Tag: Meloni

On the brink – Brazil, Israel, USA go the polls

We’ve big elections, with potentially massive consequences, upcoming. The Brazilian election run-off is on Sunday, 25th, the Israeli election on Tuesday 27th, and the US mid-term election on 4th November. The French presidential election follows April next year.

Brazil looks to go far right with Bolsonaro Jnr, after he came in ahead on the first round two weeks ago. The margin may be as little as 2%, but it is of course a presidential election and the winner will take all.

The mid-terms look to be heavily weighted against Trump: the New York Times has the Democrats 11% ahead, NBC 9%. But it comes down of course to individual races, and individual states and districts, with redistricting, also known as gerrymandering, coming into play in some Republican districts.

Israeli has proportional representation so it’s multi-party. There we’ve a pro- against an anti-Netanyahu coalition. The hard right with its overt brutality toward Palestinians just might lose out by a hairsbreadth. But attitudes have changed in Israel since October 7th three years ago. It’s disturbing to read that the hard right have made gains among young people: they used to be the guarantee of social progress.

Whoever wins in the three elections in the next two weeks will win by small margins. But once the door is opened…

It used to be an assumption of post-war liberal democracies that you’d have four or five years in power and then fight another election on your record. The elections would be a level-playing field. But far-right parties (and far-left if we head back further in time) have a long record of manipulating future elections in their favour. ‘Once we’ve a right-wing, nativist, illiberal, populist government, then let’s ensure it will always be that way.’ As they might argue. Usually there’s a charismatic leader who charms and brutalises in equal measures. It’s that disavowal of the free-and-fair-election principle that could be one of the great tragedies of our times. You climb to the top, and you pull up the drawbridge. That’s the old metaphor, it’s graphic, and it’s spot-on.

We’ve seen how the tech bros have kowtowed to Trump. How might they reposition post-Trump? We’ve seen Trump align with Putin. We’ve seen a disregard for human life, with ICE and the defunding of USAID. Even the possibility of a public firing squad. We’ve seen a triumphalist Christianity with its proponents reassured by a belief in a Second Coming which would of course solve all problems. If both houses of Congress go Democrat, planned cuts to Medicaid and reining in defence spending are likely to be a focus. But foreign policy is still ultimately the President’s.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro Jnr, if he wins, will rollback deforestation regulations. Admiration for Bukele in El Salvador and a desire to mimic Trump spells danger for Bolsonaro opponents, which could include Supreme Court judges who found Bolsonaro Snr guilty on conspiracy charges.

We’re in a relatively safe space in the UK at the moment. After two years of Starmer as prime minister we can see the difference that a leader, Andy Burnham, with a clear vision, can make. Reform has, for now at least, lost momentum, a consequence in part of simple sleaziness and the reliance on massive funding from crypto-currency and property tycoons. But the hard-right mentality is deep-rooted, here, as elsewhere in Europe. The right-wing government in Italy is trying to pass reforms which might help consolidate power in future elections. But it’s stayed loyal to the EU and strongly pro-Ukraine, and anti-Russia. And PM Meloni and Trump have fallen out big-time.

Turning to France, just how far would a National Rally government, which looks likely after next spring’s election, push an anti-EU agenda? Would they maintain Macron’s focus on European defence? Would they have the sure touch that Meloni seems to have? We have to trust that the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party in Germany stays sidelined until the Ukraine war is settled, and eyes opened to the absurdities of a backward-looking nostalgia for the imagined certainties of the old East Germany.

We have on the plus side seen Fidesz and Viktor Orban lose power in Hungary. He hadn’t pulled the ladder up quite far enough. That might serve as a warning to others to dispense with a ladder altogether.

You lose an election… OK, we’ll do better next time, you tell yourself. But there does need to be a next time.

Where are we now??

I abandoned my blog a few months ago. ‘Abandon’ feels like the right word. The liberal world was already in crisis and that was before the profoundly illiberal Trump was re-elected. So much has happened since. It’s more than I could do to resist the temptation to put down a few thoughts on where the world is now.

What kept me awake last night were jail sentences. An American resident illegally deported and now imprisoned in a brutal Salvadorian jail. No, he won’t be returned to the USA, said the Salvadorian president, Bukele. Trump standing alongside smirked a complicit smirk. Does Trump care that Ekrem Imamoglu, Mayor of Istanbul, and main rival to Erdogan in Turkey, has been locked up on absurd corruption and terrorism charges? Would Trump look to stymie some future presidential challenger if he had the chance? There’s no certainty he wouldn’t. You could argue that nepotism and the accumulation off family wealth are Erdogan’s stock in trade. Looking no further than the role of Trump’s own family, and their financial transactions, and to bitcoin, might one not say the same about Trump?

Imamoglu would have known the risks and yet he stayed the course. There can be no certainty that he will ever be released. Think of the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s now 26 years in jail. The title of Ahmet Altan’s book was ‘I will never see the world again’? He did. He was released. Arrested on a whim. Released on a whim.

Courts in Russia hand out long prison sentences for any kind of anti-government expression. Five years for associates of Navalny. Sixteen years for a social media post.

The four freedoms of the European Union, allowing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, allied to freedom of expression, now stand out ever more clearly. Giorgio Meloni in Italy has surprised many by holding true to them, albeit while pursuing a socially conservative agenda. Where might a National Rally government take France if elected next year? What of Orban and Hungary? He’s taken over both the press and courts. Will that be enough to ensure his re-election next year? Might we have another Poland, where the populist Law and Justice government was voted out in 2023?

Law and Justice in Poland, and Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, are both opposed to abortion and wider gender rights. The National Rally in France claims to be an ardent supporter of women’s rights. It supports abortion. But many in its ranks disagree.

On the subject of gender, here in the UK we have had today had a Supreme Court ruling stating that the legal definition of a woman has to be based on biological sex, which is not what supporters of transgender rights had been hoping for. The decision was, I think, inevitable. The safe spaces argument has cogency. But the issue won’t go away.

Staying in the UK. We have Reform still polling 25%. How will that convert into votes come next month’s local elections? Any support for Trump’s tariff agenda will surely be a vote loser, but his attitudes to gender and race, his scorn for academia, his taking down of ‘elites’ and bureaucracy, may well appeal. And that puts Farage on strong ground, even if he hasn’t through his political life ever propounded a sane, considered and politically workable policy. A focus on investment and social mobility has to be the way to handle social division. Not disruption for its own sake

We should be focusing on Ukraine and Gaza, and, as David Lammy as Foreign Secretary has bravely tried to do, on Sudan. Helping Ukraine produce the weapons it needs, as well as supplying from our own stocks. Holding Putin to account for the incredible number of his own Russian soldiers killed in pursuit of a very personal vision he has of restoring the old Soviet hegemony. (Yes, we were at fault for being far too slow to recognise this was his intent. And for our Western arrogance. But that story is not for here.)

Also, holding Netanyahu to account, as we should the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and government forces in Sudan for the appalling loss of life they’ve inflicted. There is also Taiwan, and what China might yet do. We’re now in the crazy position of taking sides with China in a trade war against Trump’s USA, when Xi Jinping’s China is the most illiberal society of all.

Even truces or cease-fires can be hard to imagine. In Sudan, Arab versus non-Arab divisions in Darfur have been intractable for decades. In Israel/Palestine divisions go back a hundred years. For Ukraine/Russia it’s many hundreds of years. The UK and the EU working together on defence, and the UK and France, Starmer and Macron. That at least has to be positive.

Tacking another tack, what of Starmer’s benefits policy? His return to the old Blairite and especially Cameronian agenda of reducing benefits. There’s been a massive increase since 2019 but it’s argued that we’re only now approaching the level of benefits enjoyed in some other Europeans countries. At the same time, there has to be a reason for this surge in the take-up of benefits. Are we genuinely less healthy, physically and mentally? I can see both sides but there are good reasons why a financially straitened government has to take the action it’s taking.

Tariffs are our current obsession. It seems we might, in the UK, escape the worst of them. We shall see. But such minor straws of good fortune in the current whirlwind are no more than straws. As I said many times in this blog we must deep-anchor our liberal values, personal, social and economic. I think we have currently a government with as good a chance of handling our current crises as we’re likely to have. That is a small mercy.