TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #6
Macron on his Mar-a-Lago file, India roils global rice markets, Europe copes with escalation in Ukraine, Italy looks to a sharp right turn, Germany still sits on its tanks, and a Cartoon for Peace
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. Publishing a day early….clearing the decks for the landmark Italian national elections Sunday!
How Others See America
The Mar-a-Lago papers
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago top secret documents have hardly been ignored abroad, but especially in countries or by leaders who fear they may be mentioned in some fashion or other. So, when Emmanuel Macron went on CNN to talk with anchor Jake Tapper, the Paris daily Le Figaro could not restraint itself from reporting the French president "would be delighted to know more" about just what Trump or American intelligence might know about him. The document, correspondent Antoine Crouze points out, is "simply entitled, 'President of France." Then, quoting Macron: "I am not a member of the FBI, I am not a member of President Trump's legal team, so I have no information on the subject. This situation is not very pleasant. But I try to be less paranoid every day."
Housing, investing, inflation
London's The Economist is casting a gimlet eye on what Wall Street is doing to the American housing market. "Why Wall Street is snapping up family homes," is the headline. "The opportunity is unprecedented….A decade on from the first purchase in Phoenix, Arizona—an outlay worth $100,000—the experiment has morphed into an institutional-grade asset class. Last year interest in the sector reached fever pitch.”
“According to John Burns Real Estate Consulting, a research firm,” The Economist continues, “big investors committed at least $45bn to buying single-family homes in America, up from $3bn the year before. Even as housing markets cool, investment is pouring in, with firms including Goldman Sachs and KKR following in Blackstone’s footsteps.
But there's a caveat—it "comes with a risk," the magazine warns. "Economic cycles are inevitable. Rents are unlikely to continue to climb at a record pace."
How Others See the World
India roils Asian rice markets
"The Philippines must prepare to shore up its local production once the world's top rice shipper [India] starts curbing exports of the commodity, which could further disrupt food supply and raise prices globally," The Philippine Star's Danessa Rivera reports from Manila.
The Japanese banking giant Nomura adds that the Philippines and Indonesia will be most vulnerable to the ban since India accounts for at least 40% of global rice shipments to more than 150 countries. The move by India was designed to keep a lid on domestic rice prices, which have surged 9.3%, helping to send overall consumer price increases surging nearly seven-fold. Rice harvests across India have dropped 5.6% due to below-average monsoon rainfall.
Last year, India exported 21.5 million tons, more than the combined totals of the next four biggest exporters—Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, and the United States, according to Reuters. Even before India's action, the Philippines, the region's biggest net rice importer, has already seen inflation surge to 6.3% in August, more than twice its central bank's target rate.
Don't forget Ukraine?
The war is casting a shadow over Europe, and no more a toxic fashion than in Brussels. Charlemagne, The Economist's star columnist, pen name for a writer who this author knows to be a direct descendant of the first Holy Roman emperor, unpacks "The Luxembourg Compromise [which] holds that any national government can single-handedly derail any EU measure if it feels its 'vital interests' are threatened. According to the rules, in most instances if enough member states agree, they can impose their will on a recalcitrant few. In the real world, the compromise suggests, a strong enough squeal from any one national government is enough to stall even measures agreed by the other 26 and EU institutions, rules be damned. (The measure was crafted in 1966 to assuage Charles de Gaulle, so piqued was he that lesser Europeans had designs to impose their rules on the French.)"
Well, now it's Hungary's Viktor Orban "Hungary's autocratic prime minister" who's holding the EU hostage. Charlemagne continues his brilliant exegesis of this fraught subject: "Earlier this year [Orban] held up round after round of sanctions against Russia and is now threatening to kibosh Europe’s participation in a global corporate-tax deal. In both instances links can be drawn between Hungary’s veto and its ongoing fights with the EU on unrelated matters. An expert shakedown artist, Mr. Orban has spotted an opportunity to profit and seized it."
And then there's Italy
Hardly a newspaper, magazine, website or television network across Europe has refrained from sending up cries of alarm about the next European leader teetering on the edge of joining Orban as a Putin-esque bomb-thrower in the heart of the continent. The difference is that while Orban leads a nation of barely 35,000 square miles and 9.75 million people teetering on the eastern fringes of the EU, Italy with its 116,000 square miles projecting deep into the Mediterranean and 59 million highly opinionated and vocal people anchor the southern reaches of the continent.
Which is where Giorgia Meloni comes in.
Though polling ended officially two weeks ago, she's the odds-on favorite to capture the pole position in Sunday's national election and emerge as the first avowedly (neo-) fascist prime minister of Italy since, well, Benito Mussolini became Il Duce and took Italy and the continent into the Axis alliance and the Second World War. She and her principal allies, perennial right-wing, now aging flame-thrower Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini and his Lega [League] party believe that as Salvini put it recently, should we really be knocking back even more sanctions against Russia when they’re hurting "us" even more than they're hurting Putin—or even giving him pause.
The leading French daily Le Monde runs a banner headline across the front page of its weekend edition: "In Italy, the temptation of the extreme right," above a photo of a mass demonstration in Milan for Meloni who it calls "a mirror of the fears of the nation." The newspaper points out that in Italy, "the elections are rolling out on the foundations of an energy crisis, galloping inflation, and a colossal public debt that roils the economy and makes the markets uneasy."
Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung headlines four days ahead of the vote: "Before the Hell Ride," its Rome correspondent Ulrike Sauer reporting: "The 45-year-old Roman woman took off her self-imposed muzzle. Overnight, Meloni re-entered the scene without make-up: a right-wing nationalist populist who is alarming abroad, the economy, and the financial markets. Addressing the European partners, the campaigner said in Milan's Cathedral Square: 'The fun is over for Europe now.' In other words, we will bang our fists on the table in Brussels and insist on the implementation of Italian interests." Then, Sauer continues: "Shortly thereafter, [Meloni's Italian Brotherhood party members in] the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted against condemning Hungary for the anti-democratic policies of autocrat Viktor Orban."
Sunday it will all become perfectly clear. Be sure to watch for latest episode of "Italy Votes" in Andelman Unleashed to find out what it all means for Europe, for Putin, America and beyond.
And then there's Germany
Which is having its own problems with neighbors near and far. A lot of it has to do with Chancellor Olaf Scholz apparent refusal to release advanced German tanks for use in Ukraine. As the Zurich daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung observes, "The pressure on Chancellor Scholz has never been so strong. The German head of government is sticking to his 'no' to the delivery of battle tanks and armored personnel carriers. Criticism comes not only from Germany, but also from the allies. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in April that he leads by not doing what others want. At that time there was also the question of why Germany was not finally delivering heavy weapons to Ukraine. In the meantime, the Federal Republic has supplied weapons on a large scale, including heavy ones such as multiple rocket launchers and anti-aircraft tanks.”
Olivier Maksan, Berlin correspondent for Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports: "However, Scholz continues to block the export of battle tanks and armored personnel carriers. No German solo efforts, deliveries only in coordination with the partners, he said on Thursday in Berlin. Again, he doesn't do what others want."
Putin's purgatory is Europe's, too
And Gazeta Wyborcza reports with a degree of schadenfreude, "Mobilization chaos in Russia. Even the deceased receive summons." Reporters Paulina Nodzyńska and Agata Kondzińska are counting the days: "212th day of the invasion…Russian journalists reveal the decree signed by Putin shows that the authorities intend to mobilize not 300,000, but even a million citizens. Young men are fleeing Russia en masse."
Benoît Vitkine, Moscow correspondent for the French daily Le Monde, reports from outside a recruiting station— an intake point for many of the 300,000 recalled to duty—that even "men without combat experience are being enrolled."
Milan's Corriere della Sera daily travels to Russia's frontier with neighboring Georgia which does not require a visa for Russian passport holders and finds long "queues at the border," while at the same time "Moscow admits: 'Hysterical reaction to mobilization.'"
What to do with those fleeing the country entirely to avoid the callup, though? As Jacopo Baroigazi writes for Politico Brussels Playbook, "EU member countries face a dilemma. On the one hand, they don’t want to alienate Putin’s internal opponents by blocking their exit from Russia. But, on the other, there’s the possible security risk: The Kremlin could use an open gate for agents to infiltrate the bloc. Further complicating matters: It likely won’t be women and children streaming into the EU, as it was for Ukraine, but mainly Russian men attempting to avoid being drafted for war."
In Lithuania, Le Monde reports, foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted that his country “would not grant asylum to those who simply shirk their responsibilities…. The Russians must stay and fight against Putin.”
At the same time, as London's Financial Times reports, "Hawkish EU member states are pushing for hard-hitting measures against Russia, including ejecting more banks from the Swift messaging network and banning diamond imports, as the bloc drafts a new round of sanctions over the Ukraine war. Countries including Poland and the Baltic states are demanding the new measures—which would also target luxury goods and Russia’s IT, cyber security and software industries."
And then there's the cold winter ahead….
Or at least a smile from French cartoonist 'urbs' of Cartooning for Peace, where you can find the fullness of his talents….which this week were displayed on the front page of Le Monde, riffing on EU-wide pleas for every household to restrain energy use in the wake of Russian sanctions…
"In the midst of a full energy crisis, the cold arrives. 'OK, we're back home, put on a sweater.'"