TWTW: The World This Week #109

America's presidency & a gesture from Warsaw?…France has a govt...Violence across Ukraine, Israel, target: Al Jazeera....China's look at a dark side….cartoonist's eye on pollution.

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.

UPDATING….Zelensky visits Pennsylvania…..Another German state goes to the polls, and the far-right comes in second.

How others see America

Could Poland tip the election to Trump?

Kamala Harris may have dodged a truly lethal (political) bullet herself this weekend. A meeting between Poland's president Andrzej Duda and Donald Trump in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, at a Marian shrine known as the American Częstochowa, had been scheduled for Sunday.

Such a meeting could well have meant that the winner of the American presidential election would have been decided in the halls of the Pałac Prezydencki in Warsaw. That's where at least half of  the decision (being hotly debated across Poland) was made whether to take the meeting. And then it wasn't. At the last minute, it was called off. "For security concerns," was the word from inside the Trump camp. Really? Let's think about this.

What was not called off was a visit Sunday by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to a US munitions plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania that makes ammunition for the critical 155 military artillery. His purpose? To thank workers at the facility, where no media was even allowed.

Zelensky will be making a bigger pitch for more help to the full UN General Assembly this week.

Why, though, are Poles and Ukrainians in Pennsylvania so important in the first place? Because Pennsylvania may just hold the key to who wins the Electoral College, and hence the presidency, and there just happen to be 757,627 Poles who live in Pennsylvania or 6% of the population in a state that the latest polls show in an absolutely dead heat.

One can only hope the Harris-Walz campaign is paying very close attention. Because beyond Pennsylvania, over 2 million Poles live in just the three key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, not to mention some 478,000 more in Florida, which may suddenly be in contention as well.

Not to mention the Ukrainian population, but in many states no less significant and likely even more committed. The 104,929 Ukrainians in Pennsylvania alone should be viewed through the prism of the 80,555 votes by which Biden beat Trump in 2020 (out of 6.8 million cast).

The one issue most Poles and Ukrainians care about more than anything else is the survival of their ancestral homelands. Both are under potentially existential threat if, as expected, a newly-elected Trump throws Ukraine under the bus, bringing Russian forces to the very border of Poland. In the case of Poland, Duda and Trump are very much political soulmates—even if Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky are like oil and water. Duda and Trump, however, are in sharp contrast to the center-left and determinedly pro-Ukraine government of Poland’’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who ousted the ruling rightwing Law & Justice Party of Duda, as Andelman Unleashed reported last October, leaving Duda isolated in the largely symbolic role of president.

As for Duda, he certainly did not shy away from putting his thumb on the scale for the 2020 election in America, meeting Trump in the White House for a very public photo-op as the presidential election was beginning on June 23, 2020—Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader since the previous February. The New York Times quoted Democrats as viewing it as:

….an unseemly effort to boost a European ally whose country is tilting toward autocracy days before a close re-election vote.

At the time, the focus was on what Trump would be doing to boost Duda's chances for his own reelection back in Poland. By that time the two had met one-on-one at least five times, three of them in the White House. Yet none of the coverage of the 2020 meeting noted the stakes if Trump himself would lose Pennsylvania to Biden that November. Which he did by a 1.17% margin and only after four hellish days with the world holding its breath.

The two have hardly lost touch in the ensuing years. In April, they met in Trump Tower in New York.

Writing this past week in the Polish daily Wyborcza, the paper's deputy editor-in-chief Bartosz T. Wielińskiw warned "Poland cannot interfere in the US elections," then adding, the writer's outrage clearly building:

Harris published an election advert addressed to the descendants of Polish emigrants living [in Pennsylvania] there, in which there appeared the Marian bugle call and the motif of American support for Poland during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Trump clearly intends to top this and in order to gain votes from the Polish diaspora, traditionally conservative and pro-Republican, he wants to use the Marian sanctuary and President Duda, which are important to them.

No one in Andrzej Duda's circle has seen through this game? If less than a month and a half before the election, the head of the Polish state appears alongside the Republican Party candidate fighting for the presidency, it will become clear to the entire world that Duda supports Trump. Voters of Polish origin living in and outside this state will receive a clear signal about who to vote for.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the presidential election in Pennsylvania by just 80,000 votes. This year, the duel could be even closer. And whoever wins Pennsylvania will win the entire election.

Duda’s subservience to Trump has long been a source of resentment. In June 2020, Trump needed an important guest at the White House to send voters a signal that the coronavirus pandemic was over. Angela Merkel refused to come, so Trump summoned Duda. This year, he wanted to show that he plays an important role in international politics.

I suppose that if Andrzej Duda had American citizenship, he would vote for Trump. It is his personal matter. But Duda is not going to America as a citizen, but as the president of the fifth [largest] EU country. Therefore, his support for Trump in the elections will mean that Poland is violating diplomatic rules.

Countries like Russia, China and Iran have been accused of influencing the American elections. There are still a few days left. I hope the president will understand that Poland cannot be among them.

Ironically, just this past week, Poland's foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, engaging in a spot of wishful thinking, told Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a quick stopover in Warsaw, as reported by the State Department press office:

I believe that our collaboration aimed at supporting Kyiv will be continued until the end of the current administration and by the next administration as well. I hope that it will contribute to the quickest possible end of the Russian aggression, taking into account and with due regard of raison d’être of Ukraine, which has been attacked.

Ensuring security of Ukraine, a strategic forefront of the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization is our joint priority, and we shall continue our efforts.  Poland remains a strong advocate of increasing the pressure on the Russian regime in order to force it to end the conflict against Ukraine.

Hardly clear what language might be operative if a Trump secretary of state is in Blinken's chair come January.

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How others see the World

Still think Wagner's dead ?

Well, in fact, a whole lot of Wagner mercenaries are dead following a massacre in northern Mali when they were doing their best—though clearly not enough—to help out their client state, the government of Mali. American and French forces had been hustled out of the country, which is beset by Islamists allied with powerful Tuareg tribes in the north of Mali. Replacing the western forces have been forces of the Wagner Group, reconstituted since the death of their founder-leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. France 24, using footage uncovered by the All Eyes on Wagner project, disclosed that as many as 60 Wagner fighters walked into,  then fell victim to an ambush not far from the Algerian frontier. Click to play:

France 24's Guillaume Maurice explains:

The Battle of Tinzawaten, in the Sahara Desert, was the Wagner Group's worst defeat in Africa. Separatist Tuareg rebels along with Islamist fighters killed between 50 and 67 of the Russian group's mercenaries near Tinzawaten in northern Mali. It was the Russian mercenary group Wagner's deadliest defeat since it has been active in Africa: at least 50 of its men were killed during three days of fighting after being ambushed by Tuareg rebels known as the CSP, and then attacked by Islamist forces of the JNIM.

One moment of the battle was filmed by one of the Wagner fighters himself, Nikita Fedyanin. Administrator of a Telegram channel called Grey Zone, he was one of the group's chief propagandists, publishing images showing him and his comrades operating in African countries. The video was recovered from his body by the Tuareg rebels. The rebels recovered telephones and at least one GoPro camera from the Wagner operatives' bodies.

European Union: Ursula moving right on the q-t ….

On little cat feet, Ursula von der Leyen [UVDL] is quietly assembling Europe's leadership that will need to deal with a host of challenges in its own backyard and host of others across two oceans and the continents that separate them.

And for the moment, it appears that all paths lead through Madrid and the increasingly potent Greens. As Politico Europe put it:

Spain’s climate expert is poised to become the EU’s competition chief, net-zero architect and economic transformer—all in one. Ursula von der Leyen has a dream for Europe. Teresa Ribera is meant to make it happen. The European Commission president chose the Spanish climate expert to become one of the European Union’s most influential people—in charge of charting the bloc’s course toward a future both prosperous and green.

It is, perhaps, the most powerful post ever created within the EU’s executive arm: A position combining the jobs of competition chief, net-zero architect and economic transformer. Ribera—currently Spain’s ecological transition minister—is the one von der Leyen is effectively tasking with implementing her overarching vision. And she’s handing Ribera a blueprint: An exhaustive report from former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi that calls for Europe to renew its economic fortunes via a more powerful EU and the green transition. It’s a diagnosis Ribera broadly shares. “This is a great opportunity to keep on building the European dream,” Ribera told reporters in Strasbourg.

Our SubStack partners, Christian Spillmann and David Carretta in their La Mattinale Européenne have some caveats, though, as to the new shape of those who will govern Europe going forward—quite a break with the past:

Surviving in the machine

Ursula von der Leyen has unveiled her Commission: sixteen men and eleven women. The big countries—Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland—are in the driving seat with heavy responsibilities, but their commissioners are all novices. They will have to enter a system capable of crushing them, gain the trust of the president and her cabinet or risk being marginalised, and form teams to avoid failure. In short, they will have to survive in a ruthless environment.

Antagonisms, power struggles, divisions. The outgoing commission was rotten with this mode of operation. Ursula von der Leyen and her inner circle bear part of the responsibility for this mismanagement of the institution. The oversized egos of some commissioners did the rest.

For her second term, Ursula von der Leyen advocates teamwork….The newcomers are all more or less qualified. But they will not be able to overshadow a president who has become a political figure of the European People's Party, the conservative family, with fourteen members [in the new government.]

And yes, we (finally?) have a government: France

Clearly UVDL is reflecting the conservative trend in Europe, certainly in her native Germany which she once served as defense minister and is seeing a big swing to the right as Andelman Unleashed chronicled on September 4. But now even in France as well. As Le Monde put it:

The [Prime Minister Michel] Barnier government: A team far from the national unity promised by Emmanuel Macron

The standoff between the presidential camp and Les Républicains in recent days has resulted in a government split almost equally between Renaissance and the right-wing party. Only Didier Migaud, in justice, appears to be a social-democratic figure.

The magazine Le Point, went further, suggesting a motive:

The Barnier government between Macronist continuity and rightward shift

The Secretary General of the Élysée, Alexis Kohler, announced on Saturday the appointment of 39 ministers, most of whom are unknown and have no political clout.

It's taken three months, an entire Olympics and then some, but on Saturday, France finally got itself a new government—if it'll hold.  From the dissolution of the last Parliament and the effective termination of the last cabinet to the naming of the 39 new members (with some returnees), it's the longest interregnum on record. These are just the top 10 largest ministries:

Of course, they still must withstand threats of "no-confidence" votes in the National Assembly, but for now it all seems good to go. Still, even from its first moments, there were the inevitable protests, especially from the left who Macron seemed determined to ignore, and particularly the Socialist assemblywoman, Lucie Castets, the designated prime minister of choice for the left.

The French have a habit of taking to the streets, but especially those who feel, well, left out of this right-leaning, if hardly radical, government.

But as Le Monde noted, the anti-government turnout was somewhat threadbare:

The calls for mobilisation were not widely followed in the regions: there were 2,200 in Marseille, according to the police headquarters (compared to 3,500 during the previous day of protest 7 September), 400 in Bordeaux, some 200 in Angoulême and Nantes, a hundred in Strasbourg.

Yet getting rid of the far-left—as much a thorn in the side off Macron as the far-righrt and Marine Le Pen—cannot have been far from the president’s mind all along.

Elections 2024: Sri Lanka swings left, as does Brandenberg

First, Sri Lanka

Speaking of the far-left, that’s what voters in Sri Lanka chose in their vote this weekend for their new president, as Al Jazeera reported:

• Marxist-leaning Anura Kumara Dissanayake wins Sri Lanka’s presidential election, according to official results.

• For the first time in the country’s history, election officials counted the second-preference votes after no candidate secured 50 percent.

• Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa finished second, while incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe came a distant third.

• The state of the economy dominated voters’ concerns, with many struggling to make ends meet after the imposition of harsh austerity measures following a $2.9bn International Monetary Fund (IMF) emergency loan.

Then Brandenberg, Germany

The center-left Social Democrat Party (SPD) of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pulled off a narrow victory over the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Sunday’s elections in the state of Brandenburg after AfD swept elections earlier this month in two other states. As the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine reported:

Brandenburg has voted. The SPD has managed to assert itself as the strongest force in the new state parliament, just ahead of the AfD.

One big challenge is Ukraine

What to do about this full-blown war continuing to rage on the far eastern fringe of Europe, with virtually everyone has chosen up sides, as Carretta and Spillman report:

It’s not just the European Union. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is about to take the G7 hostage as well. The group of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan, with which the European Union is associated, promised last June to provide a $50 billion loan to Ukraine by the end of 2024, using the profits from Russian sovereign assets frozen under sanctions. The aim is to shield Western aid to Kiev from the risk of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and political turbulence in Europe. The $50 billion is supposed to be used by Ukraine to buy weapons and finance its budget. But the loan may not see the light of day because Hungary has vetoed the architecture that the EU is building to finance its part. Orban wants to wait until the US presidential elections on November 5. “It’s twenty-six to one,” a diplomat tells us. Again.

Two-thirds of the $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets are in Europe as one of our interlocutors told us. “The Hungarian prime minister is convinced that Putin will win the war,” explains another.

As for that war….stalemate, as summer ends

Quietly, but inexorably it would seem, Russian forces are beginning to eat away at the territory Ukrainian invaders had seized in their first, surprise and all but unresisted push across the frontier into Russian territory. The week-to-week comparison of maps assembled by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), tell most of the story:

Territory that just a week ago was "claimed" by Russian forces to have been re-taken is now seen as confirmed "Russian advances." Part of the reason for these, still somewhat marginal gains, ISW continued, is new motivation:

Russian authorities have reportedly tasked Russian forces with pushing Ukrainian forces out of Kursk Oblast by mid-October 2024 and establishing a "buffer zone" into Ukrainian border areas along the international border with Russia in northeastern Ukraine by the end of October — significant undertakings that the Russian military is very unlikely to achieve in such a short period of time. 

At the same time, perhaps a chance to even the odds:

Mobilization in Russia remains unlikely in the near to medium term due to Putin’s personal fear that mobilization is a direct threat to his regime’s stability.

Remember those hostages?

Overshadowed by Israel's new war in Lebanon, there's growing fear that, as the determinedly anti-Netanyahu Israeli daily Ha'aretz put it, "Israel has one last chance to sign a deal before everything goes up in flames."

As the paper elaborated in an editorial:

Israel is getting deeper in trouble. It is booby-trapping itself on several fronts and could find itself in a difficult, multifront war that will incur high casualties….The collective admiration for the intelligence and operational abilities that led to the explosions of pagers and other communications devices of Hezbollah members, an operation that has been attributed to Israel, could soon give way to heartrending cries of grief, the result of a punishing regional war.

 Columnist Gideon Levy called it even more directly:

The pager attack sent a clear message: Israel wants another redundant war.

We now have it in writing, in a thousand exploding copies: Israel wants a war, a big one. There is no other way of understanding the glittering and exploding Hollywood-style operation in Lebanon other than the transmission of a determined pager message to the enemy, revealing Israel's true intentions. One thousand explosions with 3,000 injuries are an invitation to war. It will come….

 We are in the middle of the most criminal and most redundant war Israel has ever embarked upon. And it turns out that it wants another one….

Is Israel now in a safer place? Was the fate of the hostages improved? Did Israel's status in the world benefit? Did the Iranian threat dissipate? Did a single thing change for the better as a result of the latest hush-hush operation other than the already inflated egos of our security-associated people?

At the same time vast masses of the Israeli population reacted, taking to the streets by the tens of thousands in Tel Aviv and across Israel Saturday night, a team of Haaretz reporters writing:

Ahead of the protests, several relatives of the hostages issued a statement to the media. "We warned that it's either a deal or regional escalation, and that first and foremost the hostages must be returned," said Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan. "But now everyone sees that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu chose a regional escalation and decided to sacrifice the hostages on the altar of preserving his power."

"Just as Netanyahu nurtured Hamas for years, so too is he now cooperating with [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar, giving him what he wants: a multi-front war," Zangauker added. "The price is being paid and will be paid by the hostages and all the citizens of Israel. We say to Netanyahu and members of the government: Even when the guns in the north are thundering, you have no mandate to give up the hostages."

And then there’s media management

In the overnight hours, the Israeli military continued its own particular techniques of media management. Well, let’s just let the victim, Al Jazeera, tell its own story:

On live television, heavily armed Israeli soldiers raided Al Jazeera’s occupied West Bank bureau in Ramallah and handed the bureau head, Walid al-Omari, a notice to shut it down. The soldiers ordered everyone working the overnight shift at the bureau to leave, telling them they could take only their personal belongings.

The entire team working in the bureau overnight was told to leave. Initially, they were told on camera that they should leave with their personal belongings and cameras. However, they had to leave the cameras in the office in the end.

This is not the first time Israel has undertaken actions in the Oslo Accords-defined Area A, where Ramallah is and where the Palestinian Authority (PA) has its seat.

But (live) images speak more loudly than words:

How did Unleashed spend its summer?

Reading (and writing) like crazy!

And then there’s that far side of the moon

The first reports are in—from the never before visited far side of the moon and as summarized by Holly Chik for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, they are a mix…