What Just Happened 24
And what to read this weekend
Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on in the world this week. Today is Saturday, July 19th, 2023.
Today we consider the coming election in Poland, we’ll look at elections in Argentina and Spain, what’s up in Niger and the wider Sahel, Ukraine marks a year and a half of war, and we visit the Arctic, followed by your weekly selection of fine weekend reading.
POLAND: National elections are due on October 15th, when Poles will elect 460 MPs and 100 senators for four-year terms. Most everyone agrees Poland’s work in support of Ukraine has been exemplary. Because of that, many have looked away from Polish politics. We shouldn’t.
The incumbent Law and Justice party (PiS) is soft authoritarian, deeply conservative and xenophobic. Over its most recent eight years in power it has undermined the rule of law, attacked the press, restricted minority rights and packed the Constitutional Tribunal with its partisans.
Party leader, co-founder and Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the United States’s ‘deep state’ is conspiring to overthrow his government and that the 2010 Smolensk air disaster, which killed his twin brother, then-President Lech Kaczyński, was a Russian assassination plot.
True to form, PiS is playing all the populist us-against-the-world cards it can think of in the campaign. It is, for example, refusing to pay a €500,000-a-day fine for defying the European Court of Justice’s ruling to close an open-pit lignite mine. “What is happening around the mine is nothing more than an attack on our sovereignty,” says Kaczyński.
In a clever election ploy, the PiS dominated four days of headlines in the last week and a half to roll out a series of aspirational referendum questions, while submitting a bill in parliament seeking to have them incorporated into the parliamentary elections.
Alongside two less contentious questions (“Do you support the sale of state-owned enterprises?” and “Do you support the removal of the barrier on Poland’s border with Belarus?”), last Saturday former Polish PM Beata Szydło (from the ruling PiS) announced a question:
"Are you in favor of raising the retirement age, currently set at 60 years for women and 65 for men?”
This is clever because it prompts the electorate to recall, as PolskieRadio.pl has reported, that the previous government of current challenger Civic Platform (PO), raised the limit to 67 years for both men and women, and PiS lowered it again when it took over in 2015.
Then Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki read out the other question, asking Poles if they “support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, according to the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy.”
It’s a meat and potatoes question that the foreigner-unfriendly PiS leadership can and will use as a political bludgeon, whether an actual referendum happens or not.
PiS has shepherded through a new bill locally called Lex Tusk, or Tusk’s Law, “creating a special body to probe Russian influence in Polish politics which critics say is unconstitutional and could be used to intimidate political opponents.” The aim of this bill is to target, and aim to disqualify Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk from standing in the election.
With two months to go the campaign has degenerated into a nasty affair. My memory of Tusk, in his previous role of President of the European Council, is as a consensus-builder in a body that tries to decide things by consensus, as he dealt with issues like the Greek financial crisis, migration and Brexit.
PiS leader Kaczyński doesn’t think that way. Notes from Poland reports that in a rally in the town of Uniejów last week, Kaczyński declared that “Tusk is the personification of evil in Poland, pure evil,” and called the opposition “traitors [who] must be morally exterminated.”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much nicer across the aisle. Turns out politics in Warsaw is different from politics in Brussels.
On Thursday a coalition of opposition parties including Tusk’s PO closed ranks in what they called the 2023 Senate Pact in an attempt to regain control of the 100 member Senate. They have agreed to back a single candidate for each of the 100 Senate seats.
This week old poll gives the PiS illiberal democrats a fairly commanding seven point lead:
It’s all deeply depressing and disappointing, and that’s not all. Should neither of the two main blocs win a majority the radical right party could tip the balance, and, given a chance to participate, would presumably side with the PiS, for as you can see here, Konfederacja sounds much more aligned with PiS than with reality:
Konfederacja enjoys particularly high levels of support among younger men living in smaller towns and rural areas. A March 2023 survey found that 27% of under-40s supported the Confederation, rising to 37% among younger men.” These are Poland’s voters of the future.
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NIGER US Secretary of State Blinken said a week ago that he was "dismayed" by the budding Nigerien junta's refusal to release deposed President Mohamed Bazoum's family as a "demonstration of goodwill.” Perhaps in response Niger’s military leadership said it would prosecute Bazoum for “high treason and undermining the internal and external security” of the country.
The regional grouping ECOWAS commanded Bazoum’s former Praetorian Guard, which seized power in a coup on July 26th, to release him and return to their barracks or face violent intervention. The deadline for compliance has come and gone with no sign of any intention by ECOWAS to make good on its threat.
Most who profess expertise about the region emphasize that individual ECOWAS member states will be cautious about actually using force in Niger because of insecurity about varying levels of rebellion in their own countries, notably inside the regional powerhouse, Nigeria.
Understandably, it looks like Niger’s neighbors have neither the capacity to come to the rescue nor the willingness to invite retaliatory attacks on their own territories.
The Nigeria Security Tracker for example, which the Council on Foreign Relations seems to have quit updating last month, has frightening graphs, like this one, depicting threats inside Nigeria alone:
Nevertheless, ECOWAS said on Friday it had agreed on an undisclosed "D-Day" for a possible military intervention to restore democracy in Niger, but it didn’t tell us when it is.
Niger, as Cristina Maza points out in National Journal, is “the largest country in the Sahel, shares a border with seven other countries, and is a hub for migration and human trafficking.”
News reports center much of the anger that propelled the coup on former colonial ruler France, which had colonies in Ivory Coast, Dahomey (now Benin), French Sudan (now Mali), Guinea or French Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and French Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).
There have apparently been instances in which old video of protests against the French in Burkina Faso and possibly elsewhere have been passed off as having occurred in Niger, but it is clear that there is real animosity against France in Niger and the wider Sahel.
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ECOWAS stands for the Economic Community of West African States. Its members are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. In the past two years as a result of coups, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and now Niger have been suspended from the grouping.
Despite what its name implies, ECOWAS is more than just a regional economic grouping. It has given birth to ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, the region’s military arm, which has fielded armed forces in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and The Gambia.
ECOWAS was formed in 1975, at a time when France effectively ran economic policy in much of the region via its CFA Franc. The organization is still predominantly francophone although it is based in Abuja, the capital of by far its largest member state, Nigeria, which is not. Abuja and Niamey, the capital of Niger, are about 600 miles apart.
I want to write at greater length about Niger and more generally the aftermath and legacy of French colonialism in what J. P. Daughton calls The Forest of No Joy, but I need a little more time. Coming soon.
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UKRAINE Russia’s war on Ukraine passes the year and a half mark next week. Even as Russian missiles rend the country and terrorize civilian targets week after week, by all accounts Ukrainian patriotism and determination remain strong.
Stian Jenssen, the chief of staff to the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, kicked up a storm last week when he suggested that Ukraine could trade land for NATO membership.
“I think that a solution could be for Ukraine to give up territory, and get Nato membership in return,” he unwisely said, wandering into a thicket in a panel discussion in Norway on Tuesday.
The real news here is that, assurances that the coalition would never agree to any settlement without Ukraine’s approval to the contrary, discussions about Ukraine’s postwar status proceed apace inside the Western alliance.
“We will continue to try to impress upon them that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” an unnamed senior American official said in a story the Washington Post published way back in February that looks prescient in retrospect.
“The war in recent months has become a slow grind in eastern Ukraine, with neither side gaining the upper hand,” the same article said, and the summer offensive hasn’t changed that. In fact the Post reported just Thursday night that:
“The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol, people familiar with the classified forecast told The Washington Post.”
Thus Ukraine, with substantial but not wholehearted Western aid, will fail to achieve the counteroffensive’s primary aim. And as the seasons change, sentiment shifts. More than four-in-ten Republicans now say the U.S. is providing too much aid to Ukraine. Watch this space.
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ARGENTINA Last Sunday Argentina voted in force for a Trump admiring anti-abortionist who calls global warming a “socialist lie,” says public school students are “hostages of a system of state indoctrination,” deplores sex education, wants to abolish the Central Bank and to make handguns more widely available.
Javier Milei, 52, a rabble-rousing member of the lower house of Congress since 2021, who might be mistaken for a stylized, younger Tom Jones, made much of his reputation, like Donald Trump, on television. Before the vote opinion polls ranked Milei in third place, but he took something like 30 percent of the vote, ahead of the main opposition coalition, United for Change, at 28%, and the current governing coalition, Union for the Homeland, at 27%.
Another rightward lurch could be in the offing across Latin America, as regional right wing politicians closed ranks in support of Miley. The Guardian reported,
After the result on Sunday, Milei received the endorsement of fellow far-right figures from neighbouring Brazil and Chile. “We have a lot of things in common,” said Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro in a video message. “We both defend family, private property, a free market … We want to make our countries great, in accordance with [the size of] our territory and population.”
José Antonio Kast, who lost the Chilean presidential election in 2021 to Gabriel Boric, tweeted his congratulations. “For the good of Argentina, may the force of freedom win and may corruption, insecurity and mediocrity be defeated,” he wrote.
The presidential election is October 22nd. Voting is mandatory.
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SPAIN Attempts to form a governing coalition continue following last month’s elections. This week Junts, the party of would-be kingmaker and former Catalan President Carlos Puigdemont, who has exiled himself to Belgium to avoid arrest in Spain, backed the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party’s (PSOE) candidate Francina Armengol, the former regional president of the Balearic islands, for the presidency of the parliament’s bureau, sort of the role of speaker. What Puigdemont did not do was embrace right wing People’s Party (PP) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo. PP won the most votes, but not enough seats to form a government.
PSOE is the party of incumbent President Pedro Sanchez. Negotiations continue. Next week both Sanchez and Núñez Feijóo will petition King Felipe VI for permission to form a government. It’s close here, and an effectively deadlocked government may emerge.
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THE ARCTIC The Barents Observer reports that earlier this summer Russia staged a military-style propaganda parade on an island administered by Norway in the Svalbard archipelago. More than 50 vehicles, a helicopter and snowmobiles driven by men in military-like uniforms on the 9th of May paraded down the main street of Barentsburg.
In 2017 I reported a story from Barentsburg. An excerpt:
We leave our machinery in a big jumble in the middle of Barentsburg town – happy not to be vibrating to the motor and bouncing on the snow – and fan out along Main Street. A Lenin statue, the kindergarten, housing blocks, a brewery. The Orthodox church perches lonely at the far end of town, toward the water. The most modern-looking building, the Russian consulate, sits way at the back of town, behind the blocks of flats.
Walking one end of town to the other and back takes scarcely ten minutes. Then it takes a half hour for all of us to climb out of our gear, find our own place on the floor to make a pile of it and assemble in the dining hall, and another half hour to repeat the process in reverse when it is time to go.
Outpost Barenstburg’s Sovietness is decades and a Cold War away in style. Even this far from the Motherland it has what the young Croatian writer Sara Nović calls the “Eastern Bloc aura – the posturing with size and cement.”
Could Norilsk, way up the River Lena, feel like this? It must be even more bleak out there in Siberia. Barentsburg’s coal dust must be cleaner than living by a nickel smelter. If the eastern shore of Gronfjorden is this bereft of succor, Norlisk, where life expectancy doesn’t even touch fifty, must be a not very virtual hell.
Arktikugol, the mining company and only local employer, has been pulling coal out of the ground in Barentsburg since 1932. Arktikugol bought the operation from a Dutch company which named Barentsberg after the Dutchman who discovered Svalbard in 1596. Barentsburg was shelled to the ground by the German battleship Tirpitz during World War Two after its Soviet citizenry had been evacuated to Arkangelsk.
Most workers are Donbass Ukrainian. Léo Delafontaine, a French photographer who has made three trips here (and whose expertise informs my impressions of Barentsburg), tells me the conflict in eastern Ukraine bubbles not far underneath the surface:
“You can find in Barentsburg pro-Russians, pro-Ukrainians, pro Donbass Republic. In my opinion, pro-Russians are more willing to express their opinion. And the pro-Ukraininans are more discreet. But everybody knows in the town on which side you are. They just don’t talk about it in order to avoid conflicts. Barentsburg is very small, and it’s better like this.”
Life in the mine may be dangerous as the civil war back home, above ground may be cold, but you won’t be sniped dead from the rooftop across the way. The pay, around $1,000 a month, runs triple what they might get back home, even if it is in rubles. Which is okay with most workers, who come from the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine.
They mostly sign up for two-year deals. A few come from farther corners of the former Soviet space. Tajiks and Armenians do less skilled work. Armenians tend to work in construction so they mostly live in Barentsburg in summer. Tajiks clear the snow. While the Russians and Ukrainians have proper apartments, the couple dozen Tajiks and Armenians sleep in dormitories or shared flats.
There is no cash money in Barentsburg. Rubles are paid to a magnetic card issued when the worker signs up with Arktikugol. The canteen and supermarket are priced in rubles.
But this is Norway, after all, and so the hotel bar takes Norwegian kroner. Much better for the hotel, also owned by Arktikugol, but not so great for workers.
It is a fair question how much post-Soviet life has improved: spending your pay (in scrip) only at the company store. Trudging to your frozen dormitory after mining coal grim and underground. Eying the bulging muscles of the heroic workers on the murals, knowing their time – like the Lenin statue’s – is firmly past.
Out front of your door a rusty monument mocks you: “Our Goal – Communism!” With an exclamation mark. (There are prettier murals, of fishies and flowers, children and walruses and whales).
If you must grasp for superlatives, you can claim Barentsburg as the second-largest settlement in Svalbard, which is true, but besides Barentsburg and Longyearbyen there are only Ny-Ålesund, a research station with a population of 35 this time of year, two Norwegian meteorological outposts with populations of ten and four, and a Polish science station with a population under a dozen. In the good old days over a thousand fellow Russians lived in the mining community of Pyramiden, just across the fjord, but they abandoned that operation in 1998.
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BUSINESSES ACTING BADLY: Bar Pace in Gera Lario, on Italy’s Lake Como, has charged an extra €2 ($2.20) to cut a sandwich in half. Here's the story.
The reputed sandwich:
And the receipt:
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Ryanair charges elderly couple £110 after they download wrong boarding cards
An elderly couple, Ruth, 79, and Peter Jaffe, 80, had to pay the fee after they accidentally downloaded their return boarding passes instead of the outgoing ones for a flight to France.
Ryanair has defended its actions, saying the charges were in line with its policy.
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How not to drive business to your restaurant:
From an unnamed local restaurant’s website. Never been. Somehow it doesn’t look like my kind of place.
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WEEKEND READING
Every weekend I suggest worthwhile reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds. Here we go:
Thirteen year old account by Prableen Kaur, vice chairwoman for the Oslo youth party, of Anders Brevik’s deadly assault on that summer camp on Utøya Island north west of Oslo. Hell on Utøya — an eyewitness account. Hell on Utøya — an eyewitness account.
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Trouble is, they’re as likely as not to be bullshit jobs - jobs meant to clean up AI errors, manage and minimize liability and so on. Jobs that don’t move the human project forward.
On AI and the coming redundancies
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Within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness.
David Chalmers asks Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/could-a-large-language-model-be-conscious/
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Nobody I know knows anything about Mauritania. Matt Lakeman has been there:
“Mauritania is entirely in the Saharan Desert, the one desert everyone has heard of. I expected it to be scorching hot as soon as I stepped off the plane, but no: Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott, has an average annual temperature of 73 degrees (23 Celsius), with a daily maximum temperature of only 82 degrees.”
Matt Lakeman’s Notes on Mauritania
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Workers Wanted A Union. Then The Mysterious Men Showed Up.
How a pair of “union avoidance” consultants using fake names turned a small Midwestern workplace upside down. The Persuaders.
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Strikes me it’s more of a Laffer Frown. The birth of Voodoo Economics. That day in 1974 when Arthur Laffer drew a graph on a napkin at the Two Continents bar near the White House and handed it to Dick Cheney. Birth of the Laffer Curve.
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The world’s widest glacier is melting—and changing predictions about our planet’s future. A swashbuckling tale of peril to the sea. We Reached the Glacier Just As It Collapsed
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Apparently being a water bottle freak is now a thing.
“We’re all water-bottle freaks. We all have this obsession. I wish it made more sense but it doesn’t.”
“You have a decent water bottle and you get sick of it, or you’re used to seeing it all the time, and find a new one that’s pretty or it’s a new color or it holds more water or fits in a cup holder better.”
Americans are drinking more water. How to contain it.
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In 18th century England wealthy landowners hired men who agreed to live in isolation on their estates for as long as seven years to delight visitors. Ornamental Hermits Were 18th-Century England’s Must-Have Garden Accessory
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Did you know Xi Jinping was an expert on water resources management policy? Me neither. We were wrong.
“In late July, the Water Resources Ministry published a book entitled On Studying and Implementing the Important Discourses on the Management of Water Resources by Xi Jinping (People’s Daily, July 31; Gov.cn, July 18). This latest book by Xi proved particularly embarrassing, given widespread complaints that the paramount leader had totally mishandled the deluge in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei province.”
Xi’s Mismanagement Fuels Political Scandals and Exacerbates Economic Woes
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Attempts to decipher the lost script once used by the Rapa Nui of Easter Island leave more questions than answers. Rongorongo, the Lost Script of Rapa Nui.
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No matter how you use the internet there’s something in this article for you. A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
Way more than you were looking for, but still useful Internet Search Tips.
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Good weekend. For Tuesday’s travel tale we’ll sail out into the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola. See you then.
Good piece. Once I slow down and take in info, I do depend on this post for balance and some fun.