TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #9
Two votes at opposite ends of the earth. Xi Jinping trumps Ukraine on the world stage. Biden: will he or won't he? And Putin as Pinocchio.
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, explores how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world. And it’s all coming to you this week from New Orleans!
In step with our pledge to cover every national election everywhere in the world this year, we continue our coverage of the American contests on November 8 ….with an Unleashed twist: exploring what the rest of the world is learning about America’s deeply polarized process.
But first, on opposite ends of the earth, there’s Vanuatu in the South Pacific and the Kingdom of Lesotho in Africa—both choosing their leaders.
First, two votes
Kingdom of Lesotho
Voters in the Kingdom of Lesotho in Africa have ousted the incumbent All Basotho Convention (ABC) party, replacing it with the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP) party, led by millionaire diamond magnate, Sam Matekane. Assuring a degree of continuity is King Letsie III, who serves as head of state.
But with 56 of 120 seats, just shy of a parliamentary majority, Matekane embarked on the fraught process of forming a coalition with two smaller parties—the Alliance of Democrats (AD) and the National Independence Party (NIP). Crisis 24 election monitors suggest this could lead to unrest if ABC chooses to contest the results in the nation’s High Court, the same process that occurred in two other African elections this year—Kenya, then Angola. So far, this has not occurred, and Matekane has embarked on a rule focusing on “reining government expenditure, stabilizing the economy and uniting the nation.”
No party in Lesotho, a tiny, landlocked, mountainous kingdom of 2.14 million people surrounded entirely by South Africa, formerly the British colony of Basutoland, has won a majority in the four elections since electoral reforms initiated in 2012 led to the creation of a multi-party system. In the new parliament, 14 parties are represented. Matekane has vowed to end the corruption and often violent infighting that has been rife in the nation virtually since independence. The previous prime minister, Thomas Thabane, was forced to step down after being named as a suspect in the killing of his ex-wife.
Vanuatu
Four former prime ministers each managed to win seats in parliament during last week’s snap elections in this tiny Pacific island nation. And with no one party gaining a majority, weeks of jockeying have begun to choose a leader for its 323,516 people. As Radio New Zealand’s Hilaire Bule reported from Vanuatu: “The lobbying for the formation of a new government will not be easy because [each of the former leaders] will want to be prime minister again.”
If there is one major challenge to the very survival of Vanuatu, it is the rising seas. Like many of its fellow South Pacific, sea-level island- or atoll-nations, rising seas threaten eventually to swamp this stunningly beautiful country and all who call it home. The World Economic Forum has labeled Vanuatu the “most dangerous place to live on earth.”
At the same time, it is very much caught between two giant geopolitical forces contesting this part of the world—the United States and China. Some 12 Pacific Island nations including Vanuatu have committed to joining the United States as well as Japan and Australia in a series of development initiatives designed to wean the region from China which had been making major inroads. Its lavish Belt and Road Initiative and accompanying largesse have been seen by many strategists as a foot in the door to military commitments, even base facilities. Only the Solomon Islands failed to agree to the American-led initiative and was believed to have signed a secret pact with Beijing.
How Others See America
Three weeks to go on the hustings
But already folks abroad are looking ahead to 2024. “It is the rematch that a majority of Americans say they do not want,” The Times of London’s Washington correspondent reports. “But President Biden signaled he will run for a second term if his predecessor stands, saying: ‘I believe I can beat Donald Trump again.’ Biden, who turns 80 next month and is already the oldest US president, said he would make a final decision on trying for another four years in the White House after the midterm elections on November 8. Trump, 76, who holds regular rallies that give the appearance of a presidential campaign, has also said he will announce his decision after the elections. Americans are voting on every seat in the House of Representatives and a third of the 100-member Senate, with Republicans likely to make gains and complicate Biden’s remaining two years in office.”
In Israel, which is having its own elections a week before Americans go to the polls next month, readers of the daily Ha’aretz woke up to correspondent Ben Samuels reporting from Washington: “Trump warns American Jews to ‘get their act together' amid low approval ratings. With only 19 percent of American Jews holding favorable views of Donald Trump, the former president beckoned them to following Israel's footsteps—the only major Western country to view Biden less positively than Trump.”
How Others See the World
China redux
For once Ukraine and America are taking a backseat to China on front pages around the world as Xi Jinping kicks off his Communist Party Congress—stage-managed to take him one step closer to that nation’s leader-for-life. Or as the front page of the leading French daily Le Monde headlined, “Xi Jinping the ideologue defines his vision to make China a power “at the forefront of the world.”
Le Monde’s Beijing bureau chief Frédéric Lemaitre writes: “Clearly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a very particular political being. Xi Jinping provided further proof of this on Sunday at the opening of the 20th party congress. In a speech of one hour and fifty minutes, Xi Jinping did not mention the war in Ukraine, nor the economic slowdown that his country is undergoing, nor the unemployment of young people which is reaching peaks, nor the situation in Xinjiang, where China is accused of massively interning the Uighur minority, or even the constitutional change he made in 2018 to stay in power as long as he wants. Even the zero-covid policy which has partially paralyzed the country for almost three years has been settled in a single sentence. Thanks to its maintenance, ‘the life and health of our people have been protected to the maximum and the coordination between the fight against the epidemic and economic and social development has achieved positive and important results.’ Not a word for the tens of millions of Chinese who, all over the country, have been confined to their homes for weeks in sometimes inhuman conditions.”
On its front page, France’s center-right daily Le Figaro painted Xi’s landmark event in starker terms: “Xi Jinping, emperor of red China.”
In Asia, Tan Dawn Wei, China bureau chief of The Straits Times of Singapore observed, “President Xi Jinping emphasized the security challenges that China could face and told party members to be ready to weather ‘high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms,’ as the country continues its rise as a world power. Warning of continued uncertainties in the global landscape, he urged party cadres to get behind the Communist Party of China (CPC) and foster a fighting spirit so that they ‘cannot be swayed by fallacies, deterred by intimidation, or cowed by pressure.’”
Closer to home, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post focused on Xi’s Taiwan remarks: “Beijing will do its utmost for peaceful reunification with Taiwan, Xi says. But the Chinese president tells the Communist Party congress that ‘we will never promise to renounce the use of force.’”
Meanwhile, on Taiwan itself, the Taipei Times turned to the commander of the US Seventh Fleet Vice Admiral Karl Thomas who “reiterated the importance of conducting freedom of navigation operations in the Taiwan Strait, as he recognized Australia and Canada for their transits [saying] that China’s territorial claims in the region are beyond what the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea allows, and are illegal under an international tribunal ruling. ‘It’s very important that we don’t accept [China’s claims] and that’s why we do freedom of navigation operations.’”
Putin’s war continues to … collapse
Germany’s nationally circulated Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung turns its attention to Vladimir Putin’s barbaric use of children as targets of his venom. “Russia is continuing its massive deportations of Ukrainians in Moscow-held territories, according to independent experts,” correspondent Sabrina Ebitsch writes.
“The Russian authorities have openly admitted to placing children from the occupied territories of Ukraine for adoption by Russian families in a way that could violate the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Chusnullin said, ‘several thousand’ children from the Cherson Oblast in south-eastern Ukraine ‘are already being accommodated in rest homes and children's camps in other regions of Russia.’ The Russian authorities may have engaged in a broader form of ethnic cleansing, depopulating Ukrainian territory through deportations and repopulating Ukrainian cities with imported Russian citizens. Former US General Ben Hodges estimates that a million Ukrainians have been kidnapped and deported since the beginning of the war.”
Tom Reese of London’s Telegraph newspaper reports exclusively that “Ukraine's vast untapped gas reserves [are being] lined up to supply energy to Europe. The country is in talks with American drilling companies to bring its resources to the market.” The one caveat Reese points out, this probably can’t happen until “the end of the decade.” Still, a potentially important wakeup call to Putin.
Meanwhile, remember Italy…?
….Where neo-Fascist Georgia Meloni and her three-party coalition catapulted to victory in an election last month that shook Europe to its core. Well, now there are already cracks beginning to appear even before she’s able to form a government and name her cabinet. As Euronews reports: “The first fault lines are appearing, meaning the three-way alliance could be over even before the government is formalized….[Meloni’s leadership] is not sitting well with 86-year-old Silvio Berlusconi—the former three-time conservative prime minister who, four decades her senior, fancies himself the elder statesman of Italy's political right. Meloni is expected to be asked next week by Italy's President Sergio Mattarella to try to create a governing coalition with campaign allies Berlusconi and right-wing leader Matteo Salvini and become premier. A spat between Berlusconi and Meloni turned ugly when the former PM and a media mogul scrawled a list of derogatory adjectives about her on stationery emblazoned with the name of his villa near Milan.”
“Her ways are ‘presumptuous, bossy, arrogant, offensive,’ his notes read. A fifth adjective, ‘ridiculous,'’ appeared to have been scribbled over, said Italian media, who magnified the image,” Euronews concluded.
And then there's Brandan….
…with his own Pinocchio-view of Vladimir Putin and his increasingly warlike proclivities as he expands his bombing across the length and breadth of Ukraine.
The extraordinary South African cartoonist who lives in Cape Town has been drawing the daily cartoon for the national newspaper Business Day since 2002 and is a charter member of Cartooning for Peace.
TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #9
David, These are particularly valuable. Thanks. Peter