Tag Archives: unemployment

Bahamas

Christie and PLP swept aside in Bahamian landslide

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Herbert Minnis, a doctor by trade who’s been in politics a decade, has become the new prime minister of the Bahamas. (Facebook)

If there’s one rule about Caribbean elections in the 2010s, it’s that you should bet on the incumbents being tossed out by restless electorates. 

It happened in Jamaica, where voters turfed out prime minister Portia Simpson-Miller in February 2016. It happened in Trinidad and Tobago in September 2015, when Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s government fell. It happened to Tillman Thomas in Grenada in February 2013, and it nearly happened in Barbados to Freundel Stuart in February 2013. (The one exception is the Dominican Republic, where president Danilo Medina, one of the most popular leaders in the Western Hemisphere, easily won reelection with nearly 62% of the vote in May 2016).

It has now happened in The Bahamas on May 10, when voters ejected the ruling Progressive Liberal Party of Perry Christie, who had served as the country’s prime minister since 2012 and who held power again between 2002 and 2007. The nominally center-left PLP faced the wrath of voters angry about rising economic and social problems that have worsened — not abated — under Christie’s government for the past five years.   Continue reading Christie and PLP swept aside in Bahamian landslide →

France

How the Le Pen family feud influences France’s 2017 election

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Sometimes, the cruelest cuts in international politics come not only from within your own party, but from within your very own family.France Flag Icon

Just ask David Miliband.

After months of increasingly strained relations, however, Marine Le Pen has now engineered the first break yet with her controversial father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, when he was formally ousted last week from the party that he founded, the far-right Front National (National Front). The legal move followed a political move earlier in the summer, when 84% of the party’s 30,000 followers also voted to expel Jean-Marie from the party that he founded in 1972.

In one sense, the Le Pen family spat has been a distraction from Marine Le Pen’s long-term goals of projecting her party as the true heir to French conservatism and building a majoritarian coalition that can woo not only traditional right-wing voters but left-wing voters disenchanted with French president François Hollande and the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) and the neoliberal economic prescriptions that now dominate policymaking within the eurozone.

Since her party easily outpaced the ruling Socialists and Sarkozy’s center-right party in the May 2014 European parliamentary elections, Marine Le Pen has spent much of 2015 feuding with her own father.

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RELATED: Marine Le Pen is still a longshot
to win France’s presidency in 2017

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What’s worse, the spat showcases just how problematic it can be when a political party becomes tied up too strongly in family dynasty — it’s as true for the French right as for Indian secularism or Canada’s center-left. As Marine tries to consolidate the Front’s rank-and-file under her leadership, with regional elections approaching in the autumn, her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the 25-year old MP from southern France, could still make her life difficult.

marion marechal

Maréchal-Le Pen (pictured above) has been more sympathetic to her grandfather and, unlike Marine’s journey toward economic nationalism, popular in northern France, Marion is far more of a traditional economic liberal and, with her southern base, far more focused on immigration. In December, Maréchal-Le Pen will be running for the presidency of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region; Marion Le Pen, for her part, will be contesting the presidency of the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. The party will be watching keenly to see which variety of the Front‘s politics will be more successful.

But in another sense, tossing the 87-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen to the side in 2015 could help Marine in 2017 as she continues to remake the party’s image — and brand it further away from the often anti-Semitic tones of her father’s leadership, which was also rooted in his experience as a soldier fighting to defend France’s colonial holdings in Algeria. Remarks about Nazi gas chambers being just a ‘detail of history,’ as it turns out, do not go down well for Marine’s push for a Front sanitaire.

Marine’s mission

Instead, Marine Le Pen is forging an identity that blends welfare-heavy statism, social conservatism and a nationalism that rejects both immigration and European integration. There’s a reason it’s called populism. Rallying support for ‘a strong France’ and opposition to a feckless European superstate that now essentially dictate France’s monetary, justice and border control policy, championing the comfort of an unreconstructed cradle-to-grave social welfare and attacking the ‘other’ of eastern European, African and Middle Eastern immigrants has an undeniably popular allure to many voters whose economic futures are far less certain than they were two generations ago. It’s attracted some odd supporters, including a puzzlingly high number of urban LGBT voters — Marine’s chief adviser, Florian Philippot, and the architect of Marine’s anti-eurozone policy, is openly gay. While Marine discreetly avoided the most intense battles of the same-sex marriage fight in 2013, Maréchal-Le Pen embraced the opposition to marriage equality.

That means that Le Pen has found common cause in recent years with a strange number of odd political bedfellows. That includes Nigel Farage, the anti-immigrant head of the United Kingdom Independence Party, who encourages a British exit from the European Union in the 2017 referendum, and Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant crusader of Dutch politics. But she also encouraged Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras in his standoff with European finance ministers over Greek debt relief (though Le Pen rejected him in stark terms when he agreed in July to enter negotiations for a third bailout for his country). She has also voiced sympathy for Russian president Vladimir Putin in his two-year quasi-standoff with Ukraine.

Marine’s bet seems to be working as French voters begin to focus on the contours of what could be an unpredictable presidential election in May 2017. In IFOP’s latest August 2015 poll, Le Pen leads all contenders for the first-round vote, garnering 26% in a race against Hollande (20%) and former president Nicolas Sarkozy (24%), guaranteeing her a spot in a runoff against Sarkozy. Though her father made the runoff in the 2002 presidential election against then-president Jacques Chirac, Jean-Marie Le Pen only narrowly managed a second-place victory over the Socialist candidate, prime minister Lionel Jospin. Continue reading How the Le Pen family feud influences France’s 2017 election →

France

Hollande’s economic restart falls flat amid domestic drama

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scooter

Nothing screams ‘sexy’ more than… a payroll tax cut.France Flag Icon

With the French press salivating over French president François Hollande’s surprisingly sordid love life, Hollande tried to refocus his administration’s agenda last week at a press conference to announce a planned cut in France’s payroll taxes and other measures to boost France’s competitiveness.  It’s a bid to win back some control over his unravelling public image.  Hollande suffers from massively low approval ratings —  just 22% of French voters support Hollande (somewhat of an improvement over polls in November that gave him just 15% approval).  There’s even talk that his administration could augur the collapse of France’s Fifth Republic.

But Hollande’s policy revamp has been lost in the furor over Hollande’s alleged dalliance with actress Julie Gayet.  Tabloids showed photos of the French president sneaking off to meet Gayet on his scooter (pictured above), and the news seems to have sent his current partner, Valérie Trierweiler, to a Paris hospital for over a week.  Elected on the premise that he would bring decorum and normalité to the Élysée after the ‘bling-bling’ presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande’s love life began overshadowing his presidency within days of his inauguration.

Trierweiler tweeted in support of Olivier Falroni, a dissident parliamentary candidate in June 2012, who was running against Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the 2007 presidential candidate of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party).  Royal lost that race, despite Hollande’s support.  A reporter for Paris Match, Trierweiler fulfills the role of France’s first lady, complete with budget and staff, notwithstanding that she and Hollande never married.  Hollande and Royal also never officially married during their nearly 30-year relationship, which produced four children.

Trierweiler left the hospital after more than a week on Saturday afternoon, but the discord between France’s first couple continues to dominate headlines, with Le Journal de Dimanche reporting that presidential advisers are calling the relationship ‘finished.’  So much for Mr. Normality.  Though Sarkozy and his two predecessors, Jacques Chirac and François Mitterand, were both known for active love lives, the nature of media has changed since the French press kept Mitterand’s longtime mistress a secret from the public in the 1980s.

At a policy level, none of Hollande’s domestic troubles should matter.  But they come at exactly the wrong time, overshadowing Hollande’s push to make France’s economy more competitive.  At the center of Hollande’s proposal is a €30 billion payroll tax cut for French businesses, continue pushing forward with plans for €15 billion in budget cuts this year, with €50 billion more to follow over the next three years.  Though Hollande hopes that will make France’s businesses more willing to hire French workers, it seems unlikely to erase the mistrust Hollande has engendered by pushing a top income tax rate of 75% on incomes over €1 million, a troubled policy that seems set to take effect after facing legal problems in France’s top constitutional court.  Hollande and his leftist parliamentary majority pushed through a labor market reform in January 2013, but it was a relatively minor first step that merely streamlined the process for conducting layoffs.

Hollande would have engendered much more goodwill if he’d announced a retreat from the iconic 75% rate or announced a much bolder labor market legislation.  But that carries with it the risk of a full-scale revolt on the French left.  Continue reading Hollande’s economic restart falls flat amid domestic drama →

Czech Republic, Slovakia

Why is the Slovak economy doing so much better than the Czech economy?

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prague

Former Czechoslovakia is very much in the news this month, with January 1 marking the 20-year anniversary of the split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and with the upcoming Czech presidential election.slovakia flagczech

But one of the more interesting questions in 2012 and in 2013 has been the variance between the Czech economy and the Slovak economy.

Given that the Czech Republic, which still uses the koruna as its currency, retains full monetary policy independence, and that Slovakia has been a member of the eurozone since 2009, you might expect the Czech economy to be in a better position, given that Greece, Spain, Italy and other countries in Europe have suffered greatly from being shackled through their membership in the eurozone.  That seems especially true considering that the eurozone’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy was too loose for the eurozone periphery before the 2008 financial crisis and now seems, despite European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s best efforts, too tight today.

Yet the result is exactly the opposition — the Czech economy, growing at a relatively weak 1.7% in 2011, fell into a shallow contraction in 2013, while the Slovak economy continues to grow — 3.3% GDP growth in 2011 and around 2.5% growth in 2012.

So what explains the difference?  I see three dynamics in particular:

First, given that Slovakia was always less developed than what’s now the Czech Republic, there’s simply more low-hanging fruit.  The Czech economy (in PPP terms) is $286 billion, while Slovakia’s economy is just $132 billion.  On a per capita basis, Czechs, with a GDP per capita of just over $27,000, are still better off than Slovaks, with a GDP per capital of just over $24,000.  But that’s not such an incredible gap, and so I’m not sure that necessarily explains the disparity in GDP growth.

Secondly, and this is probably related to the first point, the relatively recent entry into the eurozone has likely boosted the Slovak economy in the short term, reducing the transactions costs of trade with the rest of western Europe, upon which both Slovakia and the Czech Republic depend for much of their export growth.  The Slovakian automobile industry, in particular, continues to fuel the country’s export strength.

Finally, we can look to economy policymaking — while the center-right Czech government has been focused on budget austerity, the social democratic Slovak government has been much more liberal with respect to using government as a tool to boost growth, despite the fact that both countries carry a public debt of a bit over 40% of their respective GDPs.    Petr Nečas, the Czech prime minister since 2010, and the leader of the Občanská demokratická strana (ODS, Civic Democratic Party) that dominates the center-right governing coalition, has faced massive protests in the face of an austerity program that’s features not only tax increases, but painful spending cuts and reductions in government services.

Conversely, although Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico, the leader of the Smer – sociálna demokracia (Smer-SD, Direction — Social Democracy), has pursued tax increases since taking power in March 2012 on a wave of discontent over austerity.  A previously flat tax of 19% will become a little more progressive, with an upper limit of 25% for the wealthiest taxpayers.  Meanwhile, his government has attempted to shield the poorest Slovakians from additional spending cuts (and conceivably, they are the economic actors most likely to benefit from — and spend — each marginal euro of support from the government, thereby boosting aggregate demand).  Fico has furthermore boosted budgetary funds for transport infrastructure and for equalizing educational opportunities throughout all regions of Slovakia.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that unemployment remains much higher in Slovakia — around 14%, nearly doubling the rate of between 7% and 8% in the Czech Republic, and it’s even worse among the poorer eastern parts of the country and among the disadvantaged Roma minority group.

GDP growth is not the only factor that determines the economic health of a country, and the Slovak government has not been successful in eliminating what appears to be a longstanding structural unemployment problem — at its lowest just before the 2008 financial crisis, the Slovak rate was 8.8%.

Photo credit to Kevin Lees — photo taken in Prague in December 2005.