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Soriek  6mo ago (text post)   911 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 21

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading. Megathread for the Israel-Palestine conflict is here though if you want to talk about it in this thread as well feel free.

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Germany:

German media are overwhelmingly one-sided on the Israel-Gaza issue: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/150352?context=8#context

Berlin has seen a series of riots by pro-Palestinian leftists and muslims. Reactions are predictable - indignation about violence, worry about antisemitism, the left ignoring and the right emphasizing the role immigrants play here.

Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, our head of government (no, Merkel is gone, for real), has done exactly what anyone would predict - toured the middle east in general and Israel especially, gave speeches there as well as at home, and generally took a hard line against Hamas, against antisemitism, in favor of Israel, and against Putin. And, fulfilling expectations, he announced nothing material.

Sahra Wagenknecht, hitherto leading member of the leftist Die Linke party, in the past a self-described stalinist, now an outdated socialist who failed to get with the woke times, aims to found her own party. The woman has a reputation as someone with actual ideals and principles of her own, which allowed her to stand out and earn a modicum of admiration on left and right alike. Her founding her own party is thus likely to draw at least some supporters away from Die Linke as well as from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. The current leadership of Die Linke, a party in steep decline, is outraged, calling this an ego trip. The AfD, flying high in polls, seems largely unbothered. The founding is supposed to take place on next monday.

In other news, the head of the German Union Association, Yasmin Fahimi, called the AfD - a party with strong support among unionized workers - the enemy of the workers, for its racism.

And I just heard on the Radio that two Bavarian companies will soon launch satellite-bearing rockets from a ship in the North Sea.

Edit: I just realized it's thursday and I posted in an old thread. Guess I'll repost this in the evening. So it goes.

No worries, just uploaded the new one!

Finland:

Basically nothing hugely interesting happened on week 39. Since I try to blog once a week, I wrote about how the Israel/Palestine conflict is perceived in Finland instead.

Ireland (I will update this later as I do more reading)

It seems giving multinational companies low tax rates is a gift that keeps on giving. Despite a massive increase on covid related spending Ireland ended up with a 10 billion euro budget surplus (this is apparently going to increase to 65 billion by 2027), and they've made use of it to pass a generous 'cost of living' budget consisting of tax cuts, tax credit increases, a minimum wage increase, introduction of more one off welfare payments and an increase in the existing ones in a bunch of different areas. The healthcare sector is seeing a hiring freeze to reduce massive overspending, and the Minister for Health has conceded that there will be a large funding shortfall as a result of this budget (everyone knows the healthcare system does poorly given its funding but no politician has been willing to tackle the issue head on).

Ireland is still a very expensive country to live in and not everyone has a nice job with a tech or pharmaceutical firm, so while this budget is generous its unclear whether it will keep up with the rising costs of day to day life (most of all the insane housing market).

Are these like an unusually generous set of reforms pressured by the protests / political polls, or was this sort of an expected, normal bill?

It’s in line with Fine Gael’s more liberal bent and Fianna Fáil’s tendency for big tax cuts before elections, so it’s not surprising in that sense.

I’m just surprised that after spending so much during Covid and some more as a result of the war in Ukraine debt hasn’t gotten out of hand like it did after the housing market crash. Belts are certainly tightening for the Irish people but Ireland is so FDI loaded that a few big companies seeing profits can offset a lot. There seems to be little relation between the financial problems of people living in Ireland and what the government is making.

Whatever Ireland gains from this comes partially at the expensive of people in other countries. The corporations should be paying more tax there, instead they pay less in Ireland.

Right on the is, but I'd disagree on the ought. This discrepancy shows that other countries tax too heavily, and offer too little in exchange. Ireland is making a better offer. This seems to me to be a free-ish market working as intended.

Do those big tax loopholes still exist? I know that the government closed some and iirc they’ve agreed to the European 15% corporate tax rate, but maybe corporate accountants are still one step ahead.

This is just one paper but it seems like a good chunk of the royalty money saved under the ‘Double-Irish’ loophole was redirected to the US after it was closed in 2015. Seems like they have more of a right to be angry than Europeans: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4285001

Slovakia

Former populist PM Robert Fico seems poised to make a comeback to the position, having seemingly cemented a coalition. The alliance would bring together SMER, or the Social Democrats, with the left wing Hlas Party and the right wing Slovak National Party, for I guess a general populist platform. This election has gotten a lot of international attention partially because Fico is viewed in a similar illberal light as Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s PiS (who are up in their own election this saturday), but also because of Fico’s pro-Russian stance and promise to cut aid to Ukraine (though one of his coalition partners, Hlas, is opposed to this). As far as I can tell this doesn't have any implications for broader European funding but would represent the first NATO country to take such a stance, and may move forward the general fatigue we see countries (ie the US) display towards funding the war. @georgioz may have more light to shed.

France

Socialist leader Melenchon has gotten some flak for his less than sympathetic coverage of the Gaza crisis. In May his party, La France insoumise, together with the Communist Party, pushed for a resolution to boycott Israel and condemn them as an apartheid state, so this has not exactly come out of nowhere, but the movement seems divided in the wake of the attacks, with other socialist MPs condemning their leadership.

France has been in an awkward spot with its former colonies as they successively coup and expel their French military guests. This week they have finally begun withdrawing troops from Niger en masse, though Italian and German troops remain and the government has requested American troops as well (unlikely to happen, as the US has now formally declared the coup to be, in fact, a coup, which means we’re barred from sending no military assistance). On the other hand, recently France has begun to run flights again to Mali. The Guardian runs a retrospective on the great de-Frenching:

In Mali, violence has surged since military regimes took over in 2020. The deal cut by the new rulers with Wagner forced Paris to end the deployment of thousands of French troops that had fought Islamist extremists and other insurgents for a decade. In the last two years, with 1,000 Wagner mercenaries now in Mali, atrocities have multiplied, accelerating a negative feedback loop of abuses, recruitment to jihadist groups, more attacks and more abuses.

In Burkina Faso, where French forces were told to leave after a military takeover last year, the number of people killed by militant Islamist violence has nearly tripled compared with the 18 months before. “This violence … puts Burkina Faso more than ever at the brink of collapse,” said the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in a recent report…

During the month after Niger’s military seized power, extremist-linked violence increased by more than 40%, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. At least 29 Nigerien soldiers were killed by jihadists on the border with Mali last weekend by more than 100 extremists using homemade explosives. It was the second such attack in a week.

Speaking of managing colonial relations, France and Corsica have been in negotiations about their own relationship for months now. This culminated in Macron recently visiting Corsica and promising them “autonomy within the Republic”. The independence group FLNC set off bombs at 20 locations yesterday, which I guess shows how they feel about that.

Wild that the Corsica stuff is still ongoing. It seems pretty intractable unless France is willing to be more radical, although I suppose this kind of low level violence is tolerable for now, as it mainly only hurts Corsicans (the homes bombed were second homes, so it’s an attack on the tourist industry).

I think they maitained peace pretty well for the past decade or so, and my understanding is the flare up is over something the French government didn't have much to do with, which leaves me hope there's still room for resolution (though maybe if they're fighting for irrational reasons that should give me less hope)

(the homes bombed were second homes, so it’s an attack on the tourist industry).

It's good to know at least it doesn't seem targeted at random civilians.

China

American Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer recently met with President Xi Jinping to prepare and agenda set for of an anticipated dialogue between the Chinese leader and Joe Biden. Apparently the meeting also resulted in a stronger statement of condemnation against the Hamas attacks from China, although their public wording was still careful. China also welcomed the European Union’s top diplomat yesterday and has said they hope to work to increase relations, a day after the EU announced that it would pursue a probe into Chinese steel subsidies, in hopes of not renewing American’s own steel and aluminum tariffs.

The government has finally released figures for the toll from the biblical plague-like series of natural disasters the country has been going through:

China suffered direct economic losses of 308.29 billion yuan ($42 billion) over the first nine months of 2023, the government said, from natural disasters such as torrential rains, deadly landslides, freakish hailstorms and a string of typhoons.

The emergency management ministry unveiled on Sunday the unprecedented toll wrought on the nation of 1.4 billion by calamities that ranged from sandstorms to rains that brought massive flooding and historic rainfall in Beijing, the capital.

Officials said 499 people were reported dead and missing in natural disasters during the nine-month period, with more than 89 million affected, while over 2.75 million had to be evacuated and resettled.

Ecuador

I’ve covered in previous installations the (presumed) cartel assassination of a backbencher in the Presidential election, Fernando Villavicencio. Now 7 of the suspects in his murder have turned up dead. Either way, the cartel’s plan to intimidate Ecuadorian politicians may have backfired, with Americans offering military assistance, and now both candidates in the election this Saturday have vowed to pursue stricter security measures against drug trafficking if they win.

The two presidential candidates in the upcoming Oct. 15 election - business heir Daniel Noboa and leftist Luisa Gonzalez - have said something needs to be done. Both have promised to militarize ports and airports to fight the drug trafficking. Alongside the economy, security is a top concern, voters say.

Gonzalez, a protege of former leftist President Rafael Correa, who led the first round but is now polling slightly behind her rival, said during a televised debate earlier this month she would use the military to retake control of ports and prisons, though she did not give details of her plan.

Meanwhile, Noboa, whose father is banana magnate Alvaro Noboa, has said he will use technology to support military protection of exports on highways and install scanners at toll stations and ports.

Chile

You might remember that in 2020 Chile held a referendum where the public voted decisively to update their dictatorship-era constitution. The left wing government under Gabriel Boric wrote up a new constitution which was rejected in a September 2022 referendum by 62%, in large part for being too left wing, with built in stuff about gender equality and indigenous rights. The conservative party won the last elections and have now finished designing their own constitution which, surprise, surprise, is probably too right wing, featuring some stuff about abortion I don’t even understand. Polls indicate 54% of the public will likely reject it in the upcoming referendum.

Kenya

The United Nations has approved the Kenyan UN peacekeeping mission to Haiti. However, there’s one slight hangup: President Will Ruto didn’t actually run it by Kenyan parliament first. A bit awkward to be sure. The major opposition party has opposed it both as an excess of the President’s powers, and on grounds vaguely analogous to American conservatives who object to Ukraine aid as a distraction from Mexico: saying that Kenya is too wrapped up with its own various militant groups to be off foreign adventuring. They’ve raised the complaint to their court system which has temporarily barred the intervention from proceeding till they can review and make a decision. This will leave Haiti still without respite, though separately the Dominican Republic has said they will reopen their borders.

Speaking of multinational peacekeeping missions, Kenya is currently planned to withdraw its forces in Somalia, there by request of the Somali government to help deal with Al Shabaab. However, Al Shabaab has increased its own attacks into Kenya recently, killing dozens in the past few months, so I wonder if they will change their position and remain in place.

Iran

Republicans have blamed Biden for fueling the Israeli crisis by recently unfreezing $6 billion of Iranian assets (which presumably could have been sent to Hamas/Hezbollah), though the Biden Administration denies that any of the funds had been transferred prior to the present conflict. Competing articles have argued both that representatives from Hamas and Hezbollah have said Iran helped plot the attack on Israel but also that the Israeli military says they don’t have evidence of Iranian involvement yet and US intelligence officials says that Iran was completely surprised by it. Iran of course denies culpability, no clue which narrative is correct (their weapons were definitely used though).

The building diplomatic ties between Iran’s arch-nemeses (is that a word?) Saudi Arabia and Israel are of course imperiled by the now ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. A number of sources have shared a headline that Saudi Arabia has already announced that negotiations are over, but I haven’t seen it from a particularly credible source yet.

Separately, Iran has finally restored diplomatic relations with Sudan, who had broken them off seven years ago following Iranians storming the Saudi embassy in Khartoum.

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