Hi, welcome. I’m thinking we’ll try a few more frequent but shorter posts, rather than the frighteningly long ones I hit you with at the end of the year. Just two or three timely topics at a time, as they come to mind. Let me know what you like better at billmurraywriter (at) gmail.com. Thanks for reading, and here we go.
OH, CANADA
The American political right is all giggly over the Canadian Liberal Party’s discomfort. Its leader, Justin Trudeau, has resigned. As with many politicians, after nine years in office the Prime Minister had grown unpopular, even in his own party.
His downfall was triggered by a formerly steadfast ally, adding to MAGA’s glee, when Christia Freeland pointedly resigned her dual posts as Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister (but not as an MP) on December 16th. She is expected to declare her candidacy to succeed Trudeau as party leader on Sunday. Her main opponent for the leadership is Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, who declared his candidacy in his home town of Edmonton yesterday.
The Parliament is now in recess (called a prorogation in Canada) while the Liberal Party chooses its new leader, who will then become Prime Minister. Parliament reconvenes on March 24th, and everyone expects a confidence vote soon after, setting up a general election between early May and mid-June.
The Conservative Party’s wide lead in polling means the new 24th Prime Minister of Canada’s reign will likely be extraordinarily short. In effect, the leadership race that begins now will likely choose the opposition leader after the coming general election.
The new leader’s main general election opponent will be Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party since September 2022, MP since 2004 and minister in the previous Stephen Harper Conservative government.
Poilievre leads opinion polling by a wide margin. Here’s a short and revealing introductory video:
Mr. P strikes me as having learned a lot from Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. And it would appear that, as in the United States, there are some Canadian voters to whom this particular style of arrogance appeals. Sorry, Canada.
Whoever comes to live at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa will have his or her hands full with the Americans. Not too long from now, Canada under Trudeau could seem like the good old days, even if he was, as Freeland charged in her resignation letter, sleepwalking toward the return of Donald Trump.
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MAPS, AND EUROPEAN POLITICS
It was little remarked at the time, but the Cold War was good at holding countries and political groupings together. Immediately after the Soviet collapse the former Soviet space fragmented into fifteen independent republics, and shortly after, beginning with Slovenia in 1991, the former Yugoslavia split into six (or seven, depending on your opinion of Kosovo) new countries.
The splintering of political bodies into smaller constituent parts continues apace. In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into today’s Czechia and Slovakia and Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia. East Timor (now Timor-Leste) became independent from Indonesia in 2002. Montenegro declared independence from its brief union with Serbia in 2006. The world’s newest country, South Sudan, gained independence from Sudan in2011.
As its name plainly states, the European Union aspires to be a union of 27 independent states. But now, new unofficial and semi-official alliances are forming throughout the EU.
First, consider this map:
The ‘Joint Expeditionary Force,’ shown here, is a de facto military alliance operating within NATO of like-minded countries with a primary focus on the security of northern Europe and the Baltic Sea, made up of the Balts, Nordics and Britain. It was founded in 2014, the same year Russia invaded Crimea.
After a meeting of Baltic leaders in Helsinki this week, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced a new operation in the Baltic Sea involving “frigates, maritime patrol aircraft and a fleet of naval drones to provide ‘enhanced surveillance and deterrence’” to protect undersea cables from Russian sabotage. Finland is holding a ship called the Eagle S, part of Russia’s ‘shadow fleet,’ which is presumed to have severed telecom cables between Finland and Estonia by dragging its anchor across the seabed. As of Tuesday the Eagle S was anchored at Porvoo, a Finnish port about 160 miles west of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Meanwhile, this spot bears watching:
This map shows the beginning of a growing Russia friendly region right in the heart of Europe. With the election victory last fall of the far-right, populist Freedom Party, Austria becomes the new addition to a seeming oymoron, a group of EU Skeptical European Union states.
In ongoing coalition talks, anti-immigrant FPö leader Herbert Kickl prmises to build "Fortress Austria.” Along with neighboring Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the three countries comprise the kernel of a Russia-friendly region right in the heart of the continent.
Note too that Romania’s presidential election is due to be rerun on May 4th after Russian meddling caused results of its December 6th election to be thrown out. A Putin friendly political unknown named Călin Georgescu, who declared zero campaign spending, led that race. And parliamentary elections are due by October in Czechia, where populist billionaire and former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, the “Czech Donald Trump,” has been publicly questioning the mental health of the Prime Minister in parliament, and there is reporting that “Czech voters are returning to Babiš in droves.”
Adding Romania and Czechia to our map suddenly there’s a Putin friendly prairie fire stretching from Ukraine all the way back to Germany and Switzerland.
When considering this map, note that while trying to stay on the EU’s good side, Aleksandar Vučić, the President of Serbia, has refused to impose sanctions on Russia. And in Croatia, which as you see adjoins both the emerging EU Skeptic block and Serbia, President Zoran Milanović has just been reelected. As president he is commander-in-chief. He has been a vocal critic of the European Union, NATO, and Croatia’s military support for Ukraine.
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For historical context:
It’s illustrative to consider the physical proximity of the emergent EU Skeptical Austria, Hungary and Slovakia to the former Yugoslavia, in this map, which, until the 1990s, was officially a Communist country, known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Put them together and what have you got?
Evidence that political change is accelerating in Europe’s east. A reminder that while large western European states ineffectually feud internally, time and geopolitics gallop ahead in the east. And loud alarm bells signalling an acute, immediate challenge for Ukraine, Brussels and Washington.
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THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POET
They couldn’t have led more different lives. Antonio Gramsci: a secular Marxist, confined to the raw, grainy reality of an Italian prison. William Butler Yeats: a mystic and a dreamer, a wanderer over Irish moors and mist.
I’ve been marveling this week at reading them side by side, at how perfectly the ideas of these very different early twentieth century visionaries combined, writing about events a century ago, and how today they’re in a historical convergence as spot on as it is unlikely.
From The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
From The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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“The center cannot hold.” “The new cannot be born.” “A great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Today, across the world the center cannot hold, the worst are indeed full of passionate intensity and meanness, new institutions for management of the world escape us and morbid symptoms abound. This century old writing, from two prophets of the accelerating collapse of today’s world operating system, is as timely now as when they were written. Remarkable.
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THE SUN (FINALLY) RISES
In a sign local folks are sure to see as progress, the sun will briefly rise around noon today in Finland’s northernmost municipality, Utsjoki. The last time residents saw the sun here, just north of the Arctic Circle, was November 24th.
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ONE MORE THING: ONE BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GERMANS AND AMERICANS
In a poll carried out ahead of the February 23rd German election, a national majority, 53 percent, “believe a general reduction in corporate taxes would be a good idea.” This may be a sentiment among certain economists, politicians and corporate types in this country - maybe - but otherwise, these are words never spoken by the civilian American voter.
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Bill
