TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #41
The Haunting: worries multiply for 2024…then there’s the Debt...Elections 2023: fear and loathing in Turkey…holding Hungary at bay…and a Kenyan cartoonist views Putin atop his charnel house in Bakhmut
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. Reporting this week and through August from our base in Paris…today a day early as we prepare for Election Sunday in Turkey.
How others see America
Profound worries about 2024
“The Haunting [non-fiction]” is how The Economist in London headlined America’s current dilemma on its cover this week. In my experience over a half century of reading it, The Economist is rarely wrong, rarely goes very far out on an unsupported limb. Which is what made its conclusion this week so deeply troubling: “Donald Trump is very likely to be the Republican nominee. So his chances of re-entering the Oval Office are uncomfortably high.”
“One candidate,” The Economist continued, “has a huge, perhaps insurmountable, lead: Donald Trump. Mr Trump thus has a real chance of becoming America’s next president….Imagine, then, that it is November 2024 and Mr Trump and President Biden are having a rematch—the first since Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson back in the 1950s. Could Mr Trump win?....You should take seriously the possibility that America’s next president will be someone who would divide the West and delight Vladimir Putin; who accepts the results of elections only if he wins; who calls the thugs who broke into the Capitol on January 6th 2021 martyrs and wants to pardon them; who has proposed defaulting on the national debt to spite Mr Biden; and who is under multiple investigations for breaking criminal law, to add to his civil-law rap sheet for sexual assault.”
But The Economist hardly stands alone around the world in sounding a clarion call of alarm. Piotr Smolar, Le Monde’s Washington bureau chief, observed, “The governor of Florida wants to impose himself in the Republican primaries as the main opponent of Donald Trump, but he is struggling to seduce the base of the party.…[DeSantis’] rough exercise looked more like a parody promotion of Twitter than a campaign entrance.” Instead, he was met by “an avalanche of sarcasm online.”
It’s hard to get more bitter about the state of affairs than Alon Pinkas, writing in Israel’s Haaretz daily: “The Republican Party just doubled down on itself and its brand. When the alternative to Donald Trump’s ignorance, pathological lying, incendiary rhetoric, fake and ‘alternative’ facts, and dysfunctional style of government is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the issue is not style but substance. Both Trump and DeSantis, with all due differences aside, are two expressions of the untethered radicalization of the GOP. Furthermore, while they may dislike and disrespect each other passionately, have no doubt: DeSantis is a Trumpism-espousing Trumpist through and through.”
For Federico Rampini writing in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, “The US electoral campaign begins now: Putin and Xi Jinping study DeSantis. In Moscow and Beijing, perhaps some are rooting for anyone who brings America back to an isolationist line….”
Still, People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party organ in Beijing, played it pretty straight: “DeSantis is considered the top challenger in the Republican primary to his one-time ally, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who formally announced his entry into the presidential race months earlier. According to polls, Trump has been in the lead over other GOP figures.”
But in Moscow, the Kremlin’s mouthpiece, Pravda, had its own special spin: “The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, considered the main Republican competitor of ex-president Donald Trump in the US elections, said that if he wins, he would not like to see American troops involved in the Russian-Ukrainian war….criticising the current state of the US military, saying the military has become ‘politicised,’ DeSantis said…[adding] he would like to see a ‘settlement’ of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, he emphasized that the American army should not be involved in the war.”
Meanwhile, the Russian news agency Tass, added, “’The only thing that matters for Moscow is that US voters do not choose a president suffering from dementia during the 2024 election,’ the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, told reporters. When asked which candidate would be preferable for Moscow, Medvedev replied: ‘The only thing that matters is that a guy with dementia is not elected.’”
And then there’s the debt….
“President Joe Biden and Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy have moved closer to a two-year deal to limit government spending and avert a US debt default, raising hopes of an end to the fiscal stand-off in the world’s largest economy,” London’s Financial Times reporters James Politi and Lauren Feder reported from Washington.
The FT continued: “His comments came a day after Fitch, the credit rating agency, warned that it could downgrade the US’s triple A rating due to the ‘brinkmanship’ over the debt limit, amid mounting concern that financial stress could escalate in the coming days in the absence of a compromise. Both Biden and McCarthy have been facing calls from rank-and-file members of their parties to not give up concessions in the final stretch of the negotiations.”
The FT continued: “His comments came a day after Fitch, the credit rating agency, warned that it could downgrade the US’s triple A rating due to the ‘brinkmanship’ over the debt limit, amid mounting concern that financial stress could escalate in the coming days in the absence of a compromise. Both Biden and McCarthy have been facing calls from rank-and-file members of their parties to not give up concessions in the final stretch of the negotiations.”
In Germany’s financial capital, Frankfurter Allgemeine correspondent Winand von Petersdorff reported, “The financial markets are alarmed….This is reflected, among other things, in rising yields on government bonds with a maturity of one month, which expire in June and thus possibly after the looming day of an empty treasury ….According to Moody's, if the USA did not service its bonds, this would trigger chaos on the financial markets.
How others see the World
Elections 2023: Turkey Round 2...and lookout ahead—European Parliament
Turkey has one more day left before the second and decisive run-off to choose that nation’s president, and some of the latest polls hint at a race that could be too close to call. While most pundits suggested after Round 1 two weeks ago that little could stand in the way of right-wing demagogue Recep Tayyip Erdogan winning another five years of leadership at the helm of his seriously damaged nation, now that is not so clear. And mainly because there are just so many ‘undecideds’—at least 15% according to some polls.
Both candidates—Erdogan and his center-left challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu—are within the margin of error of most leading polls. In an interview with CNN Türk and Kanal D, Erdogan ridiculed the idea of holding a televised debate, though he did suggest he would not be seeking a third term five years from now.
European Parliament elections won’t be coming along until June of next year, but that’s hardly preventing some jockeying for position already. As Françoise Fressoz, an editorialiste for Le Monde wrote, “Emmanuel Macron behaves as if he were on the campaign trail again….The President of the Republic is working hard to try to consolidate the central bloc in view of the European elections of June 2024. His offensive comes as the right is becoming radicalized [especially] on migration issues….”
Fressoz continued, reminding her readers, as though most could ever forget the vast and often violent street protests over Macron’s retirement reform, “during the conflict, [his] electoral base was shaken but never broke. An IFOP poll, published on May 14 in Le Journal du Dimanche, on voting intentions in the European elections shows the resistance of [Macron’s] Renaissance party, which would garner 19% to 22% of the votes cast, in the face of a dynamic [far right] National Rally. The objective is to consolidate, thanks to an optimistic discourse, this open European bloc in the face of the closed nationalist bloc defended by Marine Le Pen,” leader of the National Rally. As Tony, my hard-working chicken vendor at the Marché Raspail, told me Friday morning, “we must still do everything to keep those fascists out of the Elysée” presidential palace.
And then there’s Hungary … and Ukraine of course
Still more work is being done to restrain Hungary and its leader, Putin BFF Viktor Orban.
Nicholas Vinocur of Politico’s Brussels Playbook, has “seen a draft resolution [to be presented to] the European Parliament…to further sideline Hungary over rule-of-law issues—canceling its presidency of the European Council, which Budapest is scheduled to take over in the second half of 2024….[In the resolution] due to go to a vote on June 1, the Parliament questions Budapest’s ability to hold the EU’s rotating presidency in light of its Article 7 proceedings [invoked when a country is considered at risk of breaching the bloc’s core values]….If the Council fails to act on Budapest’s presidency, the Parliament warns it would take appropriate measures,’ the draft measure reads.”
An Unleashed Quote
The Grand Prize 2022 for Humor and Politics bestowed by the Press Club de France on Fabien Roussel, secretary general of the PCF [French Communist Party]:
« La station d’essence est le seul endroit en France où celui qui tient le pistolet est aussi celui qui se fait braquer. »
["The gas station is the only place in France where the one who holds the gun is also the one who is being robbed."]
And then, if it’s May, well it’s Cannes!
Passion is not the only element on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival this year. As Anne Le Hars, deputy editor-in-chief for France 3 Côte d’Azur, observes: “Italian director Nanni Moretti is back in competition for the Palme d'Or with ‘Towards a Bright Future’. The feature film ‘La Passion de Dodin Bouffant’ with Juliette Binoche is presented.”
But of course, this is France, after all, so how could even Cannes ignore, as Le Hars put it: “Since the beginning of the Festival, the CGT [France’s communist trade union] has carried out several actions and demonstrations. The latest, this Tuesday noon, on the sidelines of a demonstration by the CGT Energy against the pension reform, power was cut along the Croisette,” [Cannes’ main beachfront boulevard].
« Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose » [ The more things change, the more they remain the same. ]
Finally, there’s …. Gado
Sometimes, the further removed from a given moment in time or location on our planet, the more trenchant the interpretation. So the brilliant Kenyan cartoonist Gado imagines the reality behind the victory lap Vladimir Putin has taken in claiming his pyrrhic victory in a Bakhmut his forces reduced to a charnel house. Stripped to the waist and scanning his Plan Z for domination, Putin’s smoking tank is perched on the ruins he has created, then “conquered”.
Since the age of 15, when he first began producing caricatures, Godfrey Mwampembwa, has drawn under the name Gado. Chosen Kenyan cartoonist of the year in 1999, in 2016 he was awarded the Cartooning for Peace Award in Geneva and is a member of this outstanding collective. Until recently, he had drawn for the Daily Nation, the largest newspaper in eastern and central Africa, based in Nairobi. But following pressure from the Kenyan government due to some of his drawings of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Vice President William Ruto, the Nations Media Group severed its ties with Gado.
Here's how Gado sees himself:
And this is what he really looks like:
As economic stresses worsen amid more normal interest rates, where will we find the Dirty Dozen worst situations by the end of the year? Turkey is in the running.
Excellent David. A cornucopia of relevant information! Cannes included as a bonus.