So on this Monday, 26 October, we are mid-way through the current election cycle and so far it’s 2-0 to the left wing parties but with the two elections that really matter on a geopolitical level still to come.
The 80-year old Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has triumphed over the hard right candidate Flávio Bolsonara, which is good news for the Amazon rain forest. It also marks a pause in the general drift to the political hard right that has run across South America. That in itself is a rebuke from Brazilians to the US President Donald Trump who has openly backed right wing candidates including Bolsonara.
And in Serbia, the student-led anti-corruption movement has toppled the long serving Aleksandar Vučić, essentially by running on a campaign of ‘none of the above’. This is a slap in the face for the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, and may pave the way for Serbia to finally advance its membership of the EU.
Tomorrow, Israelis will go to the polls in an election that will have deep implications for Israel’s relationship with other democratic countries. Victory will allow Benjamin Netanyahu to further evade an ongoing corruption trial and escape the International Criminal Court’s warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges. Not surprisingly the main issue for most Israelis is security. Whatever the outcome, it appears that the European dream of a two-state solution where the Israelis and Palestinians work together towards mutual peace and security is all but dead and buried.
And next week we have the big one – the US mid-term elections that the entire world has been watching for most of this year in the increasingly desperate hope that American voters will reign in Trump, halt the disastrous failed conflict he began in the Middle East and stop the rising inflation and cost of living problems that the rest of us are having to endure.
Certainly Americans are feeling the economic consequences of the conflict in the Middle East that is being fought in their name. The latest US figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for September suggests that the average price of household items has risen by 3.7 percent annually, up from the 3.4 percent of August. This is mostly due to higher fuel prices, with gasoline a dollar per gallon more expensive than it was last year. A recent survey from Reuters and Ipsos found that 78 percent of Americans blame this inflation on the Trump administration, including some 57 percent of Republicans who support Trump.
Meanwhile, the Consumer Technology Association, which represents many US tech firms, has looked into the feasibility of Trump’s stated aim to boost American manufacturing by re-shoring many common technologies and the supply lines needed to sustain them. The CTA estimates that this would lead to a 93 percent increase in the cost of laptops in the US, while smartphones would go up by 152 percent. Helpfully, the CTA also pointed out that tariffs on components are already pushing up the cost of US manufacturing. Then again, the prices of some IT components, particularly chips and memory modules have risen because of shortages caused by the AI-boosted demand for more data centres.
In any case, it’s unlikely that Trump will pay much heed to whatever message his electorate sends him. He has successfully demonstrated the limits to American governance and there doesn’t seem much appetite amongst American legislators to deal with this.
Instead Trump’s solution to the increased oil prices in the US has been to make deals with the Russians for their diesel and to urge the Ukrainians to stop hitting Russian oil refineries. As always, the Americans have only pressured the Ukrainians, limiting their access to the SpaceX Starshield satellite network and crippling their air defence. This has underlined the weakness in European defence as a whole, which is completely dependent on a US that is no longer a reliable ally.
Month by month there are signs of the Russian war coming closer to Europe. This started with drones straying into NATO airspace but over the last month there have been increased attacks on European shipping in the Black Sea, mainly around Romanian and Bulgarian waters, with multiple ships sunk and crew members killed. The attacks have mostly been an attempt to stop Ukrainian exports but demonstrate how easily this war could spill over into a Europe that is increasingly aware that NATO is no longer an effective deterrent.
And since both Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of grain, the attacks on Black sea shipping could also lead to a global food shortage. This would come on top of the shortage of fertiliser that resulted from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Damien Chevallier, the director of maritime safety at the UN’s International Maritime Organization, warned that: “Shipping has become a deliberate instrument of geopolitical leverage.”
The increased cost of living has sparked riots across Europe, notably in France, Spain and Italy. Elected politicians in all these countries have accused agitators and hooligans of hijacking peaceful protests. In truth there’s little that any European governments can do other than moving the deck chairs around since the two main problems – the rising energy prices and the ceiling of borrowing created by the bond market – are both made in America. The only practical solution is to radically rethink their tax policies to reverse the current distribution of wealth – where the rich are getting wealthier at the expense of the poor. But that would take brains and bravery, not qualities associated with most politicians.
Meanwhile, the UK chancellor John Healey is preparing for his first budget, the first test as to whether or not the latest prime minister Andy Burnham really has anything more to offer than his predecessor. The backdrop is not very promising, with the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics for September showing that both inflation and government borrowing have hit their highest levels so far this year. Inflation jumped from 3.1 percent to 3.5 percent, whilst government borrowing in September was £24.5 billion with inflation pushing up the repayment costs.
In the week following the budget, the British will turn out to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ efforts to blow up Parliament by lighting bonfires around the country.
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