TWTW: The World This Week #106

Elections: Germany's far right…Kamala interviewed...Musk & Durov in worlds of pain...Putin up the creek?...Marsh family SINGS of Trump…and Belgian cartoonist Vadot on Macron's pals.

In this weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, we continue to explore how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world….with notes today from five continents.

Elections 2024: Germany (the East)

Beware the far-right

This is a critical weekend in the political evolution of what has long been an economic and at one point political anchor of Europe. Ordinarily, while we chronicle every election, we avoid local or regional elections but this week voters in former East German states are going to the polls to choose their leaders. And for the first time it appears that the far-right AfD [ Alternative für Deutschland / Alternative for Germany] has a good chance of gaining unprecedented full power. As EuroNews explained:

In all 3 eastern German states of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is ahead in the polls. In Thuringia, which has a population of 2.1 million and where the famous Buchenwald [concentration camp was] located, fiercely anti-immigration AfD is leading with 30% in the polls—way ahead of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), who were in power for 16 years under former Chancellor Angela Merkel. The CDU currently polls at 21% in the state.

Faced with the far-right's potential win in the regional elections, experts say there are reasons for Germany's federal government to be afraid for the future, especially the parties that make up Chancellor Olaf Scholz's centre-left bloc. Germany's security service has labelled the Thuringian AfD as a right-wing extremist party. The AfD leader in the state, Björn Höcke, was convicted twice for using the banned Nazi slogan 'Alles für Deutschland' ('Everything for Germany').

Andelman Unleashed will monitor voting and present a full report by mid-week.

How others see America

Kamala…neither departure nor brilliance

Up to a point, the world was watching Kamala Harris' first prime time televised interview this week, but Le Monde Washington correspondent Piotr Smolar seems to have summed it up quite succinctly:

Kamala Harris passes, on CNN, her first televised oral exam as a candidate with neither errors nor brilliance…

There was no crash or fireworks….The Democratic candidate spoke calmly, sometimes allowing herself a broad smile or a laugh, but lacked scathing phrases. No doubt eager to appear as presidential and controlled as possible, she failed to embody the energy that has driven the Democratic campaign since the end of July. But the real test was not Thursday on CNN. It will take place on September 10, against Donald Trump, during their debate on ABC.

But Federico Rampini of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera was even less impressed:

Both she and her running mate spent the entire interview on the defensive, and this despite the fact that CNN is a friendly television, "almost a supporter" of the Democratic Party. 

Kamala Harris had to explain all the about-faces of her recent political career, she had to justify the fact that four years ago she was in favor of decriminalizing the crime of illegal immigration, while now she promises to take a hard line and seal the border. She had to explain why four years ago she was in favor of the Green New Deal and wanted to ban fracking, the technology for extracting fossil fuels, while now she has completely changed her position on that too.

In fact, in the interview, she confirmed a distancing from the most radical wing of her party. A rather mediocre figure emerged. It was not an overwhelming interview, she is not as charismatic a character as it may have seemed to the crowd at the Chicago convention. So Kamala Harris has won the lottery: she is lucky enough to have landed in an exceptional juncture, with the hasty withdrawal of Joe Biden's candidacy and with a flawed and problematic opponent named Donald Trump. 

By contrast, America-watcher Maciej Czarnecki of Poland's Wyborocza, seems to have been viewing a whole different interview half a continent away:

In her first interview since winning the Democratic nomination, Kamala Harris — with her deputy Tim Walz at her side — promised to improve the American middle class, saying Americans are fed up with Donald Trump and want to move forward. Harris strongly emphasized her economic policy priorities from the beginning of the conversation with Dana Bash on CNN: she promised lower prices for basic products, pro-family policies, support for small businesses. She announced an "opportunity economy."

Harris highlighted the achievements of the Biden administration, in which she is vice president—creating new jobs, bringing inflation down to below 3%, fighting poverty in the US, lowering the prices of prescription drugs….In her conversation with Bash, the Democrat avoided any slip-ups. She tried to address concerns raised by many Americans by combining a story about traditional American values ​​with promises to improve the situation of working families.

How others see the World

Musk beaten by Brazil

Elon Musk suffered a substantial setback in Brazil, Latin America's largest (by GDP) nation—whose courts have snuffed out his operations from X to Starlink in a stunning coup that the world's wealthiest man ($243.7 billion) seemed powerless to reverse. As Jornal do Brazil headlined, the entire X site and the accounts of Starlink have been blocked throughout the country.

With X used by at least 20 million of the nation's 200 million people, the court warned any who try to use VPNs (virtual private networks) to circumvent the order risk fines of R$50,000 ($8,900) per day. Then, another Supreme Court Justice refused to unblock the accounts of Musk's Starlinks system, which the government had also frozen. As Jornal do Brasil continued:

The decision took into account the fact that X, Musk's social network, does not have a representative in Brazil and is not complying with the [Supreme Court] decisions….The economic group under Musk's command includes both X and Starlink. Thus, the internet company's assets could be frozen to ensure the collection of part of the fines applied to X.

According to Cristiano Zanin, the blockade is supported by the “preceding factual reality”…. He highlighted that this is not a mere matter of collecting a fine, but of preventing “an affronting behavior against the highest court in the country….The repeated failure to comply with decisions of the Supreme Federal Court is extremely serious for any citizen or public or private legal entity. No one can intend to carry out their activities in Brazil without observing the country’s laws and Constitution.”

Elon Musk fired all of the company's Brazilian employees on the 17th and announced that the network will 'cease operations' in the country…. The company owes around R$18 million ($3.2 million) in fines, a much higher amount than the R$2 million blocked from Starlink.

The BBC explained some background of this series of stunning decisions:

Justice Moraes had ordered that X accounts accused of spreading disinformation—many supporters of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro—must be blocked while they are under investigation….

Justice Moraes gained prominence after his decisions to restrict social media platforms in the country. He is also investigating Bolsonaro and his supporters for their roles in an alleged attempted coup 8 January last year.

Bolsonaro, defeated for re-election as president in a bitter, closely-held election by leftist Lula da Silva as Andelman Unleashed reported in October 2022, has been a great friend for years with Musk….

As London's Independent added:

In between promoting Donald Trump’s US presidential bid and sharing far-right misinformation about British politics, Musk has repeatedly used his platform to lash out at Justice Moraes in recent days….Responding to news of X’s suspension, Musk tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” adding: “The oppressive regime in Brazil is so afraid of the people learning the truth that they will bankrupt anyone who tries.”

Language hardly inclined to win over any skeptical court, but that suggests its author's political leanings. Bolsonaro in turn has been especially close to Donald Trump as we also pointed out in 2022….

Many of the comments of Bolsonaro in the course of his campaign have suggested a page torn directly from the playbook of Donald Trump—to the point of suggesting he might not accept the results of the vote as legitimate—if voters chose not to return him to office.

Trump has supported Bolsonaro throughout his campaign and indeed throughout his administration.

Full disclosure: this writer has himself been banned from X since March 18, 2023, the thousands he has followed removed from his page, after a series of posts apparently antithetical to Musk's political interests.

And then there's Telegram….

Another Internet titan is in the hotseat, but this time facing hard time in at least two European countries, as Le Monde explains:

On July 29, Pavel Durov boasted about his large family. “  [exploding head emoji] I was just told I have over 100 biological children ,” he wrote on his Telegram channel….

Irina Bolgar, who was Mr. Durov's partner until the end of 2018 and the mother of three of his children, filed a complaint on March 27, 2023 in Geneva, where she lives, for three acts of violence against their youngest son. Contacted, Ms. Bolgar did not wish to comment. Telegram, for its part, did not respond to our requests at the time of publication.

These revelations come after Mr Durov was indicted in France for 12 offences, most of which relate to organised crime. The Telegram messaging service—and therefore its CEO—is accused of failing to cooperate with the judicial authorities, particularly in cases of organised crime and child pornography.

On Saturday, French cable network BFM elaborated:

Pavel Durov, arrested on Saturday for 12 offenses relating to organized crime, is also the subject of an investigation for "serious violence" against one of his children in Paris, we learned from a source close to the case. This investigation, entrusted to the Office for Minors (Ofmin), has just been opened, the same sources added, specifying that the acts were allegedly committed against a son of the Franco-Russian billionaire born in 2017, while he was at school in Paris.

Africa makes the cover

In The Economist, as deputy editor Robert Guest explains:

The last time we put Sudan on the cover was 20 years ago. I remember it vividly because I wrote the cover leader, having spent a fair amount of time chatting to dissidents in Khartoum and enduring finger-wagging lectures from government ministers who insisted that there was positively, definitely no campaign of mass rape and murder against black Africans in Darfur. Today the situation is even worse.

The country is imploding, as two unscrupulous warlords battle for control. The Khartoum neighbourhoods where I once sipped hibiscus tea are charred ruins. More than 10m people have fled from their homes and a famine looms that could be worse than anything the world has seen since the 1980s.

It is hard to see past the human tragedy of the war in Sudan. Perhaps 150,000 people have died since fighting began last year and more than 10m have fled their homes….Sudan is a chaos machine….As the country disintegrates, it could upend regimes in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. It could become a haven for terrorists. It could send an exodus of refugees to Europe. And it could exacerbate the crisis in the Red Sea….

Heading off an even broader war

That seems to have been the mission of Jake Sullivan to China, as Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post suggested…

The results of a three-day visit by US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to Beijing, at the invitation of Foreign Minister Wang Yi, can be viewed as a welcome relief.

On the final day, President Xi Jinping met Sullivan and said he hoped both sides would support each other’s development. Xi stressed that as major powers, China and the US “must be responsible to history, people and the world, and become a stable source of world peace and an accelerator of common development”.

Biden is the only US president since Jimmy Carter not to visit China while in office. It was agreed Xi and Biden would speak by phone in coming weeks, another positive sign.

Sullivan, in talks with Wang, raised concern about China’s “destabilising actions” against Philippine vessels in the area. Wang countered that the US should “not use bilateral treaties as an excuse to undermine China’s sovereignty.”  He urged the US to abide by the one-China principle and to stop arming Taiwan. Sullivan also met Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, who warned against crossing a red line on Taiwan.

This was the first meeting between a top US security official and a Chinese general in eight years.

As for how all this came about, Demetri Sevastopulo, US-China reporter for London's Financial Times has some insights:

Three months after a Chinese spy balloon flew over the US, sending relations with Beijing to their lowest point since diplomatic ties were established in 1979, Jake Sullivan embarked on his own stealth mission.

The US national security adviser flew to Vienna on May 10, 2023, for a highly consequential meeting—one that would be held in the kind of clandestine fashion in keeping with the Austrian capital’s historic reputation. Sullivan was in Vienna to meet Wang Yi, a veteran Chinese diplomat who had become his country’s top foreign policy official in January…(for) a series of talks at the Imperial Hotel that spanned more than eight hours over two days. It was the first of several secret rendezvous around the world, including Malta and Thailand, now called the “strategic channel.”….The channel has played a vital role managing relations between the rival superpowers during a period fraught with tensions [and] has been a shock absorber that officials say has helped cut the risk of a miscalculation by both nations.

Still, in Hong Kong….

China continues to extend its long arm—convicting two leading journalists of "sedition," which means they wrote something true, but unwelcome in Beijing. The Overseas Press Club of America weighed in to ….

…condemn the guilty verdicts in Hong Kong of two former editors-in-chief of Stand News, Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, on charges of sedition. A Hong Kong court has found the editors, arrested in December 2021, guilty on charges of publishing and reproducing seditious publications. The conviction is part of a crackdown on news publications in Hong Kong since an opaque National Security Law went into effect in mid-2020.

Hong Kong has fallen on the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index to 135 from 80 since 2021—out of 180 places on the list.

Also in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai, founder of the defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, is currently on trial on charges of conspiracy and collusion with foreign forces under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law.

During the trial of the Stand News editors, the government said the articles and opinion pieces published were a threat to national security as they were biased against the government. The editors maintained that the articles were similar to those the news organization had been publishing for years and have maintained their innocence….

Now for our two shooting wars … first, Ukraine

The battle within Russia continues to expand slowly eastward (though still failing to contain Russia’s own push into Ukraine’s Donbas), as the week's maps from the definitive Institute for the Study of War (ISW) suggest:

ISW concludes:

It remains unclear if the Russian military command has already or will redeploy additional reserve forces intended for Russia's offensive operations in the [Donbas] to address the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast.

And further inland, things really don't look so good for Putin these days …. As ISW discovered in Russian polling channels:

The Public Opinion Foundation, a Russian state-owned polling institution, published a poll on August 30 that it conducted on August 25 showing that 28% of respondents expressed outrage or dissatisfaction with the actions of Russian authorities over the past month. This is up from 25% and 18% in its polls conducted on August 11 and July 28.

Trust in Putin / Distrust in Putin

Respondents have not expressed such high dissatisfaction since polling conducted in November 2022, following the first month of the deeply unpopular partial mobilization in Russia. The Russian state-owned Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) noted that Putin's approval rating fell by 3.5% to 73.6% between August 12 and 18—a record fall in Putin's approval rating

Then there's Israel…

…where now a real two-front war seems to have been opened….with Fadi Amun reporting in the Israeli daily Haaretz:

Israel continued its large-scale raid—which includes destruction of infrastructure, airstrikes and gunbattles—into urban refugee camps in the north of the volatile West Bank. The Palestinian health ministry in the West Bank said 22 people have been killed in Israel's ongoing operation in Jenin….

Meanwhile, deeply sad news on the hostage front … as the Israeli military reported on its Telegram channel:

The IDF and ISA located and recovered the bodies of the hostages Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sergeant Ori Danino, from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area in the Gaza Strip and returned them to Israeli territory.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin is, sadly, the Israeli-American whose parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention last month, saying the world was praying for his release.

A deeply embittered Haaretz headlined Sunday:

….as negotiations over ceasefire/hostage release talks seem to hit  a pause for the moment, hostage families grow ever more desperate:

Israelis protested countrywide against the ruling coalition and demand a Gaza deal to release hostages held by Hamas. Earlier in the evening, families of hostages…accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his security cabinet that … the decision to remain at the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi route, is motivated "solely by criminal intentions for political survival, rather than any legitimate considerations."

An Unleashed First !

Andelman Unleashed has unleashed new, paid tiers.

Most Fridays, for our (lightly) paid subscribers, we’d ordinarily be offering our Unleashed Conversation via Zoom….

A campfire of the mind

But we took last Friday off (as is most of the American universe) and we'll be back this week with a surprise….a one-time opening to all our subs!

So DO sign up…you’ll get a link…we’ll have fun … but bring your own smores.

And then there’s … The Marsh Family

A musical family from England is shaking up America's presidential race. The Marsh family describing themselves as a "family of six, from Kent in the UK, are versatile, earthy, and independent." Dubbed the "Von Trapped family," they have their own particular sense of America's presidential contest.

As they put it before bursting into song:

With only a matter of weeks until the pivotal US Presidential Election in November…we decided to revisit the magnificent Eddy Grant's controversial and catchy anthem about international politics in the time of apartheid in South Africa—Gimme Hope Jo'Anna. The original song was written and recorded in 1988 by the British-Guyanese artist as an anti-apartheid British musical intervention (it didn't chart in the US) and it was banned by the SA government for daring to critique and offer hope for change in Johannesburg (Jo'Anna) and beyond.

So we've flipped the concept back to a person—because that's how the US contest is always configured—and set up Kamala Harris as the centre of the chorus as she now occupies the centrepiece of hope for those wishing to avoid another Donald Trump administration….It just felt a good fit to be able to sing something upbeat and positive—and for our two girls to see the most powerful person in the world might be about to be a woman for the first time, in contrast to Trump's track record on gender and rights.

Take it away Marsh family!

Finally, there’s …. Vadot  

As France continues to stumble along with no confirmed, or confirmable, government, the great Belgian cartoonist Vadot imagines an apparently not very happy Emmanuel Macron (nickname of Manu) fulfilling his pledge, before naming a new Prime Minister and cabinet, to "continue his consultations….in every direction." This might even include, standing in the doorway of his Elysée Palace, receiving his predecessors—the right-wing Nikolai Sarkozy and Socialist François Hollande—not to mention ghosts as far back as Charles de Gaulle or even King Louis XIV, the Sun King, followed by a quite skeptical Asterix.

Nicolas Vadot, 53, was born in Britain and has triple French, British and Australian nationality. His first appearance in Andelman Unleashed, he has been working for the magazine Le Vif/L'Express since 1993 and for the daily L'Echo since 2008. His drawings are regularly featured on Jean Quatremer's blog Coulisses de Bruxelles. He was the vice-president of the great collective Cartooning for Peace between 2013 and 2017. He is also a comic book author and has published several albums and produced an animated short film "The gloomy aftermath of Brexit" in 2016, written by Philippe Cayla, as well as ten animated films for the "Rock The Eurovote 2019" campaign, encouraging young people to vote in the European elections. A radio and television columnist, he regularly appears on France 24 during the program “Une semaine dans le monde” [A week in the world].

Here’s how Vadot imagines himself: