TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #10
Two weeks til America votes … Italy’s new ruler and China’s president-for-life set the world on edge … and our cartoon: a revolving door at #10 Downing.
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 Feudo Catuso, Sicily.
How Others See America
Two weeks to go on the hustings
All eyes are on America as the mid-term election campaigns wind to a disturbing and for many abroad all but incomprehensible close. Even The Times of London, like most major Britannic media normally plugged into the electoral processes of England’s former colonies, can’t but be astonished by the fact that as its Washington correspondent Hugh Tomlinson reports, “Joe Biden is missing from midterms action as Democratic candidates shun his support.” Reporting on a Biden campaign stop in Philadelphia, he continues, “proud of his ability to connect with ordinary blue-collar voters, again claiming that he was ‘the most pro-union president in American history,’ yet he has spent much of the time in the final weeks of this critical election campaign closeted away from voters…and the polls shift against the Democrats.”
The Financial Times of London takes a close look at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who it describes as “Donald Trump with brains and without the drama,” its correspondent Joshua Chaffin, reporting from Fort Myers, “If Florida’s governor is re-elected, he’s likely to challenge the ex-president’s hold on their party,” a formidable candidate “along with his glamorous wife, Casey, a former television news anchor with an inscrutable gaze trained on the future.”
How Others See the World
A new regime in Italy
Since we are on the island of Sicily off the southern tip of Italy’s boot, we thought to start this week with hometown news before moving to China’s new-old look and the latest from the Ukraine front. The daughter of the owner of the fabulous 14th century auberge where we are staying in the mountains of central Sicily was reflecting on the new leader of her nation. Giorgia Meloni was sworn in Saturday as the first female prime minister in the history of Italy and the first avowed fascist since Benito Mussolini ruled as an unchallenged dictator during World War II. Along with her two leading coalition partners—four-time radical-right former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and far right firebrand Matteo Salvini.
Our Sicilian driver, Riccardo, was afraid that “she is dangerous, very dangerous.” For our young hostess, however, she was suspending judgment as to her thoughts about her newest ruler. “I honestly don’t know yet,” she confided, “because unfortunately it will certainly not be she who governs.”
Other neighbors certainly did know who’d really be ruling—or thought they did. And they found the whole idea pretty disquieting.
“A haunting British crisis, a new Italian government dominated by the extreme right, obstruction from Hungary and Franco-German tensions: Europe is being rocked to its foundations on all sides,” writes Piotr Smolar, Washington correspondent for the French daily Le Monde. “Now, an additional storm threatens, coming from the United States and linked to the war in Ukraine. Could the bipartisan unity that has dominated Washington since February over the massive aid granted to Kyiv crack in the event of a Republican majority after the midterm elections, scheduled for November 8?” His answer? Not impossible.
“Unlike what is happening in Europe, war does not sound like a familiar and close crisis” in America, Smolar observes. He cites, particularly, the latest warning from French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, who was visiting Washington to prepare for a state visit by President Emmanuel Macron, fixed for early December: “"If Russia's actions go unaddressed, wars of conquest could become the norm."
What Xi Jinping wants
With the Communist Party Congress winding up in Beijing, The Economist of London suspects that “Xi Jinping has no interest in succession planning,” though it observes perhaps he should pay some attention since “the longer he clings to power, the harder it will be to engineer an orderly transition.” His third 5-year term seems calculated to bring him ever closer to his goal of president for life. But The Economist observes, “Imperial Chinese history is littered with succession sagas tainted with bloodshed and skullduggery. Communist China was not much better for its first six decades.”
The Straits Times of Singapore agrees that “Changes to the party charter further cement Xi Jinping’s power,” adding that “some 2,300 party members voted unanimously to pass the changes to the party’s top guiding document.” And to confirm his control, “four of the current seven supreme leaders of China, including Premier Li Keqiang and fourth-ranked Wang Yang, look set to retire in a surprising major reshuffle that will allow President Xi Jinping to surround himself with his allies.” Both 67 years old, neither had even reached the mandatory retirement age.
World media were especially struck by the unceremonious removal from the dais of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. As German agency Deutsche Welle observed: “The frail-looking 79-year-old seemed reluctant to leave the front row of the state where he was seated next to Xi Jinping.
“During an exchange that lasted about a minute, a steward attempted to take a sitting Hu by the arm before being shaken off. The steward then attempted to lift the former president up with both hands under the armpits. He briefly exchanged words with Xi…before being led out of the hall.”
Vatican vs Beijing
The Vatican is still holding out hope for some kind of truce with an atheistic Chinese leadership, since it seems as though it’s going to be the only game in town to play with. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported on the renewal for a third two-year stretch of a “secret and contested agreement on the appointment of Catholic bishops” in China. “The deal was a bid to ease a long-standing divide across mainland China between an underground flock loyal to the pope and a state-backed official church,” the paper continued. “For the first time since the 1950s, both sides recognized the pope as supreme leader of the Catholic Church.” The one problem? Though the pact gives the pope “the final and decisive say,” only six new bishops have been appointed since it was struck four years ago.” Just another indication that there’s but one man pulling all the streets in China.
Ukraine and the West, alternative views
For an idea of just what Russians may still be hearing about the challenges to the Kremlin’s failing war in Ukraine, it’s necessary to go no further than the Russian outlet RT. “Germany is ‘massively’ reducing its rearmament plans as high inflation and a strong dollar have made the equipment too expensive to buy for the country,” RT led its homepage Sunday morning with a large black headline and having sent so much to Ukraine. “Many projects, especially those for the navy and airforce, would likely have to be canceled….The fate of a third batch of K130 corvettes is now hanging in the balance, along with new Eurofighter jets for electronic warfare, frigates, and self-propelled howitzers, which were to be ordered to replace equipment sent by Berlin to Ukraine.” RT blames “high inflation” for the cutbacks.
At the same time, Euronews was reporting the other side of the coin, namely “European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU is set to provide Ukraine with up to €18 billion in financial assistance throughout 2023 to cover the basic budgetary needs of the war-torn country. ‘It is very important for Ukraine to have a predictable and stable flow of income,’ von der Leyen said at the end of two-day meeting of EU leaders in Brussels.” Still, Euronews does observe that this is likely to cover less than a third of the county’s needs: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this month his country will need around $55 billion (€56 billion) to sustain next year's budget deficit and repair damaged infrastructure.
Disorderly transition in Downing Street
An orderly transition is clearly not what seems to be going on in England these days. Prime Minister Liz Truss barely had time to unpack her bags and settle in before she announced her exit, which did not go unremarked across the entire European Union that Britain had so unceremoniously exited. France 24 in Paris observed that “she was quitting after just 44 tempestuous days in office,” while a poll “found 79 percent of British people thought she was right to resign, with 64 percent calling her a ‘terrible’ prime minister.”
Even France’s center-right daily Le Figaro was drawn to calling the latest political turmoil across the Channel, “a crisis without end,” while pointing out that for the next-shortest term for a prime minister you’d have to go back to “George Canning, who served 119 days before dying in 1827.” They concluded, with only a dollop of schadenfreude “the sign of a tory (sic) party in total disarray.”
Meanwhile, the great German magazine Der Spiegel is remarking on “Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunka—both possible candidates for the post of British Prime Minister—said to have met for a confidential talk. Is there a deal coming up?”
And finally, there’s Lectrr
The great Belgian cartoonist Steven Degryse, who draws under the nom de plume of Lectrr, is riffing on the short-lived tenure of the British prime minister—Truss being the fifth such resident of #10 Downing Street in six years.
The revolving door that Lectrr has installed at #10, is only the latest effort to twist the tail of power by the daily cartoonist for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard and member of the Cartooning for Peace collective. Lectrr frequently amuses himself with the strengths, but more often the failures, of governments and power across Europe.
Excellent piece David, the world has certainly become a rather large ghetto, with fascism veiled in a ridiculous form of religiousity. American has its problems, Italy is a hot Mussolini mess in regress.
So kind of you, Patrick!
DO spread the word …. I’d be ever so grateful!!!
d.