessman who has floated the prospect of an independent run.
The IDF has continued its operations in Gaza where it continues to dismantle Hamas’s infrastructure. In recent days large numbers of Hamas fighters have been surrendering having apparently come to the conclusion that they cannot beat Israel on the battlefield. The progress Israel is seeing has bolstered Israeli politicians’ determination to reject international pressure to end the campaign quickly.
There has been a large upswing in attacks on ships in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels in Yemen who have pledged to attack ships that might supply Israel in support of Hamas. While the US and UK have been aggressively defending the shipping ways the increased danger has led some companies to reconsider using the popular shipping route which could have a big impact on supply chains if the situation is not quickly resolved.
Armenia and Azerbaijan conducted a prisoner exchange following talks between the two countries about trying to establish a new peace agreement following the conclusion of the most recent outbreak of war. Armenia has also endorsed Azerbaijan’s bid to host COP29. Whether this surprising warming in the relationship can survive attempts to negotiate a more permanent agreement remains to be seen.
Four cabinet ministers quit the cabinet of Japan’s PM Fumio Kishida over allegations the faction of the LDP they belonged to had failed to report hundreds of millions of yen worth of fundraising. The story is just the latest controversy that has pushed Kishida’s approval to under 30% and raised the prospect that the LDP will seek to oust him before the 2025 elections.
More than 70 people have reportedly been arrested as part investigation into claims that details of the Chinese missile system were leaked to the US. Among the accused in the plot is former Foreign Minister Qin Gang who has not been seen in months fuelling some rumours that he has been executed. This feeds into larger questions about the crackdown President Xi has launched in recent months that have seen many who were seen as close allies of Xi purged from the government.
The Chinese have not waited for the conclusion of talks with Bhutan that is expected to resolve a long-running border dispute to start building in the area it expects to claim from Bhutan in the talks.
Hong Kong local elections saw record low turnout which was unsurprising given the government had pre-screened the candidates to ensure that there were no differences of opinion with Beijing on the ballot leaving voters with no real choices to make.
The Australian government has announced it plans to halve immigration levels as well as enforce a strong requirement for international students. The centre-left Labour government said the surge in immigration seen after the pandemic is unsustainable and the system needs reform.
Javier Milei started his Presidency with a series of rapid reforms including devaluing the peso and making deep spending cuts which Milei admitted will cause some short-term pain but which he says are necessary to lay the foundation for the rebuilding of the Argentine economy., Milei started his cuts by entirely eliminating the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and Ministry of Culture and merged several others as he had pledged to do in the campaign.
Venezuela and Guyana have agreed to diplomatic talks including a pledge not to resort to military force to resolve the disagreement over President Maduro’s recent attempts to claim that a large chunk of Guyana ought to be part of Venezuela. The prospect of a military clash had raised concerns not only of Western leaders but of other South American leaders including Brazil’s President Lula who has generally maintained a friendly relationship with Maduro but who warned Venezuela against the use of force. While not being invaded is a positive for Guyana, the fact that it’s being forced into negotiations over a rather dubious claim is not the most fair outcome.
The recent rally in Bitcoin prices has been welcomed by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele as vindication of his decision to spend more than $120 million worth of government money on Bitcoin. With the value of the nation’s Bitcoin stash now worth more than what he spent on it Bukele took to social media to call out his critics who had suggested this was a bad investment.
A brief theory on Joe Biden’s difficulties
In recent weeks there has been increasing discussion about polling that shows President Joe Biden is behind in a rematch with Donald Trump. While important to note both that his current position is a function of many factors with inflation issues likely the most important one and that current polling is certainly not guaranteed to reflect the final results particularly given how unpredictable any campaign involving Trump is likely to be, I do have a new theory that may partly explain his troubles.
This a thought that came to me while recently reading Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties, an interesting cultural history of the 1990s. One of the leading cultural figures in the book is Bill Clinton who Klosterman argues was the biggest celebrity of the 1990s. He makes the point that every President is automatically the biggest celebrity of their time just given how much space the US President takes up in our attention. And this seems true not only of Clinton but also of his successors George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump each of whom not just inextricably symbolic of the era in which they served in the White House
However, I’m not sure this is true of Joe Biden. This is admittedly something that I don’t know how to quantify but it feels like in lots of ways that while Biden is undoubtedly a frequent presence in the news he’s never quite achieved the cultural impact that we’ve become to President’s having.
Some of this reflects perhaps Biden’s own unusual position within the Democrats where he has not generated the same level of devotion as other recent Presidents. The past 4 President all in some ways represented some sort of ideal for a significant part of their base whether it was Clinton as the epitome of the Baby Boom generation at a time when it was coming into power, Barack Obama as a symbol of a newly diverse, modern US, or Donald Trump as the unapologetic champion of alienated Americans. In contrast Biden, an elderly white man, who has been a prominent political figure for 50 years is not the epitome of what many people see as the ideal of this time. It seems hard to imagine that decades from now looking back this will seem like the Biden era in the same way that the 1960s had Kennedy or 90s had Clinton.
In some ways this doesn’t matter. Biden is still President regardless of the cultural mark he is making and on purely legislative grounds was able to get much of his agenda enacted before he lost control of the House. And for those of us who want there to be more space for life outside of politics and smaller President is in some ways a hopeful development. But I do wonder whether Biden’s cultural stature is an underrated factor in why his road to re-election is rockier than might have been expected.
Links
Is the world’s oldest dog a fraud?
Is the secret to long life visiting museums?
How the Sun briefly blew up Mars’s atmosphere
Did the introduction of tea to Britain save lives?
Quote of the day
"But if [Samuel] Johnson was sometimes bewildered, that is not the abiding impression from the biographies and from his own writings. It is, rather, of a life driven by the conviction that those who honestly seek truth and goodness will find them. And so he did."- Dan Hitchens