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Law enforcement surround the Mississippi State Capitol
Hard Numbers: Bomb threats rattle state capitols, Egypt expands new desert metropolis, Myanmar junta springs prisoners, poll shows popular Jan. 6th conspiracy theory, “Bladerunner” walks out of jail
28: For several years now Egypt has been building a slick new capital city on a swathe of desert land 28 miles east of teeming, chaotic Cairo. Now officials plan to double the size of the undertaking. Supporters say the government needs a modern seat of power, and a new city to help absorb some of Egypt’s fast-growing population. Critics say it’s just a Neo-Pharaonic boondoggle that’s busting the country’s fragile finances and enriching President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s cronies.
9,652: Myanmar’s military government announced it will release 9,652 prisoners, including 114 foreigners, in an attempt to salvage foreign relations that have suffered since it seized power in a 2021 coup. Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, however, remains in prison, where she is serving a 27-year sentence for corruption that the United Nations regards as bogus.
25: Polling shows that 25 percent of Americans believe it is “definitely or probably true” that the FBI was behind the Jan 6th riot at the US Capitol. Supporters of Donald Trump are overrepresented among the group that believes this. The investigation into Jan 6th is ongoing, with 1,240 people connected to the attacks arrested so far. Trump has promised to pardon those who have been sentenced if he is re-elected later this year.
11: Throwback alert! Remember Oscar Pistorius, the South African paralympic superstar with carbon fiber legs who dazzled the world at the 2012 Games before he was convicted of killing his girlfriend by shooting her through a bathroom door? “Bladerunner”, as he was known, is getting out of jail on Friday, after serving 11 years for the killing.
Gang members wait to be taken to their cell after 2000 gang members were transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Handout distributed March 15, 2023.
What We’re Watching: El Salvador’s lingering state of emergency, Northern Ireland on alert, Alibaba’s breakup, Greek election matters
El Salvador’s state of emergency one year later
This week marks one year since El Salvador’s bullish millennial president, Nayib Bukele, introduced a state of emergency, enabling his government to deal with the scourge of gang violence that has long made his country one of the world’s most dangerous.
Quick recap: To crack down on the country’s 70,000 gang members, Bukele’s government denied alleged criminals the right to know why they were detained and access to legal counsel. The arrest blitz has seen nearly 2% of the adult population locked up.
Despite these draconian measures and Bukele’s efforts to circumvent a one-term limit, he enjoys a staggering 91% approval rating.
Bukele has also sought to distinguish himself as an anti-corruption warrior, which resonates with an electorate disillusioned by years of corrupt politicians (Bukele’s three predecessors have all been charged with corruption. One is in prison; two are on the run.)
Externally, relations with the Biden administration have been icy under Bukele, with San Salvador refusing to back a US-sponsored UN resolution condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What matters most to Salvadorans is the dropping crime rate, which is why Bukele will likely cruise to reelection next year.
Fears of domestic terror attack in Northern Ireland
Britain's MI5 intelligence agency has raised the domestic terror threat in Northern Ireland from “substantial” to “severe” amid fears of an imminent attack in the British-run region. This follows a series of attacks by Irish nationalist groups, mainly against police, in Northern Ireland in recent months.
The New Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group with roots in the original militant group of the same name, has taken responsibility for a series of crimes against law enforcement and journalists.
For context, the IRA dominant in the 20th century disbanded with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that put an end to decades of violence between pro-British unionists wanting to stay part of the UK, and Irish nationalists calling for the unification of Northern Ireland with Ireland.
This warning comes as US President Joe Biden is preparing to travel to Belfast next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the peace deal, which put an end to the conflict, known as the Troubles.
Indeed, tensions have risen since Brexit, which revived age-old questions about the status of Northern Ireland’s borders. The threat level in Britain, meanwhile, remains “substantial,” meaning that an attack is still a strong possibility, according to authorities.
Alibaba breaks up … itself
Now we know the real reason Alibaba founder Jack Ma resurfaced in China this week. On Tuesday, the Chinese e-commerce giant announced it would spin off its different businesses into six units with separate CEOs under a single holding company. Each unit will be allowed to seek outside capital or go public independently.
Alibaba claims that the Chinese government did not order the restructuring, but it's an open secret that Xi Jinping thought the company had become too rich and powerful. The restructuring plan was unveiled the day after Ma made his first public appearance in the country since late 2020 to boost confidence in the tech company and within the broader sector. (His public criticism of regulators set off a broader crackdown against China's tech sector that hit Alibaba hard.)
Politics aside, Alibaba is just following in the footsteps of its main rivals, Tencent and JD.com, which showed earlier they got the memo from Xi: Break yourself up before you become too big to fail, or it'll be worse if we have to do it for you. The question is, would this ever happen in the US to curb the power of Big Tech?
Greek PM calls spring election
PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose popularity has dipped in the wake of a train disaster last month that killed 57, has called for a general election on May 21. The train crash sparked national protests and strikes as angry Greeks pointed blame at the government for poor transport-sector investment and regulation.
In this election, Greece is transitioning to a proportional representation system, making it harder for any party to enjoy an outright win.
Mitsotakis, whose term was set to end in July, has been dogged by protests and allegations of wiretapping of political opponents by security forces. His reputational dent mixed with his New Democracy Party’s declining numbers – though they remain slightly ahead of the opposition Syriza Party – raise the likelihood of Greece soon being ruled by a coalition.
Syriza, meanwhile, says that even if it wins an outright majority, it will form a "government of cooperation." But the left-wingers have ruled out the possibility of working in a coalition with Mitsotakis’s conservatives.
Quick Take: US facing domestic insurrection & terrorism
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
What a crazy day. A historic day and not one that you really want to have in your memory with the United States facing domestic insurrection, terrorism. Thousands of people converging on the Capitol and the seat of the legislative branch of government after having been stirred up with disinformation and fake news by the president, President Trump and his supporters this morning. I will be very clear that the violence that we have already seen is the responsibility of the president directly. And we've never in our lives, the last time you had an election like this was in 1876 and still the transition was handled more responsibly.
You've never had a sitting president actually work to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election. And that is exactly what occurred. And it was interesting, very late, but nonetheless, Senate majority leader McConnell came out just a few hours ago and said that President Trump's efforts to overturn the electoral vote was a threat at the heart of democracy that should not be supported. And yet, nonetheless, you could still get more than a dozen sitting, GOP senators and a majority of sitting GOP members of the house to support President Trump, knowing full well that the election had not been stolen. That indeed Biden had won a free and fair election. But because President Trump's influence over the voting base of the Republican Party so outweighs that of any other Republican figure, they were prepared to go with him even after he lost the election, even as a lame duck president. And that's the problem.
This doesn't go away. And it doesn't go away for two reasons. One, because Trump's influence will continue. He'll have access to billions of dollars and mass media and have dozens of millions of direct followers that will continue to prepare to listen to him. And it also doesn't go away because even as Trump diminishes from public view, which certainly will happen as he's no longer president and perhaps if there are legal efforts directly against him in the aftermath of the events that we are watching transpire today, Trumpism will still have political space and gravity and many will occupy it.
Trump, as Steve Bannon once said, is a vessel, a broken vessel, a flawed vessel, but for something much deeper, which is a feeling that the system is rigged against the average American. And even though Joe Biden has the instinct to reach out across the aisle and across the divide in his own Democratic party, decades of a country and a political system that makes the average American feel like it is rigged against them, creates a massive amount of antiestablishment sentiment that was tapped into by Trump, but that others will tap into as well. And in its ultimate level, you get violence. And in its ultimate level, you get what we have seen play out in Washington today.
Now, I want to be clear. I've said to all of you before that the United States is not on the verge of becoming an authoritarian regime and that continues to be true right now. But that does not mean that the United States is not deeply damaged. No, indeed. If you go to our top risks that we put out just this Monday, risk number one was the political polarization in the United States. And all week, people have been asking me, "Why wasn't it coronavirus? How can it not be the pandemic?" And the answer was, the pandemic is horrible, but at least with the vaccines, mortality is going down significantly.
The United States, the divisions in the US are getting worse. And are getting worse, vastly differentiated rate from that of other countries in the world. What we are seeing play out right now in the United States, it is inconceivable that that would have happened in Canada or Australia or Germany or France or the UK today. Historically, perhaps, today, not possible. Why in the United States? Because in the United States, so many people have fallen through the cracks. The equality of opportunity is not there. The divide is much greater.
There are some incredible things about the United States. It's very hard, very painful for me to talk about all of this, as someone who considers myself an American patriot, someone who loves my country. But the same things that created true greatness in the US economy in the past decades, the fact that we are alone, so aligned with the animal spirits of capitalism that we so provide support for entrepreneurs and the market forces. But when the market no longer works for the average person, when suddenly labor doesn't matter as much and the average American no longer has anything to offer to capitalism, and indeed coronavirus has sped that up a great deal. Well, that means that the disenfranchised in the US are going to feel uniquely disenfranchised compared to other countries that haven't done such a great job at capitalism, but they've done a better job for protecting their people. And that's all of those other advanced industrial democracies.
So, at the same time that the United States has become so much more powerful, the US has also become more politically delegitimized. And that's what today is all about. Today is, in a sense, the increasing progression of a trend that has been growing for decades and which has accelerated under Trump and has accelerated even further under coronavirus. And yes, President-elect Biden can start to try to heal and repair some of this and having probably won the two seats in Georgia that were contested that can start with a couple of trillion dollars in additional stimulus that will help to ensure that average Americans aren't evicted, don't become homeless. Can deal with having lost their jobs and the stress of the schools being closed and coronavirus continuing to affect the country. But that's a Band-Aid. That doesn't address the underlying structural challenges in the United States. That is a project for decades, not for one administration.
And until then, the erosion, globally, as the United States continues to be somewhat absent as a global leader and increasingly mistrusted as an example, not to be followed. I've said this before, but today is it not so glaringly obvious that no one outside the US would look to my country and say, "That is a paradigm for governance. That is the way I want my country to be run." In 1989 when the world fell down, we won the Cold War because people respected our system, because our government was better, because our ideas were better. You cannot say that today. And that is truly unfortunate and it's happened over a few decades.
I certainly hope that events of today and the next two weeks will be a clarion call, a wake up for Americans of all stripes and of both parties to understand that we need to work together to start rebuilding some of the institutions that have faced so much erosion and damage over the past decades. But the idea that Biden becomes president, and we can go back to status quo, anti-America is back, that our country is the world's exceptionalist power once again, indispensable nation making the world safe for democracy? You know, we've exported a lot of "democracy" over the past years. Maybe we should have kept a little more in the United States, start at home. And that is the message for today. Thank you so much. Be safe. And talk to you soon.