TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #13
A new cold war in Europe trumps (pardon the expression) America’s political battle, Biden heads to Asia, a vote in Bahrain ... and then our cartoon.
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.
This week coming to you from Paris….as good a spot as any to watch the world watching America. But we reverse our order today and begin with the Europe’s latest border conflict....that for a moment knocked Ukraine off the front pages.
How Others See the World
The headlines of European newspapers have been devoted this weekend to what is clearly a brewing war on the continent over the perpetual question of what to do with migrants. Now, the battle is joined between France and Italy, but you can’t leave out Britain, Germany or a host of other deeply concerned nations and their leaders. Most have offered to share the burden of caring for “immigrés” that continue to swarm in from the Middle East and Africa, but none of have held up their end of innumerable bargains. France’s leading center-right daily Le Figaro Friday morning found President Emmanuel Macron “yielding under pressure.”
The pressure took the form of the Ocean Viking, a 226-foot cargo vessel sailing under the Norwegian flag and chartered by the human rights group SOS Mediterranée in cooperation with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Its cargo is 230 refugees collected from a number of small, overloaded boats attempting to across the Mediterranean from North Africa and threatened to founder. The Ocean Viking, following 22 days at sea, finally found refuge in the French Mediterranean port of Toulon after sending 46 “requests for a Place of Safety” to Italy—all of them refused. Macron was hardly happy about being placed in this position by Italy’s intransigence.
For the immediate fallout, it’s only necessary to turn to the front page of Rome’s leading daily, La Repubblica, where a banner headline proclaimed—now it’s war: “Macron breaks with Meloni.”
The reference, of course, was to Giorgia Meloni, the neo-fascist firebrand elected in September as Italy’s new prime minister. To drive home the real stakes in this break, the paper runs a sub-hed: “From energy to hospitality, all the dossiers [are] at risk in the Italy-France clash.” Repubblica Paris correspondent Anais Ginori reported, “The diplomatic crisis with Paris opened by the Ocean Viking case can isolate Italy in Europe and make it more difficult to agree on various issues, from the price cap [on Russian oil and gas] to a shared management of immigration. ‘Sanctions against Italy’ is the new threat circulating in Paris during the hours in which the Ocean Viking ship was docking in the port of Toulon. The 230 people on board were taken to a military base away from photographers and journalists. Two thirds will then have to be relocated thanks to the ‘European solidarity’ of nine countries, starting with Germany which has agreed to take 80 asylum seekers.”
Le Figaro goes even further. From its viewpoint, “Giorgia Meloni [is] denouncing the French reaction [as] ‘aggressive, unjustified and incomprehensible.’” Instead, she wants “a European solution” to the crisis.
The battle only intensified into the weekend. Corriere columnist Antonio Polito observed, “Giorgia Meloni's new government has entered a test of strength that from the beginning [she] seemed destined to lose. And she fell into a trap due to evident diplomatic inexperience.” The first statement from her government praising "France's decision to share responsibility for the migration emergency," Polito added, “only served to trigger the reaction of [right-wing French firebrands Marine ] Le Pen and [Eric] Zemmour, and to get Macron in trouble for opening the doors to Ocean Viking.” Indeed, Zemmour could not help but take to his favorite right-wing channel CNews, using the opportunity to berate Macron—and by extension every other liberal leader in Europe—for not doing enough to “keep these migrants at home” in the first place. Which has become the new mantra: “send them back.”
Indeed, Le Monde in Paris headlined: “The French rescue of the Ocean Viking fractures relations between Paris and Rome and saps the efforts of normalization of Giorgia Meloni.” In Germany, which had pledged to accept the largest number of refugees, pushing the country’s population to a new record according to Deutsche Welle, the daily Frankfürter Allgemeine called this crisis “Meloni’s first shipwreck.” Its Paris correspondent Michaela Wiegel couched the issue in more pan-European terms: “It is now about [Macron’s] political legacy. He is driven by the ambition not to go down in history as France's Obama, who has to hand over the keys to the Elysée Palace to a Trump à la Française….The example of the Ocean Viking should be used to demonstrate the humanity and defensiveness of free democracy. Macron also wants to show that European solutions [in the form] of solidarity are possible.”
The final nail in Meloni’s efforts to paint Italy as the victim of a tsunami of refugees, however, are the latest World Bank figures that show in Europe (excluding Ukrainian temporary refugees), Germany is hosting 1,255,694 “forcibly displaced people,” France 499,914, Italy 144,862, Greece (with a population one-sixth that of Italy) 119,650. Incidentally, the United States, with four times the population of Germany, has officially accepted 339,179.
This weekend, France has deployed four brigades of the gendarmerie and a host of frontier police—some 500 troops in all—along its border with Italy, especially the exits off the autoroute through the hilly Riviera border resort of Menton. As the commanding officer of the operation, Chief Superintendent Emmanuelle Joubert told the Paris daily Libération, “When there are more patrols, it’s better. It’s more waterproof.” And much of Europe holds its breath for the denouement.
The world views America
There are still those abroad who are hanging on every turn of America’s mid-term efforts to demonstrate its voters continue to embrace democracy. But far more attention is being paid to Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert it. Corriere della Serra columnist Marilisa Palumbo, whose paper’s front page has been given over to the Ocean Viking, has herself been examining as she puts it, “The furious and abandoned Trump.” She continued: “Donald is furious: with Ron DeSantis in particular who is already overshadowing his star, and with Rupert Murdoch, a crucial (albeit reluctant) ally with his Fox [News, who promoted] the rise of the tycoon, and has now turned his back on him.”
Furious seems to be the term of choice when Europeans refer to Trump these days. In his first interview since Tuesday’s elections, one of France’s leading elder statesmen, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told François Clemenceau in the pages of Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche, “Trump is a burden for the Republicans.” Le Drian, who has served as both foreign affairs and defense minister of France, added that he remains “worried about the permanence of populism on the two sides of the Atlantic, and about American protectionism.”
As Le Drian continued, “The denial of reality, the manipulation of information and the determination of the Trump-ist forces have continued to call into question then fundamentals of American democracy. However, if the Democrats haven’t won, Trump has lost. It’s his extravagance and his extremes which provoked the rejection and led to his camp losing. He has become a burden for the Republicans. It’s good news for democracy and the United States. When democratic values and the interests of power converge, we can witness this kid of outburst.”
The Israeli daily Maariv, also monitoring the actions of Trump, noted that he’s claimed fraud in Arizona after the Democrats' victory and said: “‘This is voter fraud. The Democrats stole the electorate. There are polling stations in Republican areas that had fakes. Do the elections again immediately.’" In contrast, the Jerusalem Post turned to the Satmar sect’s grand rebbe Aron Teitelbaum who charged that "Trumpism has infiltrated the Jewish camp and twisted so many minds.”
Meanwhile, Biden arrives in Asia
At his first stop in Cambodia for a summit with ASEAN leaders, the local Phnom Penh Post described Biden’s opening one-on-one with Prime Minister Hun Sen, when the president “thanked the Cambodian government for reaffirming its strong opposition against Russia's invasion of Ukraine [after which Hun Sen] briefed Biden on Cambodia's cooperation with Japan in helping Ukraine with de-mining training and in opposing the threat, let alone the use, of nuclear weapons.”
Dewey Sim, correspondent of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, reported on how Biden “sought to put Washington’s relationship with ASEAN on the same level as China, while at the same time [we] resolve challenges from the South China Sea to Myanmar and find innovative solutions to shared challenges,” a reference to China’s continuing efforts to assert control over the South China Sea as its own territorial waters. “The relationship between the world’s biggest economies has deteriorated since Mr Biden took office over economic competition, human rights issues and rising tensions between Beijing and Taiwan.”
But it’s Biden’s next stop in Bali, Indonesia and the G-20 summit beginning Monday where he is expected to hold a critical “sidelines” summit talk with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that was on everyone’s mind. As The Straits Times of Singapore reported, “US President Joe Biden said he goes into an intense meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday with a stronger hand, after US voters returned control of the Senate to his party with the re-election of Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto. ‘I know Xi Jinping, he knows me,’ Mr Biden said. ‘We have very little misunderstanding. We’ve just got to figure out what the red lines are.’”
Still, Global Times, the English-language outlet of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily, pointed out, “The world has been paying close attention to the upcoming meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia on Monday, as many observers see it as an opportunity for the two countries to ease strained relations, while Chinese analysts urged the Biden administration to stop playing the Taiwan card and making further provocations, and take tangible measures to build guardrails for China-US relations.”
And then we have an election…Bahrain votes
As part of our pledge to examine every national election, the latest we have is Bahrain where as Agence France Presse reported “330 candidates, including a record 73 women, are competing to join the 40-seat council of representatives— the lower house of parliament that advises King Hamad, who has ruled since his father died in March 1999.” Removing any doubt as to the parliament’s real role or allegiance, the entire upper house, known as the Consultative Council, is appointed by royal decree of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
Moreover, among those 330 candidates on Saturday’s ballot could be found not a single member of what might reasonably called an “opposition.” No opposition is allowed in this country, joined at one end to likeminded Saudi Arabia by a causeway. King Hamad is prepared to take “advice” from his uni-dimensional parliament, but certainly not prepared to grant any power, not to mention tolerance, to the Shiite minority that is seen as a direct tool of Bahrain’s express enemy, Iran. Indeed, no one who has served a jail term longer than six months can even vote.
“Holding this general election will not address the atmosphere of repression and the denial of human rights that has gripped Bahrain for years,” Al Jazeera quoted Amnesty International as saying. Explaining why the United States had little to say about these elections, Al Jazeera continued, “A small oil producer that is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, Bahrain is one of the most indebted states in the Gulf…. It was bailed out in 2018 by wealthy neighbors with an aid package of $10bn tied to reforms aimed at attaining fiscal balance by 2024. Its debt fell slightly to 129 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021.” Leading the bailout, hardly surprisingly, was neighboring Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia.
And then there’s Swen….
The inventive Swiss cartoonist Swen still fears the megaphone of MAGA and Trumpism could extinguish the flame of Lady Liberty and democracy itself.
Working outside of Zurich in the village of Baden and occasionally in Podebrady in the Czech Republic, Swen or Silvan Wegmann (!) draws for a number of Swiss and German newspapers and is a member of the Cartooning for Peace collective. This is how Swen sees himself: