Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. June 9, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
Indian voters have delivered a major setback to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as election results announced this week will slash the number of legislative seats held by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Dominant since taking power in 2014, Modi's BJP now will be forced to rely on its coalition to govern.
Fareed says Indian voters rejected Modi's strongman ways. Some sophisticated international observers praise strongmen who can get things done, Fareed says. But Indian voters seem to have recognized that "pluralism, cooperation and diversity," rather than religious nationalism and authoritarian leanings, are their country's strengths.
After that: This week, President Joe Biden outlined a plan for a ceasefire in Gaza, yet peace remains elusive. What will it take for Israel and Hamas to reach a truce? Fareed talks with Richard Haass, Centerview Partners senior counselor and Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus.
In another big announcement, Biden declared authority to suspend asylum claims at the southern US border after a certain threshold of crossings is surpassed. Will this help him politically in November, as immigration remains a key issue for voters? Fareed asks The New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer.
For the first time, Mexico will be governed by a woman. Last Sunday, Mexican voters overwhelmingly elected as their next president Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor from the party of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). Given that AMLO's populist style has prompted concerns about Mexican democracy, which way will the country turn with Sheinbaum at the helm? Fareed talks with Mexican writer and political analyst Denise Dresser.
Finally, yet another big election result: In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC)—the party of Nelson Mandela—lost its majority after 30 years. Fareed examines what went wrong for the ANC over time and how, for parties like it, a long run of dominance can become a liability. Note to readers: The Global Briefing will be on hiatus in the coming week. We'll return to your inboxes on Tuesday, June 18. |
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After launching a full-scale war on Ukraine early last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government clamped down even more tightly on Russian political life. Independent news outlets were shuttered or forced abroad. Dissidents were jailed; leading opposition political figure Alexey Navalny died in an Arctic prison. Nonetheless, two recent essays have argued some Russians are maintaining opposition, at least in their private lives.
"As Russia becomes ever more isolated and the psychological toll of maintaining normality amid a grinding war rises, Soviet-style repression may be the only thing keeping those segments of the population who are dissatisfied with the war from exploding into public outrage," Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center wrote in May for Foreign Affairs.
Independent media may be gone, Kolesnikov wrote, but "many Russians have become avid watchers of YouTube videos of opposition figures and analysts, concerts by opposition rappers, and singers who are more familiar to older generations of liberal intellectuals ... There are ... people in this apathetic crowd [of Russian citizenry] who are burning up on the inside with shame at what has happened to their beloved country, at the impenetrable indifference and docility of the others."
At The New York Review of Books, a more recent essay by a Russia-based writer under the pen name Zhenya Bruno begins by noting the certainty of a fellow Russian that their country is not shelling Ukrainian cities. Reviewing Elena Kostyuchenko's "I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country," the pseudonymous Bruno writes that Kostyuchenko "gives us a term for this certainty. She calls it decency: 'A decent person follows established rules,' she explains. 'They obey their elders. They don't insist on their rights.' … The world that Kostyuchenko describes is a terrible one in many ways. I caught myself groaning aloud as I read. But the book is called I Love Russia. So I also kept thinking about what there is to love. Because, I realized, I love Russia, too. I love it, I think, for the courage with which people break orders and laws to help others, knowing that the swords of law and 'decency' are raised over their heads. They do so clandestinely, without attracting unneeded attention, because it is right. Perhaps this is decency, without the scare quotes." |
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El Salvador's millennial president, Nayib Bukele, has attracted global attention for his authoritarian crackdown and the security that has followed. Notoriously beset by gangs, El Salvador has gotten much safer, now boasting "a homicide rate of only 2.4 per 100,000 people—the lowest of any country in the Western Hemisphere other than Canada," Gustavo Flores-Macías wrote for Foreign Affairs this spring. In March 2022, the government approved a state of emergency (or "exception") following a spike in murders. Since then, mass arrests have swept tens of thousands into jail. Amnesty International has decried human-rights violations.
And yet, Bukele is popular. He won reelection by a wide margin this year. In the current issue of the right-leaning political journal American Affairs, Juan David Rojas examines the thorny issue of El Salvador trading rights and liberties for security. For one thing, Rojas writes that some kinds of violence had already been countered effectively before the state of exception, by unrelated government negotiations with the gangs.
On the implications for freedom and democracy, Rojas writes: "For all practical intents and purposes, El Salvador under the current state of exception is a dictatorship. … Unlike Cuba or Nicaragua, Salvadorans have freely elected to sacrifice key democratic liberties in order to control criminal violence. Observers would do well to both respect and understand this decision as well as celebrate the many lives that have been saved thanks to the policies of the current government. At the same time, questioning the relative benefits of this trade-off is by no means illegitimate. … The issue now is that an abrupt end to the state of exception could result in the mass release of gang members. A key gauge of the regime's adaptability will come from the public's reaction toward mass trials of alleged gang members given the very real possibility that hundreds or even thousands of innocent Salvadorans stand to go to prison. … It remains to be seen exactly how long the Bukele model might last or whether it stands to outlive Bukele himself." |
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