Monthly Archives: September 2012

Germany

Steinbrück set to challenge Merkel as SPD candidate for chancellor

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In a month when most eyes have been on Germany’s current finance minister, all eyes are now on Germany’s former finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, who is now set to become the main challenger to German chancellor Angela Merkel in federal elections expected later in 2013.

In a bit of a surprise, Steinbrück was named as the candidate of the main opposition party, the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) on Friday after the other main contender, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, indicated that he didn’t want to run.

Among the trio of Steinmeier, Steinbrück and party leader Sigmar Gabriel, Steinbrück has always been the clear favorite.

But perhaps the most jarring element of Friday’s announcement was that SPD party leaders simply announced the news — in Germany, there are no primaries and no leadership contest as such to determine who will be the candidate for chancellor (essentially, think of the German chancellor much like a very strong prime minister rather than a president). Gabriel is highly unpopular among voters and Steinmeier previously led the SPD against Merkel and her governing Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) — to disastrous result.

In the previous September 2009 general election, Steinmeier won just 23% for the SDP and lost 76 seats (for a total of just 146).  The party thereupon fell out of the CDU-SDP “grand coalition” that had governed Germany since 2005.  The CDU, which won 34% and 239 seats, was able to form a more rightist coalition with its preferred partner, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), which won 15% and 93 seats. Steinmeier had previously served in the “grand coalition” as foreign minister.

The next federal election in Germany is expected to be held in September or October 2013.

Steinbrück, however, remains a less than ideal candidate — he served as Merkel’s finance minister from 2005 to 2009, so it’s going to be difficult for Steinbrück to draw as clear a contrast on economic policy as might otherwise be the case, even with signs that Germany, the last beacon of economic strength throughout the eurozone, is now also likely headed into recession.  As finance minister, Steinbrück famously (demonstrating his, ahem, willful side) derided Keynesian economics and criticized the stimulative approach of the UK’s government under Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, but he is well regarded, alongside Merkel, for steering Germany reasonably well through the 2008-09 financial panic. (Note: Paul Krugman will be happy).

On Europe, too, the German electorate seems receptive to a populist challenge to Merkel’s performance on European affairs — Germans are incredibly weary of four years of what they see as German bailouts of profligate governments from Portugal to Greece.  Nonetheless, the SPD is actually more pro-Europe than the CDU — and especially more pro-Europe than the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU, Christian Social Union).  In Bavaria, the CSU-led government’s finance minister Markus Söder has all but called for Greece to be booted out of the eurozone.

In any event, German voters seem fairly well disposed to giving credit to Merkel for walking a tight line between letting the eurozone crumble, on the one hand, and holding governments in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Greece to very tight austerity plans in exchange for European monetary and fiscal support, on the other hand.

The latest polls show the CDU-CSU with a very healthy lead of around 38% to just barely 30% for the SDP — since 2010 and 2011, the gap has only grown wider in favor of the CDU-CSU.  The FDP, however, looks set to collapse, picking up just 4%, though the SDP’s preferred coalition partners, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (the Greens) poll a very strong 13%.  The newly-formed Piratenpartei Deutschland (Pirate Party) and the more leftist Die Linke (The Left Party) poll 6% each.  Given Steinbrück’s centrist characteristics, I would not be surprised to see the current soft support for the Pirate Party migrate to the Left Party or to the Greens — there will be a lot of room on the left in a Merkel-Steinbrück race to win support, both on Europe and on economic policy, especially if Germany’s economy continues in a downward trajectory.  Given the Left Party’s strong base of support in the former East Germany, there’s a real opportunity for the Left to break out.

The ideal candidate for the SPD may well have been the premier of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hannelore Kraft, who led the SPD to a huge victory in elections in May of this year.  A premier with charisma, who has championed a more activist state response to boost economic growth, and who could well have been Germany’s second woman as chancellor, Kraft indicated earlier this year that she was not interested in running for chancellor.

 

South Korea

Park’s apology marks milestone in Korean presidential race

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It’s hard to understate just how important (if inevitable) it was for South Korean presidential candidate Park Geun-hye to make the following statement earlier this week:

“Behind our history of miraculous growth, there were the sacrifices of workers who suffered under harsh working environments, and behind our guarding of national security against North Korea there were violations of human rights by public authorities.”

“I once again offer my sincere apologies to the people who suffered wounds and hardship as a result, and to their family members.”

Those words come in relation to the legacy of Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, who took power in a coup in 1961 and held power until his assassination in 1979.  Park Chung-hee is credited with lifting South Korea out of poverty in the wake of the Korean War and transforming the South Korean economy into one of the most efficient and developed in Asia.  The South Korean economy is today one of the world’s most productive and developed, and it’s certain that Park Chung-hee’s administration deserves credit for that.

But his legacy remains tarnished by authoritarian rule that did not tolerate free speech or dissent of any kind.  His regime engaged in political arrests and torture, and his rule morphed into a dictatorship despite promises of making South Korea more democratic.  South Koreans, to this day, have incredibly mixed feelings about Park Chung-hee.

As such, the legacy of Park Chung-hee is invariably at the heart of his daughter’s campaign — when Park Guen-hye’s mother was assassinated in 1974, Park Guen-hye essentially took on the role of first lady in lieu of her late mother.  Indeed, much of her success comes from a sense of nostalgia among those who see the 1960s and 1970s as a time of unparalleled growth for South Korea.  There’s no question of South Korea turning back from democracy, which has been entrenched in South Korea since the 1980s, but there is a sense that South Korean voters have wanted Park Guen-hye to acknowledge and transcend the darker aspects of Park Chung-hee’s legacy.

In the past, as recently as earlier this month, Park Geun-hye has been both dismissive and defensive over the less noble aspects of her father’s regime.  In making the apology, Park Geun-hye, also showed a rare emotional side:

“I’m sure all of you know how difficult it is in this country for a child to judge his or her parents, and especially to make a public statement about their misdeeds. I do not think that the people of Korea really want me, a daughter, to spit on her father’s grave,” she said.

East Asian politics is not known for its “I feel your pain” politicking, but Park Guen-hye has a particularly formal and stiff image even by East Asian standards. Continue reading Park’s apology marks milestone in Korean presidential race →

Japan

Abe returns to lead Japan’s Liberal Democrats in advance of 2013 Diet elections

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Former Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe has returned to the leadership of the once-dominant Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, or 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō) after an internal party election Wednesday, paving the way for a rare second act in Japanese politics for the nationalist Abe. 

Abe will likely now lead the LDP into elections in 2013 against the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, or 民主党, Minshutō).  Although the LDP remains unpopular, polls show that the LDP appear likely defeat the even more unpopular DPJ — that means Abe is now the hands-on favorite to become Japan’s next prime minister.

Abe, who succeeded the wildly popular reform-minded Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister in 2006, was the first of a string of six prime ministers from both the LDP and the DPJ who have followed in the ensuing six years.  He served exactly one year before resigning, ostensibly for poor health, but Abe had become increasingly unpopular throughout 2007 following LDP misappropriation scandals (which resulted in the suicide of his agriculture minister) and tumult over Japan’s role in the military action in Afghanistan.  Under Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, Japan is prohibited from any act of war, making even a supporting role in the Afghanistan action controversial.

As prime minister, Abe was known for his nationalist stance vis-a-vis China, North Korea and South Korea.  That posture has taken on greater significance, with China and Japan now facing off in an increasingly tense standoff over the status of the Senkaku islands (known as the Diaoyu islands in Chinese).  The showdown has already led to a massive anti-Japanese sentiment on the Chinese mainland and threatens to destabilize not only East Asian trade and commerce, but also peace throughout the region at a time when both countries are looking to leadership transitions.

Japan’s current DPJ prime minister Yoshihiko Noda is forecast to lose the next general election, which must be held before August 30, 2013.  Chinese leaders are likewise focused on a transfer of power within the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party — outgoing general secretary Hu Jintao is set to be succeeded by Xi Jinping, but higher-than-normal turnover is also expected among the nine-member standing committee as well.

Abe is relatively pro-American — the DPJ came into office on a promise (unfulfilled) to close a U.S. military base in Okinawa, a promise (fulfilled) to end Japan’s refueling mission in Afghanistan, and to orient Japan’s foreign policy more toward Asia than to the United States.  In addition, Abe has expressed interest in revising Article 9 of Japan’s pacifist constitution in order to allow Japan to have some kind of military force in the future.

Continue reading Abe returns to lead Japan’s Liberal Democrats in advance of 2013 Diet elections →

Iran, Israel

Picture of the day: Bibi goes to the United Nations

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Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains before the United Nations General Assembly just why Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a, well, nuclear time bomb.

But the only thing I could think was, “When did Wile E. Coyote become the prime minister of Israel?”

Although the Iranian nuclear program isn’t exactly a laughing matter, I think this may be even funnier than the Bibi / Duck remix.

Netanyahu was trying to argue that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon by next summer:

“A red line should be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb, before Iran gets to a point where it is a few months or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon,” he said.

“Each day that point is getting closer, and that is why I speak today with such a sense of urgency and that is why everyone should have a sense of urgency.”

Fair enough, but I have to wonder what his staffers were thinking when they sent him to the podium with such a cartoonish prop.

This comes after Netanyahu has taken considerable criticism for pushing U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration to set ‘red lines’ that Iran cannot breach without incurring a military response from Israel and/or the West — he’s pushed so hard that the criticism has seeped into the U.S. presidential election set for November 6.

Photo credit to Mario Tama, AFP/Getty Images.

Canada

Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party

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For better or worse, Justin Trudeau is expected to announce next Tuesday that he will seek the leadership of the beleaguered Liberal Party in Canada.

Trudeau, the son of beloved former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is the last, perhaps best, hope of an endangered party.  As John Ibbitson noted in The Globe and Mail yesterday, Trudeau’s assets make him an almost prohibitive favorite.

At age 40, however, the Montréal-area MP has been a member of the House of Commons since just 2008, and he will face doubts that he’s seasoned enough to become prime minister.

If he wins the leadership, he’ll first face the task of winning back supporters from the New Democratic Party, who made such incredible inroads in the 2011 election under the late Jack Layton that they far eclipsed the Liberals to become the Official Opposition and the main alternative to prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party.

Currently, polls show the NDP, under new leader Thomas Mulcair, within striking distance of the Tories and Liberals trailing in distant third place.  But a National Post poll today shows that the Trudeau-led Liberals would win 39% to just 32% for Harper and 20% for the NDP.  Those numbers, I believe, represent a best-case scenario for Trudeau — when he really represents nothing more than nostalgia for his father and before he’s had to contend through a long leadership fight and go head-to-head against not only Harper, but Mulcair as well.  Trudeau will have to sideline the NDP (or otherwise engineer a merger or alliance with the NDP) and then win not only a sizeable number of ridings in Quebéc, but also in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

There will be much more to say in the months leading up to the leadership race — it doesn’t start until November 14 and it won’t end until April 14, 2013.  Since the 2011 election that saw the Liberals reduced to just 34 seats, former (NDP) Ontario premier Bob Rae has served as interim leader.

There will a lot of rebuilding for whomever wins the leadership — and since Rae himself ruled out running for the leadership in a permanent capacity earlier in June, it’s seemed like the leadership is Trudeau’s for the taking, despite a number of candidates also expected to run — the most serious potential challengers to Trudeau include Dominic LeBlanc, a New Brunswick MP since 2000 and currently the party’s foreign affairs critic and, perhaps more intriguingly, Marc Garneau, a retired astronaut and former president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, who has served as an MP since 2008, also from Montréal, and is the current Liberal House Leader.  Each candidate will pay a $75,000 entry fee — it’s thought the steep price will limit the number of contenders to just serious challengers, and campaign spending will be capped at $950,000.

It’s difficult to fathom just how far the Liberals have fallen in just little over a decade.

Continue reading Trudeau will seek leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party →

Germany

Wolfgang Schäuble, the ‘big beast’ of German politics and a vital European policymaker at age 70

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I am also a week late to this — but it should be noted that Wolfgang Schäuble turned 70 last week, and it’s been an opportunity for the German media to reflect on a man who’s been a “big beast” (to steal a term from the UK’s Kenneth Clarke) of German politics.

The Guardian called him “the politician who has done more to shape contemporary Germany and Europe than anyone else currently in office in the EU.”

Schäuble, a lion of the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), has been a member of the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament, since 1972.  He served as a key ally of chancellor Helmut Kohl during Kohl’s reign from 1982 to 1998, including as minister of the interior and chair of the CDU in the Bundestag in the 1990s, leading negotiations on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany (i.e., West Germany) for reunification with the German Democratic Republic (i.e., East Germany). He, alone among the current German government, was present in 1992 when the Maastricht Treaty brought the single currency into existence.

Kohl, however, refused to cede the limelight to Schäuble — the CDU lost the 1998 election and Schäuble himself was implicated in a party funding scandal in 2000.  By the time that the CDU regained power, it was under Angela Merkel and not Schäuble.  The falling-out between Kohl and Schäuble was so acrimonious that even today, Kohl refuses to take part in the many celebrations of Schäuble’s 70th birthday.

In 2004, Merkel refused to nominate him for the largely ceremonial role of the German presidency, another rebuke to a man who was all but assumed to be, at one time, a future chancellor.  But Merkel’s relationship to Schäuble has taken a different turn than his relationship with Kohl.  Schäuble, who served again as interior minister during Merkel’s “grand coalition” government from 2005 to 2009, has now served as finance minister since 2009.

As such, Schäuble, who has been paralyzed and uses a wheelchair since a 1990 assassination, at age 70, is arguably at one of the most engaged — and vital — points of his lengthy career in public service.

In the past week alone, he’s been talking up a plan to leverage the European Stability Mechanism, boosting the value of the euro when he said the currency’s salvation was “worth any effort,” and throwing cold water on the idea of a European bailout for Spain (picking a subtle fight with France while doing so).  The week before, he got into a row with Jens Weidmann, the president of Germany’s Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank) — Weidmann has opposed the move for the European Central Bank to buy the debt of eurozone countries directly.

It’s safe to say that he is second only to Merkel herself and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi in his centrality to determining the future of the euro.  Big beast, indeed.

When I think of Schäuble, I can’t help but also think of Clarke — if Clarke is a One Nation Tory, I think of Schäuble as a kind of One Nation Christian Democrat.

  • They both entered politics in the early 1970s, and rapidly became rising stars.
  • They both served as finance minister (in the UK, Clarke served as chancellor of the exchequer, which is the equivalent) in times of currency crisis — Clarke in the wake of the 1992 sterling crisis and Schäuble today, during the eurozone crisis.
  • They both watched their leadership prospects crumble away as their parties passed them over for a new generation (Merkel, in the case of Schäuble, and David Cameron and others, in the case of Clarke).
  • And they have both been, despite right-wing pressures from their respective parties, champions of the European project throughout their careers.

For better or worse, whatever the solution to the eurozone crisis, it seems nearly certain that Schäuble will be among its authors.

United Kingdom

Cameron stops by Letterman in New York, flubs Letterman’s grilling

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UK prime minister David Cameron stopped by The David Letterman Show (a popular late night show in the United States, for non-US readers), and flubbed a few questions.

Notably, Cameron couldn’t name who composed Rule Britannia (Thomas Arne wrote the music — not Edward Elgar, as Cameron suggested — and James Thompson wrote the poem upon which it is based) and he couldn’t translate Magna Carta (it means, “The Great Charter”).  Magna Carta was the 1215 charter that limited the powers of the English monarchy and set forth certain liberties for certain English nobles — it became the foundation for much of the following English, British and American liberties, including the U.S. Bill of Rights.

By the end of it, it was clear that Letterman’s “dumb American questions” were a joke at Cameron’s expense.  He took the jibe well, however, and joked, “You have found me out. That is bad, I have ended my career on your show tonight.”

British media are having a poke at the prime minister today, but it’s not likely to cause Cameron any lasting harm — indeed, it may have stepped on the attention from the media to the speech of Liberal Democratic leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg at the Liberal Democratic Party conference this week.

Catalunya, Spain

Mas calls early elections in November for Catalunya amid growing calls for independence

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Artur Mas, the president of Catalunya (pictured above), called early regional elections yesterday, which are set for November 25, and which will now follow two other key regional elections in October — in the other two ‘nationalities’ of Spain, the Basque Country and Galicia.

The decision brings to the forefront of Spanish politics the question of Catalan independence during a period in which Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy is trying to balance increasingly harsh budget cuts against an economy mired in recession and 25% unemployment, trying to keep yields on Spanish debt from climbing too high (which surpassed 6% again this week) while also keeping his pledge never to seek a bailout from the European Union (a pledge that Rajoy seems increasingly unlikely to keep).

Mas’s decision amounts to the latest ploy in a game of chicken between Madrid and Barcelona, despite the fact that it’s a dangerous time for Spain (and for the eurozone) for either to be playing any such game.  After a month in which the eurozone seemed largely on the right track — a pro-European election result in the Netherlands, the European Central Bank’s decision to buy eurozone debt, the German constitutional court’s decision to endorse the European Stability Mechanism and optimism on Greece’s continued membership in the eurozone — a Catalan/Spanish showdown could spook bondholders into another round of eurocrisis.

The elections come more than a year early — elections were not due until November 2013 — and they come after contentious negotiations between Mas and Rajoy over a bailout for Catalunya.  At a time when many regional governments are struggling, Mas’s regional government is seeking a rebate of up to €5 million for Catalunya and a ‘fiscal pact’ under which Catalunya could levy its own revenues to be used solely in Catalunya.  This comes in the shadows of strident pro-independence sentiment, with up to 2 million Catalans participating in pro-independence marches (pictured above) on September 11 earlier this month (that’s Catalan’s national day).

If Mas’s Convergència i Unió (CiU, Convergence and Union), a center-right and autonomist party, wins the election on the strength of a pro-independence wave, and if it garners an absolute majority in the 135-member Catalan parliament (the Parlament de Catalunya), Mas will have more leverage with Rajoy’s national government — and it seems likely that Mas and other Catalan nationalist parties will champion a referendum on either greater Catalan autonomy, a full declaration of Catalan nationhood or actual Catalan independence from Spain.  Some polls now show over 50% of Catalans support independence, which has risen dramatically during the Spanish financial crisis of the past three years — just as Germans balk at sending money to shore up Greek and Portuguese (and Spanish!) finances, Catalans balk at shoring up broader Spanish finances.

If he wins, though, the danger is that Mas will become the unlikely champion of an independence movement that is moving faster than he might otherwise have liked.  The snap elections only risk fanning the flames of Catalan independence further out of control of Mas, Rajoy or anyone in Spanish or Catalan politics.

Rajoy, who certainly has enough headaches of his own, has taken a largely conciliatory public stance, even as he looks for ways to isolate Mas at the federal level — in the broad fight between Mas and Rajoy over concessions to Catalunya, Rajoy has the support of his own party, the center-right Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) and the opposition leader, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the leader of the national center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), as well as many of the regional presidents, who blanche at Catalunya getting a better deal than their regions.

Catalunya, the second-most populous region in Spain, with 7.5 million people and one of three ‘nationality’ regions (like the Basque Country and Galicia), has as strong a regional identity as the Basque Country — both have their own language and their own culture that were subdued during the Franco era.  The current surge in support for Catalan independence comes from the view that Catalunya, as Spain’s wealthiest — and most indebted — region, has subsidized other (read: lazier) regions that have mired Spain in its current austerity/recession trap, and that money transferred from Catalunya to the federal budget is money that could be better spent shoring up the Catalan budget.

Essentially, Catalan politics since the end of the Franco era has been traditionally a battle between two major parties:

Mas’s CiU (technically it is a federation of two similar parties) essentially ran Catalunya from 1980 until 2003 under the leadership of Catalan president Jordi Pujol. Although it technically won a plurality of seats in the 2003 and 2006 elections under Mas’s leadership, it won nearly an absolute majority in 2010, with 38.5% of the vote and fully 62 seats, just six seats short of such a majority.

The Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC, Socialists’ Party of Catalunya) is the major center-left party in Catalunya, but remains much more federal in nature — it’s the Catalan variant of the national PSOE.  It controlled Catalunya’s government from 2003 to 2010 in coalition with two smaller parties.  It lost a significant number of seats in the prior 2010 election and holds 28 seats currently after receiving just 18% of the vote.

In response to Mas’s latest push, the PSC has called for a federal system, like in Germany (a call that has been met with something far less than enthusiasm from Rajoy’s government).

Meanwhile, five smaller parties also hold seats in the current Catalan parliament and will vie for support in the November elections: Continue reading Mas calls early elections in November for Catalunya amid growing calls for independence →

Mexico

How AMLO’s spinoff movement could help the PRD in Mexico

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Since losing the 2012 Mexican presidential election on July 1 to Enrique Peña Nieto, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been working at every turn to invalidate the result — through mass mobilization of his supporters to a lawsuit (since dismissed) charging wide scale fraud.

López Obrador (known simply as “AMLO” throughout Mexico) came in a surprisingly close second place in July, winning 32% to Peña Nieto’s 38%, and the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) won 140 seats in the Cámara de Diputados, the lower house of the Mexican Congress, an increase of 52 seats for the PRD, which kept Peña Nieto’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional(PRI) from an absolute majority.  While it is very likely true that the PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years from 1929 until 2000, engaged in some amount of fraud, especially in Mexico’s more rural states, some of which have been controlled by the PRI for 80+ years and running — but not the kind of fraud that would make up 6% of the electorate in Latin America’s second-most populous country.

Earlier this month, however, AMLO left the PRD to join forces with the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA, the National Regeneration Movement), an umbrella group that combines elements of even more leftist forces in Mexico and the #YoSoy132 youth protest movement that notably highlighted the issue of fraud before the election and served (and continues to serve) as a broad anti-PRI bulwark. It seems clear that AMLO is angling to form a second party on the Mexican left in advance of the 2015 legislative midterm elections and the 2018 presidential election — even before Peña Nieto is inaugurated in December!

That could complicate the PRD’s hopes to consolidate its legislative gains in 2015, and it could yet again deny the Mexican left the presidency after decades of bad luck and wrong turns.

AMLO, the former head of government in the Distrito Federal (the position essentially amounts to being the mayor of Mexico City), very narrowly lost the 2006 presidential election to Felipe Calderón, the candidate of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN).  AMLO thereupon accused Calderón of fraud after that election, and he and his supporters set up camp outside the Zócalo in Mexico City for months to protest the result — going so far as to hold a mock inauguration of the ‘legitimate’ president of Mexico.

It’s those demonstrations — and AMLO’s insistence that he should be the PRD’s 2012 presidential candidate instead of outgoing DF head of government Marcelo Ebrard (pictured above) that have attached to him a bit of a narcissistic — even messianic — image.  In the most recent race, AMLO even ran television ads apologizing for his post-2006 demonstrations and pledged to respect the result of the 2012 election.

All of which is to say that, despite the initial fears of a split left in Mexico, and despite a strong core of personal supporters, AMLO’s departure might well be the best thing to happen for the PRD. Continue reading How AMLO’s spinoff movement could help the PRD in Mexico →

Cuba

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s sparkling NYTimes article on Cuba

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I meant to link to this last week, but John Jeremiah Sullivan for a while has been one of my favorite new essayists on American life.  He captures contemporary U.S. culture as well as any other writer today.

He’s taken his eye to Cuba (his wife in Cuban, so he’s made multiple trips to the island) in a sparkling piece in the New York Times Magazine that examines Cuba from an American perspective, but from a three-dimensional way that recognizes the problems with the U.S. embargo of Cuba (a half-century and running) without apologizing for Fidel and Raúl Castro that also manages to be just as much about the United States and Americans as it is about Cuba and the Cubans:

You know when you’re meeting a Canadian, because they always ask, in the same shocked tone, “How did you get into the country?” It’s an opportunity to remind you that you can’t go legally, and they can. And by extension, that they come from a more enlightened land. “You need to grow up about that stuff,” one guy that I met at a nature preserve said, to which I wanted to tell him to get a large and powerful population of Cuban exiles and move them into an election-determining province of Canada and call me in the morning….

God, the human body! It was Speedos and bikinis, no matter the age or body type. You would never see a poolside scene in the United States with people showing this much skin, except at a pool where people were there precisely to show off the perfection of their bodies. The body not consciously sculptured through working out has become a secret shame and grotesquerie in America, but this upper-class Euro-Latin crowd had not received that news, to my distraction.

If you haven’t read it already, it’s worth your time.  And the accompanying photos are mesmerizing (see above from photographer Andrew Moore) — Moore has been traveling to Cuba since 1998, and his photos of late-Castro Cuba are spectacular.  His book, Cuba, comes out next week.

United Kingdom

Labour leads, as Clegg and the Lib Dems struggle during UK convention season

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As conference season gets underway in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party, under relatively new leader Ed Miliband, now leads the Conservative Party by a 41% to 31% advantage in the latest Guardian/ICM poll, with the Liberal Democrats trailing at 14%.

Labour, which performed generally better than expected in the last election in May 2010 (which was supposed to have been a complete landslide for the Tories), hold 254 seats in the House of Commons to 304 seats for the Tories and 57 seats for the Lib Dems.  Although the next election is not expected until 2015, and the current Tory-Lib Dem coalition shows no signs of fracturing, despite some strains, Labour would be set to return to government.  That’s the best poll performance for Labour since well before the era of former prime minister Gordon Brown.

The support comes largely from the drop in support for the Lib Dems, who won 22% in the 2010 election and have watched support crumble as the junior partner of UK prime minister David Cameron’s government.  Just last week, Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg (pictured above) recorded an apology for violating its 2010 pledge not to raise tuition fees — the Tory/Lib Dem coalition has voted to lift the cap on tuition fees to £9,000.

The move, which came in advance of this week’s annual Lib Dem conference, has dominated political discussion — Clegg’s video has even gone viral:

As we approach the expected 2015 election, if Lib Dem support remains subdued, the calls for a new leader will only become louder.  This week’s favorite is Vince Cable, who has been the business secretary in the coalition cabinet since 2010.  That’s perhaps ironic, given that Cable is just as pregnant with support for the central Tory program of budget cuts as Clegg.  Nonetheless, the Guardian/ICM poll showed that the Cable-led Lib Dems would increase their support to 19% from 14%.

Throughout the conference, Cable and Clegg have both emphasized that the Lib Dems will run in the next election as a separate party, not jointly with the Tories or in favor of any particular coalition.

All things considered, today’s polls are of limited utility nearly 30 months before the next election.  Furthermore, I still think — despite a strong performance by shadow chancellor Ed Balls and an increasingly sure footing for Ed Miliband — that the polls are a reflection less of Miliband’s stellar leadership than of the collapse of the Lib Dems under Clegg and the tepid reviews of Cameron’s Tories, given the austerity program that chancellor David Osborne is pushing forward with, even with the UK mired in a double-dip recession.  So there’s much time for the economy to turn around, and if so, Cameron and Clegg will both in better shape going into an election expected in 2015, and Miliband still seems like (and remains closer to) Neil Kinnock, the perennial loser of the 1980s and 1990s British politics than to Tony Blair, who delivered three consecutive Labour routs.

The left has savaged Clegg because he refused to apologize for the actual hike in tuition fees (and not just for breaking the pledge), but the more damning criticism is that by offering up such a mealy-mouthed apology and by refusing to stand up to the Tories on not just student fees, but the direction of the economy, Clegg sounds like just another politician.  Given that Clegg’s ascent into government came largely from his freshness and the appeal of a new approach to government (Cleggmania!), that is perhaps the most dangerous aspect for Clegg’s leadership.  Continue reading Labour leads, as Clegg and the Lib Dems struggle during UK convention season →

Belarus

Surprise! Lukashenko allies win rout in rigged, boycotted Belarus elections

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Surprising no one, allies of Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko have won all 110 seats in the House of Representatives of Belarus (Палата Представителей in Russian, Палата Прадстаўнікоў in Belarusian) after major opposition parties boycotted elections on Sunday in a system that has been essentially a dictatorship for nearly two decades.

Lukashenko (pictured above voting on Sunday) came to power only in 1994 in Belarus, well after the collapse of the Soviet Union — ironically, the one-time director of a state-run farm was elected president on the strength of his anti-corruption reputation.  By 1996, constitutional reforms had transformed Lukashenko into a dictator, and he was subsequently reelected in 2001, 2006 and 2010.

Sunday’s election was not expected to change that in the country that generally has the least amount of personal freedom in Europe and the greatest amount of human rights violations — the photo above shows the police response in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, to protestors leading up to the unfair and unfree 2010 presidential election, and there’s obvious signs of worry from Lukashenko that protests could follow Sunday’s vote as well.

The 2012 parliamentary elections have already been panned by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe:

“This election was not competitive from the start,” Matteo Mecacci, an OSCE coordinator, said in the statement. “A free election depends on people being free to speak, organize and run for office, and we didn’t see that in this campaign.”

German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, who has attacked Lukashenko’s human rights record in the past (Lukashenko, in a dig at the openly gay Westerwelle, responded earlier this year that it was better to be a dictator than gay), declared that the vote indicates that “Belarus is the last dictatorship in the heart of Europe.”

Lukashenko joins just three other post-Soviet leaders who have ruled their respective former Soviet republics with an iron fist since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 (or very shortly thereafter): Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov, Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev (who was reelected last year with 95.5% of the vote!) and Tajikistan’s Emomalii Rahmon, who came to power in 1992.

While all of those leaders rule in central Asia, however, Lukashenko rules a country in the center of Eastern Europe with around 9.5 million people, a country that borders Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, each current or aspiring European Union members.

Lukashenko, ‘the last European dictator,’ however, has cultivated perhaps the closest relationship with Russia of any of the former Soviet republics — and Belarus serves as a transit for Russian oil and gas to the rest of Europe.  Lukashenko’s coziness with the Putin regime in Russia has prompted some discussion last decade that Belarus might even one day join into a more formal union with Russia.

The two leading opposition parties in Belarus — both of which are mainstream center-right, pro-democracy and anti-Lukashenko parties and both of which are observer members of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament, boycotted the election just last week after it became clear they would have no chance to win any support:

  • The Партыя БНФ (the BPF Party, formerly the Belarusian Popular Front ‘Revival’ until 2005, when Lukashenko decreed that the words ‘Belarusian,’ ‘National,’ ‘Popular,’ and ‘People’s’ could not be used in the names of any parties or other political movements) was formed in 1988 to promote Belarusian independence and, since independence, greater democracy and a greater nationalist rebirth of Belarusian identity.  One of its leaders, Aliaksandr Milinkevič, served as the consensus opposition candidate for president in 2006 against Lukashenko, winning support from European leaders, but just 6.2% of the rigged vote (the 2010 presidential election was even more skewed in favor of Lukashenko).
  • The Объединенная гражданская партия (United Civil Party of Belarus, Аб’яднáная грамадзянская пáртыя Беларýсі in Belarusian) was formed in 1995, a merger of the United Democratic Party and the Civil Party as an opponent to Lukashenko’s growing threat to Belarusian democracy.

The country’s $5,881 nominal GDP per capita (in 2011) is akin to the economic development of Serbia (GDP per capita of $6,080) despite a Soviet-style, state-run economy that, in any event, remains highly dependent on a strong Russian market and despite several troubling economic signs: a 2010 financial crisis that stemmed from efforts by the Lukashenko regime to raise wages in advance of his reelection, thereby causing inflation and a balance of payments crisis, and the looming repayment of a $3.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in 2009. Continue reading Surprise! Lukashenko allies win rout in rigged, boycotted Belarus elections →

The Netherlands

Dutch talks over streamlined VVD,Labour ‘purple coalition’ progressing rapidly

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It appears that Dutch coalitions may be even easier to form now that the monarch isn’t in charge of the negotiations.

Both Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte of the free-market liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) and Diederik Samsom, leader of the social democratic Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party) are moving forward with talks for a coalition government, despite clear divides on some of the most important policy issues that will face the next Dutch government.

The VVD and Labour both emerged as winners by improving their existing standing in last Wednesday’s election — the VVD won 26.6% and 41 seats (an increase of 10 seats from the prior election in 2010) and Labour won 24.8% and 38 seats (an increase of eight) in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament.

The negotiations, for the first time, following a new 2010 law, will be organized by the Dutch parliment instead of by the monarch, reducing one of the key roles that the Dutch monarch has traditionally played in affairs of state.

So instead of Queen Beatrix, VVD parliamentarian Henk Kamp has taken the lead in sorting which potential coalitions exist and now, as informateurs, Kamp and former Labour party leader Wouter Bos seem to have found enough common ground between Labour and the VVD for a potential coalition, and the camps are set to proceed with private negotiations out of the media spotlight.

Typically, it takes around three months for a coalition government to be formed — notwithstanding the new cabinet formation process that excludes the monarchy, however, it seems likely that a coalition may now be formed within weeks.  That’s because there are only a small number of viable coalitions, and because both Rutte (pictured above, right) and Samsom (pictured above, left) agree that forming a relatively stable coalition quickly is important, given the questions lingering over the 2013 Dutch budget and given the precarious state of European finances.

After the 2010 election, the VVD formed a minority coalition with the Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), with an agreement with the right-wing, populist, anti-Muslim Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, the Party for Freedom) to provide support for the VVD agenda from outside the government.  That agreement held up only until April 2012, when the PVV balked at supporting further budget cuts to bring the 2013 budget deficit within 3% of GDP, thereby causing last week’s election — the fourth Dutch election in a decade.

After preliminary inquiry into potential coalitions that began last Thursday, just hours after the election result, a so-called ‘purple coalition’ of the VVD and Labour emerged as the most likely coalition, so named because it would bring together the ‘blue’ VVD and ‘red’ Labour.  The result would leave the two parties with a clear majority of 79 seats in the 150-seat chamber, but eight seats short of a majority in the upper house, the Eerste Kamer, where VVD holds 16 and Labour holds 14 of the 75 seats.

Such a coalition would be a throwback to the ‘purple coalitions’ of Labour prime minister Wim Kok from 1994 to 2002 among Labour, the CDA, the VVD and the progressive / centrist Democraten 66 (Democrats 66) (as well as a throwback to the coalitions of the 1980s between Labour and the CDA).  It’s similar to the ‘grand coalition’ that governed Germany from 2005 to 2009 between Angela Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, the Christian Democratic Union) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party). Continue reading Dutch talks over streamlined VVD,Labour ‘purple coalition’ progressing rapidly →

South Korea

Moon, Ahn candidacies officially set South Korean presidential field

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Moon Jae-in (pictured above, top), a former chief of staff to president Roh Moo-hyun, won the presidential nomination on Sunday of the main opposition party in South Korea, the Democratic United Party (민주통합당, or the ‘Minju Tonghap-dang’), and today, Ahn Cheol-soo (pictured above, below), a popular doctor-turned-entrepreneur launched an independent bid for the presidency.

Both are, somewhat, novices to electoral politics in South Korea.  Moon is the former chief of staff to the late former president, Roh Moo-hyun, and Ahn is a complete outsider to South Korean politics.

Both pull support from the same pool of generally liberal and moderate voters — meaning that if neither drops out before the December 19 election, neither currently would stand much of a chance against the frontrunner, Park Geun-hye of the Saenuri Party (새누리당 or the ‘Saenuri-dang’ / New Frontier Party).

The essential fact of the South Korean presidential race is that if neither Moon nor Ahn steps down in favor of the other, Park will win the election.  Every poll, including the latest one from Real Meter, conducted Sept. 17-18, demonstrates this glaring threshold truth: Park leads with around 39%, Moon follows with 26% and Ahn wins 22.5%.  Although over the course of the month, Moon has moved from 15% and third place (drawing support from both Park and Ahn) into a stronger second place, arithmetic is arithmetic.  Moon and Ahn may seesaw as the favorite challenger to Park, but Moon, having easily won DUP’s primary, now faces another sort of primary — with Ahn — to consolidate the liberal and moderate vote.

Furthermore, even if one candidate bows out soon enough to allow for a unified challenge to Park, the road that either Moon or Ahn faces ahead is tricky.

Even in a one-on-one race with Park remains competitive against either Moon or Ahn.  So the longer it takes for either Moon or Ahn to back down as the chief alternative to Park means that the race will focus less on Park and more on the Moon vs. Ahn aspect.

Park, as I’ve written before, is virtually defying gravity in that she’s run nearly a flawless campaign — after rebranding her party from the ‘Grand National Party’ to the Saenuri Party late last year, she led her party from a bit behind to win South Korea’s parliamentary elections in April, notwithstanding the incredible unpopularity of the incumbent, Lee Myung-bak (who Park challenged for the then-GNP presidential nomination in 2006).  Since then, she’s essentially been running victory laps through South Korea, and co-opting the message of the opposition by championing issues that are the traditional turf of the left in South Korea — strengthening the social welfare system and reducing income inequality.  Until either Moon or Ahn drops out, the storyline will be Moon and Ahn, while Park glides, rather presidentially, above the din. Continue reading Moon, Ahn candidacies officially set South Korean presidential field →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: September 17

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Silvio Berlusconi’s one-time supposed protegé, Angelino Alfano, now says that Berlusconi is the ‘natural candidate’ to lead Berlusconi’s center-right Popolo delle Libertà in the upcoming 2013 Italian elections.

Richard Morgan’s thoughtful piece on being a long-term permanent resident in the United States.

Romanian prime minister Victor Ponta comes to Brussels.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has spoken out in Beirut in favor of the ongoing protests in the Middle East.

Last week’s German constitutional court ruling may jeopardize the European Central Bank’s plan from ten days ago to purchase debt directly from eurozone countries.

Dutch caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte and Labour leader Diederik Samsom’s discussions for a new Dutch government so far seem promising, but it’s a long road to forming a coalition — the next step is Thursday’s report to the parliament from negotiator Henk Kamp.

On the rise of Wang Yang, the liberal party head in Guangdong province.

Madrid’s regional government leader Esperanza Aguirre has stepped down after nine years.

Foreign policy and the Venezuelan presidential election.