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Women in politics whose names you should know in 2022
Was it the year of the woman? Angela Merkel left the political stage. New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen were given gold stars for their respective responses to the pandemic. And Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya emerged as Belarus’ democracy warrior.
As COVID lingers – and thrives – it’s clear that 2022 will be packed with immensely complicated political problems for all countries. Many female leaders will be at the forefront of efforts to meet complex domestic and international challenges over the next 12 months. Here are four of them.
Britain’s Liz Truss
Liz Truss has many jobs. She is Minister for Women and Equalities, and after a cabinet reshuffle in the fall she was also tapped as Foreign Secretary. This week, she added to her portfolio the unenviable role of chief negotiator with the EU on all things Brexit. One of her priorities will be to chart a path forward on the future of the Northern Irish border, which has put London on a path toward trade war with Brussels and trouble with Washington. Truss, who has now held cabinet positions in three Tory governments, is also trying to mold Britain's post-Brexit foreign policy.
Timing is everything in politics, and Truss takes on this monster portfolio just as her boss, Boris Johnson, finds himself in the dog house after a series of bungled policies and communication strategies – as well as a string of tasteless scandals of the Marie Antoniette variety. Truss has already been floated as a potential successor to Johnson, who analysts say may now be on borrowed time. But her chance to become prime minister could depend on how painstaking talks with Brussels progress in the near term. Can she triumph where others have so far failed?
France’s Valerie Pécresse
Since entering the French presidential fray just a few weeks ago, Valerie Pécresse, who now heads the center-right Les Républicains party, has shaken up a race that has been incumbent Emmanuel Macron’s to lose. Pécress has been in politics for a long time, having advised former President Jacques Chirac in the late 1990s, and is now head of Paris’ sprawling regional government.
In winning her party’s presidential nomination, Pécresse became the first woman to head the party of Charles de Gaulle, a big feat in a country where women remain underrepresented in politics.
Pécresse’s near-term challenge will be twofold: First, she must convince an embittered French electorate that she has a plan to improve average people’s lives after two years of pandemic hell. So far, her tough-on-immigration and security message seems to be resonating with moderate voters across the political spectrum.
But Pécresse’s second trial will be one that her male counterparts don’t have to contend with: convincing voters with long-held views about gender and leadership that a woman can – and should – head the next government.
Israel’s Merav Michaeli
Eight ragtag parties joined forces this past summer to unseat Israel’s longtime premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Only one of them is led by a woman. Merav Michaeli, a 54-year old former journalist, heads the once-dominant Labor party, which has seen its political fortunes wither in recent years along with the rest of the Israeli left.
For the past six months, Michaeli – and the entire ideologically-diverse coalition – has been focused on survival, by keeping the governing bloc from collapsing. They’ve done that, having passed the first national budget in three years.
But there’s a lot riding on Michaeli’s leadership, and many are counting on her to rebuild the liberal party of Golda Meir and Yizhak Rabin that’s been in shambles: “I am here because this is my project — to turn it back into a ruling party,” she told the New York Times earlier this year.
It’s true that Michaeli has brought Labor back from the brink (the group had been in the opposition from 2009 to 2020). But it’s one thing to bring a party back from oblivion as part of a sweeping change movement. It’s another to return it to its peak as Israel’s “peace camp” when neither the Israelis nor the Palestinian Authority now seem particularly keen on upending the status quo. So then what does the revived Labor party stand for in post-Oslo 2022? Now that the onboarding period is over, it’ll be Michaeli’s job to let Israelis know.
Hungary’s Katalin Novak
When discussing the illiberal shift in Eastern European politics in recent years, the media conjures images of leaders who look like barely reformed apparatchiks with stubby fingers. Then there’s Hungary’s Katalin Novak, vice president of the ruling Fidesz party, touting the group’s right-wing populist message.
This week, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tapped Novak to be Hungary’s first female president should he prevail in elections next spring. Novak, who is 44, is widely considered both attractive and articulate. Indeed, undecided voters might find Fidesz’s hard line on LGBTQ rights and so-called traditional family values more palatable when Novak, Hungary’s Minister of Family and Youth Affairs and recipient of France’s highest state honor in 2019, is delivering the message.
As president, Novak’s job would be mostly ceremonial, though she could delay the enactment of some laws and appoint judges and a national prosecutor, which might come in handy for Orbán. But will Novak’s sugar-and-spice image help pull Orban across the finish line as he faces a united opposition and the toughest political fight of his life?Five choices
We have lots of big elections on deck in 2022. Today we’ll preview five that will feature high international stakes and especially colorful candidates.
France (April) — President Emmanuel Macron is expected to seek re-election, and at this early stage he looks likely to win. Marine Le Pen, an anti-EU far-right firebrand, appears set to try to rebrand herself yet again in hopes of earning a second-round rematch with the centrist Macron, who defeated her by nearly 2-1 in their head-to-head battle in 2017. But Le Pen will be elbowed on one side by center-right establishment candidate Valérie Pécresse. On the other, she’ll face constant pressure from France’s new election wildcard, Eric Zemmour, a TV personality who claims left-wing elites want to consolidate power by replacing white French citizens with immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
Hungary (April) — Here the outsized personality belongs to incumbent Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, who now faces his toughest election challenge to date. Though Orbán insists he wants Hungary to remain within the EU, criticism of the union forms a central part of his appeal to loyal supporters. His moves in recent years to tighten his grip on power, stack the country’s courts with loyalists, silence media critics, close the country’s borders to non-EU migrants, and restrict the rights of LGBT people have earned pushback from the EU. But the big story here is that six opposition parties have joined forces with the single aim of ousting Orbán.
Colombia (May-June) — Colombians will choose a new Congress in March, but it’s the presidential election in May and June that might make history. For now, Senator Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla and mayor of Bogotá, is the wildcard to watch — and the favorite to win. He owes part of his popularity to his own formidable political gifts. But he’s also helped by the unpopularity of the incumbent, Iván Duque, and a year of controversy and public frustration over Duque’s botched tax reform and pandemic response plans. (Duque is term-limited, even if he weren’t politically toxic.) A Petro victory would mark a major political turning point in Colombia, traditionally a center-right country in which decades of war with Marxist militants — and the ongoing disaster next door in socialist-led Venezuela — have long stigmatized leftist politics at the national level.
Brazil (October) — Many recent elections around the world have pitted a charismatic populist against a defender of the political establishment. Not so in Brazil next year, where October’s presidential election will feature a battle for the ages between incumbent right-wing lightning-rod Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, one of Latin America’s most dynamic left-wing populists. Critics have hammered Bolsonaro for his dismissive attitude toward COVID, and he’s aroused anger by denouncing the integrity of the election itself. Lula is well ahead in early polls, but Bolsonaro’s popularity has risen recently on promises of cash help for the poor, a decidedly off-brand maneuver for a leader who usually dismisses the need for empathy in policymaking. These two brilliant political performance artists will probably deliver the most volatile election of 2022.
US midterms (November) — Much of the US political drama next year will come directly from Donald Trump. The former president and master showman hopes to use November’s midterm congressional elections to tighten his grip on the Republican Party ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In many ways, the hotly contested races for majority control of Congress will be a referendum on increasingly unpopular President Joe Biden, and on Democrats too busy arguing with one another to deliver on some of their grandest campaign promises from 2020. But Trump’s active backing for Republicans who signal personal loyalty to him and his agenda against more independent-minded GOP incumbents makes this set of midterms — as well as state and local elections — less predictable than most.
We’ll also be writing in the coming weeks about upcoming elections in South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Kenya, and elsewhere.The Graphic Truth: French presidential frontrunners
France's presidential election is only three months away, and it’ll be no snoozer. Although barely one-quarter of French voters back current president Emmanuel Macron, he’s heavily favored to win re-election because he’d almost certainly beat far-right hopefuls Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour in a runoff. But the center-right French president now faces an unexpected challenge from the old establishment right: Valerie Pécresse, the nominee of the Les Republicains party, could give Macron a run for his money if she makes it to the second round. We take a look at how the top four French presidential candidates have polled over the past six months.
The French election is getting hot
Germany has been the European center of political attention in recent months, as punk-rock god Angela Merkel exits the stage after almost two decades at the helm. But there’s another big election heating up in Europe. The French will head to the polls in just twelve weeks, and the race has started to get very interesting.
What’s the state of play?
The slate of presidential candidates is now finalized after Les Républicains on Saturday elected Valerie Pécresse to head the ticket. Pécresse, the first woman to head the center-right party of Charles de Gaulle, is hoping to reinvigorate a group that’s been marginalized in French politics in recent years as anti-establishment sentiment has gripped the electorate.
She faces off against incumbent President Emmanuel Macron, a wishy-washy centrist who is not particularly popular and would reap about a quarter of votes if elections were held today.
Trailing Macron in the polls is Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Rally party, who in recent years has abandoned part of her populist economic agenda to broaden her appeal. And more recently, far(ther)-right firebrand Éric Zemmour — a media shock jock who likes to say provocative things to get attention — has entered the political fray.
Center right vs right vs far right. The French electorate is now decidedly right-leaning. This is in part because the once-potent French left has imploded since former President François Hollande of the Socialist Party left office in 2017 as one of the country’s most unpopular leaders. The French progressive movement remains split as a result of intra-party infighting and ideological differences. Young progressive voters are disengaged from politics.
As a result, big electoral debates over immigration, law and order, and France’s influence on the world stage are playing out almost entirely on the right. For Macron, who has for years tried to paint himself as a pragmatic, liberal political outsider, this swerve to the right has not been too difficult to navigate. He’s talked tough on immigration and Islamic extremism to appeal to right-leaning voters who have staunch views on security and French identity, while distinguishing himself from his far-right opponents whom he dubs as myopic kooks.
But Pécresse’s entrance into the race indeed throws a spanner in the works. The 54-year-old, who served as budget minister in former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government and was an advisor to party stalwart Jacques Chirac, is no provocateur à la Zemmour and Le Pen. She's a run-of-the-mill conservative who has vowed to get tough on immigration and rein in big government. Pécresse describes her brand as “one-third Thatcher, two-thirds Merkel.”
This is a somewhat nightmarish situation for Macron. For the French president, it’s easy to play up his sensible middle-of-the-road politics (on the right, that is) when you have Le Pen’s and Zemmour’s respective Wikipedia pages to draw upon. But Pécresse can hardly be branded as a far-right loon. What’s more, as current chief of Paris’ regional government she has experience balancing budgets and overseeing social programs.
France has a runoff presidential voting system — if no one cracks 50 percent in round one, the two top finishers face off in a second bout. A new poll shows that Pécresse would beat Macron in a runoff, while the incumbent would thrash Le Pen or Zemmour.
Does it even matter who wins? Sort of. Pécresse does not have a track record on foreign affairs, and unlike Macron, would be unlikely to advocate for European strategic autonomy or push for France to lead European policymaking.
Zemmour, on the other hand, is avowedly Euroskeptic, while Le Pen doesn’t like Brussels but says breaking away would be too damaging.
Domestically, tightening immigration rules and cracking down on crime will be priorities for all of the presidential candidates given that large swaths of the French electorate support such moves. But passing legislation through the French parliament is going to be hard for whoever wins the race because no party is likely to win a majority.
Looking ahead. Pécresse has quickly risen to third place, and is just two points behind the second-placed candidate. If she makes up the difference over the next few months, all bets are off.