The Global Repercussions of the Attack on the Heart of the Oil Industry

Hedy Naguib Mahfouz to Majalla: “I fear that future generations will forget my father and I wish that he would become part of school curricula.”

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Tunisia’s Rebuke of the Political Establishment was a Long Time Coming

Issue 1766- september - 20/09/2019

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1766- september - 20/09/2019

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Just How Special is the Spire of Salisbury Cathedral? www.majalla.com

The Global Repercussions of the Attack on the Heart of the Oil Industry www.majalla.com

Editorial The recent attacks on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields in Saudi Arabia have caused major setbacks for the Kingdom’s economy, which is reliant on oil exports. While Saudi Arabia is expected to make a quick recovery and restore its output in the near future, the attacks did mark a new chapter in the recent tensions in the Arabian Gulf, and major questions have been raised regarding the efficacy of the Kingdom’s present missile defense system. In this week’s cover story, Majalla explores the immediate impact the attack has had on the global economy and which countries have been the most negatively affected as well as the strategic importance the Abqaiq oil field has both for Saudi Arabia and the world as a whole.

Joseph Braude also writes on the recent attacks, as he investigates skepticism from Trump and Pompeo over the Houthi’s claim to the reasonability of the attacks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has openly blamed Iran over the attacks, while Trump has had a more reserved response. Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has accused his American counterpart of deceiving the international community by placing the blame on the Islamic Republic.

The Tunisian presidential election has been highly contested, and perhaps the most shocking result of the first round of the election is the elimination of candidates from both major parties, namely Abdelkarim Zbidi who ran as an independent but was supported by the secular Nidaa Tounes and Abdelfattah Mourou of the Islamist Ennahdha Party. Since the 2011 revolution both parties have been at the forefront of Tunisian politics, and both have ruled in coalition governments for the past five years. Yasmine El-Geressi writes on this democratic rebellion against the political establishment, and the reasons why the electorate have grown impatient with both parties.

Naguib Mahfouz is arguably one of the most successful twentieth-century authors to come out of Egypt and the Arab world. His major novels have become a staple in Arabic literature, and many of his works have been made into TV series and films, and his efforts have been rewarded in 1988 when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In spite of this, his daughter, Hedy Naguib Mahfouz has expressed fear that future generations might forget her father’s literature and has called for his work to be taught in schools. Safa Azeb interviews Hedy as she also spoke to Majalla about her family’s disputes with the American University in Cairo and the recent opening of the Naguib Mahfouz museum.

Finally, Bryn Haworth writes an exploratory piece on how the Russian oligarchy has maintained hegemonic control over the Kremlin and even goes back to pre-Soviet history to find out how Russian culture and national mysticism has played a role in the rise of these oligarchs.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Editor-in-Chief

Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary Mostafa El-Dessouki HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Ltd 10th Floor Building 7 Chiswick Business Park 566 Chiswick High Road London W4 5YG Tel : +44 207 831 8181 Fax: +44 207 831 2310

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

24 Bolton Was Trump’s Best Match, Until He Wasn’t

Issue 1766- september - 20/09/2019

32 Italy’s Precarious Triumph Over Populism

Drone Attacks on Saudi Oil Fields

14 Reinforce Tensions in Gulf

28 To Counter China, Out-Invent It

08 Netanyahu Fails to Win Majority in Close Election

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Asmaa Mohamed Abd Allah: Veteran Diplomat becomes Sudan’s First Female Foreign Affairs Minister 3

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An Older Adult s Guide to Exercising

50 in Cold Weather

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napshot

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The 'Tribute in Light' rises skyward on the 18th anniversary of the 11/9 terrorist attacks, September 2019 ,11 in New York City.

Throughout the United States services are being held to mark the 18th anniversary of the 11/9 terrorist attacks to remember the 2,977 people who were killed in New York, the Pentagon and in a field in rural Pennsylvania. (Getty)

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napshot

"Novecento", a taxidermy horse suspended from the ceiling, created by artist Maurizio Cattelan, is seen at Blenheim Palace on September 2019 ,12 in Woodstock, England. The Italian artist is known as the prankster of the art world. His most notable piece being "America" a solid gold usable toilet which had art lovers queuing to use when it was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. (Getty)

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eekly news Israel’s longest-serving leader, who was already weakened by the inability to put together an administration after an inconclusive election in April. The weakened Prime Minister invited his main rival, Benny Gantz, on Thursday to join him in a broad coalition government but was immediately rebuffed by the former general’s party. Netanyahu’s surprise offer of a power share was an abrupt change of strategy after failing to win a ruling majority in two elections this year.

Tunisian Establishment Stunned as

Houthi Drones Strike Major Saudi Oil Facilities, Defence Ministry says Iran to Blame

Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a drone attack on the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia which is vital to global energy supplies. The attacks on the processor and a major oilfield, operated

by Saudi Aramco on early Saturday sparked a huge fire, the kingdom’s interior ministry said.

Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry has shown off what it says it wreckage of drones and cruise missiles that proves Iranian involvement. The US has stood by its accusation that Iran was behind the attacks. Secretary of State Mike

Pompeo said after arriving in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that it was an "act of war". President Donald Trump said the US had "many options" in response. Iran has denied any involvement and threatened “all out war” if action is taken over the attack.

Netanyahu Fails to Win Majority in Close Election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to win a ruling majority in an election that produced a virtual tie between his right-wing bloc and a centre-left grouping that would be led by former military chief Benny Gantz. The outcome, according to almost complete results published on Wednesday, dealt a new blow to

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Outsiders Win Presidency

Tunisians have delivered a political earthquake by rejecting established leaders for a little known law professor and a media mogul jailed on suspicion of tax evasion during the presidential elections. Kais Saied and Nabil Karoui beat 24 other candidates, who included the prime minister, two former prime ministers, a former president and the defence minister, to advance to a runoff vote next month. It represents a sharp rebuke of elected governments that have struggled to improve living standards or end graft after Tunisia’s 2011 revolution introduced democracy and inspired the “Arab Spring”.

Afghanistan Braces for Deadly Attacks as Taliban Vow to Disrupt Presidential Election A deadly suicide bombing this week near an election rally in central Afghanistan where President Ashraf Ghani was due to speak came as a sharp reminder of the risks to a ballot set for the end of next week in the shadow of failed peace talks. Tuesday’s blast, in which at least 26 died, was just another grim moment in a

mass casualties since March 2017 being driven by extreme rightwing ideology. They said referrals to anti-radicalisation programmes of those feared to be at risk of committing far-right terrorist acts had doubled between 2016 and 2018, and were expected to rise further. In a briefing to the media, Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer, the Met assistant commissioner Neil Basu, said police were battling to stop extreme rightwing terrorism deadly week for Afghanistan: A Taliban truck prime minister, Antti Rinne, told reporters in gaining more of a foothold than it already had. bomb on last week killed at least 20 people and Paris that they were both “concerned about He said: “The problem is small but it is my wounded 95 when it exploded near a hospital in what is happening in Britain”. Downing street fastest-growing problem.” Basu said extreme southern Afghanistan, bringing the death toll in refused to commit to tabling its Brexit plans rightwing terrorism had gone from %6 of the a wave of attacks in one week to close to 100, for replacing the backstop by September 30, caseload two years ago to %10 now. with hundreds more injured. Despite the rise in branding it an “artificial deadline” and agreeing bombings, presidential candidates - including only to share informal “non-papers” on its Ghani - addressed large public gatherings on preferred solutions.

Wednesday and Thursday, urging people to cast their vote to defeat the Taliban agenda UK Police Say Fastest-Growing of circumventing the democratic process. But the Taliban have made no secret of their aim Terrorist Threat is From Far Right of disrupting the election, when Ghani will be Police have said the fastest-growing threat of terrorist violence in the UK is from the bidding for a second five-year term.

UK Given Two-Week EU Deadline for Irish far right, with seven of the 22 plots to cause Backstop Plan, Downing Street Rejects Request Boris Johnson has been set a two-week deadline to table a plan for replacing the Irish backstop as further embarrassing details emerged of the prime minister’s chaotic visit to Luxembourg.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and Greta Thunberg Tells US Congress Finland’s prime minister, Antti Rinne, told to ‘Wake Up’ about Climate Change reporters in Paris that they were both “concerned Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has about what is happening in Britain”. France’s inspired a global movement for climate change, president, Emmanuel Macron, and Finland’s delivered a strong message to U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday: “Wake up.” Wrapping up a sixday visit to Washington, D.C., the -16year-old Thunberg rallied a room full of Democratic lawmakers and activists, urging them to follow scientific warnings and push for strong measures to combat climate change.“This is not the time and place for dreams. This is the time to wake up,” Thunberg said behind a lowered podium at the ornate House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee room. Thunberg spent the day in Congress and on the steps of the Supreme Court, lending her star power to join U.S and youth activists who were drumming up attention and support ahead of a global climate strike on Friday.

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The Global Repercussions of the Attack on the Heart of the Oil Industry The Abqaiq Facility’s Importance to Saudi Arabia and the World Economy Mean a Lot is Riding on How Long Disruption to Oil Production Lasts 10

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Although the damaged facilities are central to Saudi ability to export crude oil, they have significant excess capacity and were not destroyed, so the Saudis may be able to restore exports relatively quickly. in global oil prices since 1988 by wiping out 5.7m barrels of production a day – 5 percent of the world’s oil supply. That’s more than half the kingdom’s overall output, and a higher rate than most countries—aside from the US and Russia—produce in total.

The price of Brent crude surged by more than 12$ a barrel within seconds as trading began in London, quickly climbing to highs of 70.88$ – a rise of more than 18 percent – before settling lower in a day of record-breaking oil trading.

Meanwhile, the energy price shock drove up shares in energy companies on the prospect of higher profits, while stock exchanges across Europe plunged into red as investors took fright over rising geopolitical tensions.

King Salman, who chaired a Cabinet session at Al-Salam Palace in Jeddah, said the attacks not only targeted vital installations of the Kingdom but also pose a threat to global oil supplies and threaten the stability of the global economy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a phone conversation with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said the attack is a dangerous escalation not only against Saudi Arabia, but also the world.

Smoke billows from an Aramco factory in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia.

(Reuters)

ABQAIQ’S STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE

Majalla - London The attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, which targeted what one analyst called the ”Achilles heel of the world economy”, was a direct attack on the heart of the Saudi economy and the global oil system. It knocked out more than half of all production capacity in the world’s largest oil exporter. The main target of the airborne attacks, which the US has blamed on Iran, was the Abqaiq processing facility, which has been exposed as a key chokepoint for the kingdom’s oil supplies. Abqaiq is used to prepare up to 70 per cent of Saudi Arabia’s production, most of it for export. The giant Khurais field, one of the world’s largest, was also hit.

While Saudi Arabia said it expected output to be restored in the near future, the size of the loss still sent shockwaves through the global energy markets. The attacks led to the biggest jump

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Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq governorate is located 75 kilometers South of Dammam.

It covers an area of about 595 square kilometers is home to 70 thousand inhabitants. The governorate also houses the Abqaiq oil plant, arguably the world’s most strategically crucial one. Abqaiq plant is an integral part of Aramco’s daily oil production. Not only is it the world’s largest oil refinery, it is also world›s largest crude oil concentration plant. According to Aramco, the plant processes 7 million barrels of oil a day. Aramco also manages four crude oil stations in Abqaiq, which, as of 31 December 2018, collectively store up to 66.4 million barrels of crude oil.

Abqaiq consists of three main plants, a crude oil plant, a liquefied gas plant and an auxiliary plant. The plant is also a hub of Arab light crude oil production, as 7 million barrels of light oil comes out of the plant on a daily basis. Additionally, the Abqaiq plant is

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the world›s largest crude oil stabilization plant. Oil stabilization is the process by which sorting facilities send sour crude oil to oil plants, in this case Abqaiq, where it is processed and converted into sweet crude oil. In laymen’s terms oil sweetening is the process of removing hydrogen sulphide from oil (sweetened oil is favored since it is safer for tankers to ship). This processed oil is then transferred to Ras Tanura and Jubail on the east coast, then to Yanbu on the west coast. The Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) also gets part of the oil. After that gas originating from semi-spherical tanks and concentration columns is sent to the liquefied natural gas facilities at Abqaiq for further processing.

The Abqaiq plant’s international importance extends beyond the security global oil supplies, as its pipeline ties Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facilities to Bapco’s refineries in Bahrain. Recently as much as 350 thousand barrels of crude oil a day are transferred to Bahrain via this 110 kilometer pipeline. A new pipeline has been installed between both facilities to accommodate Bahrain’s increased need for oil. The older pipeline built in 1945 could only send 220 thousand barrels of oil to Bahrain, this proved to be insufficient given the increased processing capacity of the Sitra refinery of 267 thousand barrels per day. As a result, the new pipeline was set up in the south of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia passing through the shores of Al Jazair in the south of Bahrain.

The plant’s most crucial pipeline is its East-West Pipeline, aka the Petroline. The Petroline consists of two parallel pipelines which connect the Abqaiq plant on the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia to the west coast of the Kingdom. In 2018, Aramco stated that 2.1 million barrels of crude oil moves through the Petroline.

It also predicted that by the year 2023, crude oil transfers through the pipelines will increase from 5 million barrels a day to 6.5 million barrels a day. Because of these factors, the security of the Petroline, as well as the Abqaiq plant as a whole, is a top priority for Saudi Arabia.

AN INOPPORTUNE TIME FOR THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Economists fear weeks, or possibly months of disruption which could do significant damage globally by tipping the stumbling global economy into a major recession by stemming supply to

A lot is riding on how long the oil disruption to Saudi oil production lasts – and the extent to which the gap can be filled by stepping up production or drawing down inventories elsewhere

Asian economies if the Saudi can’t get the Abqaiq facility back online soon and the resulting oil in prices lasts more than a few months – or if tensions between the US and Iran escalate. Oil market analysts claim prices could surge towards 100$ a barrel in the coming weeks if Middle East tensions reignite disruption in the strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for the world’s oil tankers.

A lot is riding on how long the oil disruption to Saudi oil production lasts – and the extent to which the gap can be filled by stepping up production or drawing down inventories elsewhere.

Bjørnar Tonhaugen, the head of oil markets at Rystad Energy, said the world was “not even close” to being able to replace Saudi exports.

Some countries are more exposed than others, and the rising geopolitical tensions resulting from the attack will add to the uncertainties which are already weighing on business investment around the world.

Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg, told the Financial Times that an increase of 10€ per barrel generally adds 0.3 percentage points to eurozone consumer price inflation within two months, with a similar effect on consumers’ disposable income. “For countries that are hovering on the brink of recession already, this could make the difference between stagnation or a mild contraction,” he said, pointing to Germany and Italy.

The biggest losers would be large oil-importing emerging economies such as Turkey and Argentina – already in a highly

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A destroyed installation in Saudi Arabia›s Khurais oil processing plant is pictured on September 2019 ,20.

(Getty)

Some countries are more exposed than others, and the rising geopolitical tensions resulting from the attack will add to the uncertainties which are already weighing on business investment around the world.

fragile state, and ill-equipped to deal with even a temporary rise in inflation, according to the Financial Times.

Jennifer McKeown from the consultancy Capital Economics also cautioned that if prices were driven higher by an escalation in Middle Eastern tensions, “benefits for some oil producers would have to be set against the severe costs of conflict for other,” she told the Financial Times. Even without a big regional flare-up, the heightened risks of conflict would “add to a host of reasons to feel uncertain about the global outlook” that are already weighing on business confidence and holding back investment across advanced economies, she said.

Despite the fact that the US is now the world’s largest oil producer, it still imports significant quantities of oil. Samatha Gross, Fellow in the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate, said that from an energy security perspective, the Trump administration has been telling us that the United States is now “energy dominant” and that we no longer need Middle East oil, but that “this incident shows how important the region still is to global oil markets, and in turn the United States.” She added that Saudi Arabia is still the indispensable country in oil markets, owing to its large exports and ability to use spare capacity to move prices.

SAUDI RESILIENCE The export-reliant Saudi economy depends on profits from oil sales worth some 23 percent of its GDP, according to World

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Bank figures. And although the damaged facilities are central to Saudi ability to export crude oil, they have significant excess capacity and were not destroyed, so the Saudis may be able to restore exports relatively quickly.

The Kingdom said on Wednesday that the attack had no impact on government revenues and authorities were gearing up to list the state oil giant, Aramco, signalling the kingdom’s resilience following the crippling strike on its oil industry. “In terms of revenues there’s zero impact,” Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of an investor conference in Riyadh. “Aramco continued to supply the markets without interruption and therefore revenues should continue as they are.”

He spoke a day after Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said the kingdom will restore lost oil output by the end of September and has managed to restore supplies to customers to the levels they were at prior to the attacks. Oil prices fell after the Saudi reassurances.

The giant oil producer has accelerated preparations for a share sale that could happen as November in Riyadh. Dozens of bankers from Citigroup Inc. to JPMorgan Chase & Co. met last week to work on the deal, with analyst presentations scheduled for September 22, people familiar with the matter have said.

Doubts had emerged earlier this week about the timeline of the IPO in the wake of the attack, but despite the concerns, Aramco has pressed ahead with banker meetings this week. Bankers at an investor conference in Riyadh, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the planned IPO of the state oil giant would go ahead despite the attacks. “There will be a patriotic buy into the company from both the wealthy and the less wealthy Saudis,” John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Gulf Research Center, told Reuters this week.

Sources previously told Reuters Aramco was targeting a domestic listing as early as November, but Aramco’s chairman, Yassir alRumayyan, said on Tuesday the IPO would be ready within the coming 12 months.

The Aramco IPO is a pillar of an ambitious economic diversification drive by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has put the firm’s valuation at 2$ trillion. The domestic flotation is the first step of a targeted 5 percent sales.

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Drone Attacks on Saudi Oil Fields Reinforce Tensions in Gulf Houthis Claim Responsibility but American Officials Suspect Iran as Main Culprit

by Joseph Braude An apparent Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities has escalated tensions in the Gulf to new heights.

American officials swiftly dismissed Houthi claims of responsibility and pointed an accusing finger at Iran. The affair seems to have quashed any possibility of American-Iranian diplomatic

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engagement in the near term.

UNPRECEDENTED STRIKE ON OIL FACILITIES On September 14, what White House officials described as a combination of drones and cruise missiles struck two Aramco oil installations located in Abqaiq and Khurais. Combined, those two facilities have a processing capacity of 8.45 million barrels of crude oil per day, amounting to the lion’s share of Saudi Arabian oil production. In the immediate aftermath, Saudi Aramco announced that production of 5.7 million barrels a day was suspended — well over half of the nation’s overall daily output.

Unsurprisingly, prices surged %15 as a result of the sudden supply cutoff.

Before this week’s attacks, it was reported that President Trump intended to hold a meeting with senior Iranian leaders in a bid to alleviate regional tensions. The oil facility attacks appear to have put such prospects on hold.

The oil facility attacks appear to have put such prospects on hold. President Trump ruled out talks the day after the missile attack without Although Houthi forces claimed responsibility preconditions, calling it “Fake News” and for the attack, American officials expressed “an incorrect statement (as usual!).” As if to skepticism. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo underscore the extent of the change in mood tweeted: “Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks in Washington, Republican Senator Lindsey on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif Graham of South Carolina mulled publicly pretend to engage in diplomacy. Amid all the the idea of a retaliatory airstrike on Iranian oil calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched refineries, saying “It is now time for the U.S. to an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy put on the table an attack on Iranian oil refineries supply. There is no evidence the attacks came if they continue their provocations or increase from Yemen.” nuclear enrichment.”

Smoke billows from an Aramco oil facility in Abqaiq about 60km (37 miles) southwest of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia's eastern province on September 2019 ,14.

(AFP)

For his part, U.S. President Trump stopped short of accusing Iran directly, but hinted at retaliation, tweeting, “There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!”

US-IRANIAN MEETINGS ON HOLD Before this week’s attacks, it was reported that President Trump intended to hold a meeting with senior Iranian leaders in a bid to alleviate regional tensions. On September 10, National Security Adviser John Bolton, a stalwart opponent of such talks, left the administration on apparently poor terms. Trump indicated openness to French plans to extend a 15$ billion line of credit to Tehran.

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To judge by the response of senior Iranian officials, the sharpness of Washington’s response struck a nerve. Ayatollah Khamene’i tweeted: “If U.S. repents & returns to the JCPOA it withdrew from, then it can join and talk with Iran, among other members of the deal. Otherwise, no negotiation will take place between [Iranian] and U.S. officials at any level, whether in New York or anywhere else.”

Further down the hierarchy, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted that “Having failed at ‘max pressure’, [Secretary Pompeo is] turning to ‘max deceit’. The U.S. and its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will lead to military victory.

Blaming Iran won't end disaster. Accepting our April 2015 proposal to end war and begin talks may.”

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Tunisia’s Rebuke of the Political Establishment was a Long Time Coming Economic Woes and a Divided Establishment Opened the Door for Outsiders to Claim Both Top Spots in the Presidential Election 16

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Promises of democracy have been undermined by the lack of economic progress which is worse than the pre2011- conditions that led to the revolution.

A divided establishment created the opportunity for outsiders to claim both top spots in the run-off. For most of the eight years since the revolution, Tunisian politics has been organised around two large blocs: one centred on the Islamist Ennahda party, and the other centred on the late president Essebsi’s Nidaa Tounes party. Originally opposed to each other, these blocs reached a consensus agreement in 2014 election and have participated in a coalition government for much of the past five years. But the 2019 election marked the end of the Islamist-secular divide. No fewer than six candidates campaigned for what can be referred to as “secular establishment” – the progressive, modernist cam originally affiliated with Nidaa Tounes, and one of the biggest surprises wa perhaps the poor performance of Ennahda who despite moderating its image and selecting lawyer Abdelfattah Mourou as its candidate, only won %11 of the vote.

This sharp rebuke of the establishment was a long time coming.

WORSENING ECONOMIC WOES

Supporters of Tunisia's jailed presidential candidate Nabil Karoui (picture) celebrate in front of his headquarters in the Tunisian capital Tunis on September ,15 2019. (Getty)

by Yasmine El-Geressi The second round of Tunisia’s presidential election will be a choice of two political outsiders after they topped the first round of voting on Sunday: Kais Saied, an independent candidate and a law professor who was relatively unknown before this year, and Nabil Karoui, a media mogul running for office from behind bars after he was detained last month on charges of money laundering and tax-dodging.

The vote, which was brought forward after the death in July of the president Beji Caid Essebsi on 25 July, and has widely been viewed as a test of one of the world’s youngest democracies, handed a blow to the political establishment, including for Prime Minister Youssef Chahed, who won just 7 percent, and former interim President Moncef Marzouki, who had a mere 3 percent.

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In what was hailed as sign of its successful democratic transition, Tunisia held its first-ever televised debate of presidential candidates earlier this month. The country has won praise as the only democracy to emerge from the 2011 Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia, before spreading across the Middle East and North Africa. But it has not all been smooth sailing. In the eight years since the 2011 revolution, successive governments have failed to delivery on the primary demand of the people: economic opportunity.

Promises of democracy have been undermined by the lack of economic progress which is worse than the pre2011 conditions that led to the revolution. Nationwide, unemployment which was roughly 14-12 percent prerevolution, has jumped to 18 percent in 2011 and remains at 15 percent today, with youth unemployment reaching around 45 percent. The cost of living has also been rising rapidly, increasing by more than 30 percent since 2016.

The dinar has lost half its value since the revolution. GDP growth is sluggish, though it did rise to 2.6 percent last

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year. An IMF-backed reform programme that aims to cut the budget deficit has brought higher taxes and unpopular efforts to freeze public-sector wages. Along with widespread poverty, high inflation, and wave of terrorist attacks that damaged the economically vital tourism industry, these difficult conditions have contributed to frustration with not just the ruling parties but the entire political system.

In recent years, the political landscape has shifted significantly as electoral coalitions have been made and unmade, and as established political parties have fractured into smaller parties or collapsed amid leadership disagreements. The first round of the election was marked by high rates of apathy among young voters, pushing ISIE head to put out an emergency call to them Sunday an hour before polls closed. The most recent published Arab Barometer surveys (2016) reveals diminishing trust in the political process and institutions. For example, %65 of Tunisians have low or no trust at all in the government, %57 have little or no trust in the legal system. And %72 have little or no trust in parliament.

Leading up to the elections, analysts and politicians said a lack of economic progress could pose a threat to Tunisia’s democratic project. The International Crisis Group, a thinktank in Belgium, warned of a “general crisis of confidence in the political elite” in Tunisia. The group urged the European Union to support measures that would prevent further polarisation, including macro-financial assistance, reforms to public administration and the creation of a politically diverse Constitutional Court.

It is unsurprising; therefore, that both of the top two candidates – although very different – are seen as anti-system votes as neither come from political parties currently represented in the legislature and have capitalised on the general political and economic hopelessness many Tunisians feel.

ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT VOTES It is unsurprising; therefore, that both of the top two candidates – although very different – are seen as antisystem votes as neither come from political parties currently represented in the legislature and have capitalised on the general political and economic hopelessness many Tunisians feel.

Nabil Karoui’s appeal is easy to understand as it has been pitched against a sense of growing disillusionment. Despite his wealth, the media mogul - who founded Nessma TV alongside Silvio Berlusconi which he has used to promote his political ambitions - has positioned himself as the champion of the poor and “forgotten” Tunisians. He cultivated this image by hosting a charity show since 2017 in which he aired images of himself delivering aid from a family charity to the poor.

Karoui has promised a “revolution at the ballot box” in favour of the “other Tunisia” – the millions neglected by the establishment and has promised a strong state that can restore economic growth and deliver goods and services to the people. Among his popular promises, the Qalb Tounes head has pledged to invest in education, clean water and other basic services for the poor.

The criminal charges against him, which he denies and calls

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Tunisian presidential candidate and law professor Kais Saied speaks during a press conference in Tunis on September ,17 2019, following the announcement of official results in the first round of Tunisia's presidential election. (Getty)

The road ahead for the run-off election between Said and Karoui is uncertain.

A critical predictor of how each will perform will be who the losing parties endorse, which will be crucial for the candidates to get to %50.

them politically motivated, only added to his reputation as an outsider loathed by the establishment. In tandem to his arrest, Tunisia’s electoral and media authorities banned the popular Nessma TV, as well as two other stations, from reporting on the presidential campaign, accusing them of broadcasting without licenses. For many Tunisians, Karoui’s arrest 10 days before the campaign, was reminiscent of the country’s autocratic past and points to the rapidly eroding institutions, and therefore worked in his favour. It mobilised voters in a key section of Tunisian society that feel side-lined by the economy and detached from the main political trends. His critics, however, describe him as an ambitious, unscrupulous, populist. The wealthy secular political elite, which he once backed, now view him as a threat.

Karoui’s wealth and massive electoral organisation stand in sharp contrast to his rival, Kais Saied, who gathered 10,000 Tunisian Dinar (3,400$) from friends and family to pay a deposit required of candidates by Tunisia’s electoral body and launched a shoestring campaign in which he rejected state election funds and large rallies, favouring door-todoor campaigning. The frequent legal commentator on TV, who earned the nickname “Robocop” for his monotone, mechanical style of debating in classical Arabic, has presented himself as a humble public servant – taking public transport, pledging to continue living at his humble home

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instead of the luxurious presidential palace –evoking an image of an honest man, resistant to corruption by power.

Saied is devoid of any prior political experience, having never held political office or even voted before Sunday. He appeals to youth, especially disillusioned revolutionaries, by promising a new system: one in which power will be more decentralised, “so that the will of the people reaches the central power and puts an end to corruption.” The social conservative, who wants to restore the death penalty and rejects equal inheritance for men and women, is promising sweeping constitutional reforms, including empowering Tunisians to recall their parliamentarians. Claiming that the “era of parliamentary democracy is over,” he has also proposed eliminating parliamentary elections altogether in favour of a “bottom-up” approach where parliamentarians will be chosen from elected local councils, wielding significant regional autonomy.

THE ROAD AHEAD The road ahead for the run-off election between Said and Karoui is uncertain. A critical predictor of how each will perform will be who the losing parties endorse, which will be crucial for the candidates to get to %50. Saied, socially conservative and relatively pro-revolution, may appeal to Ennahda voters, while Karoui, antiIslamist and ex-Nidaa Tounes, may appeal to the secular establishment.

October's legislative vote comes next, offering another test of whether Tunisians will continue to sanction the political establishment. Under the current constitution, these parliamentary elections are ultimately more important than the presidential ones, as the prime minister – the stronger of the two executives – derives his or her power from the parliament. Campaigning has already behun, but Saied will be absent as without a political party, he will have no direct representation in the parliament. Karoui’s newly-formed party, Qalb Tounes, by contrast, had been leading the preelection polls for parliament.

With two elections in the coming weeks, Tunisia’s political landscape could be radically reshaped for years to come.

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Bolton Was Trump’s Best Match, Until He Wasn’t For a Mercurial President, National Security Adviser Is the Hardest Spot to Fill

by Ivo H. Daalder and I. M. Destler In less than three years, U.S. President Donald Trump has had three wildly different national security advisers: a campaign aide with a checkered past, a respected general, and an ideologue with strong views apparently consonant with his own. All ultimately failed. John R. Bolton’s firing is just the latest and

most dramatic episode in Trump’s national security travails.

Though the outgoing adviser drove tough policies on Iran and other issues, his peremptory, no-compromise style proved, over time, unacceptable to the president, who “disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions.” His firing underscores the difficulty in filling this particular role, whether with an honest broker or a straightforward adviser.

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The job of national security adviser is a presidential creation, neither established in legislation nor requiring Senate confirmation. Ideally, the adviser connects the president to other senior officials, assures that he hears all relevant viewpoints, and sees that his policy decisions are translated into action. In practice, the ability of advisers to function effectively depends less on the process they establish than on the proclivities and preferences of the president they serve.

Few presidents had thought less about the management of national security policy the day they entered the White House than Donald J. Trump. He had run for president without really expecting to win and focused little on the details of governing even after he did. In the White House, Trump has eschewed formal process and expertise and instead relied on his often changing impulses.

Each of Trump’s three national security advisers has tried, with mixed success, to tailor to the president’s instincts a process that brings government expertise to bear on decision-making. Bolton was perhaps substantively and temperamentally the most suited to help Trump pursue his “America first” foreign policy. But even he found himself on the outs with this decidedly mercurial president. And Bolton’s core style—rushing to decisions, excluding advisers with dissenting views—may have brought short-run results, but over time it was a recipe for policy disaster.

A TEXTBOOK PROCESS REBUFFED US National Security Advisor John Bolton during a meeting with Belarus› President Alexander Lukashenko.

(Getty)

Trump’s original choice for national security adviser, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, had been his campaign’s most senior adviser on national security policy. Flynn was an odd choice. He had extreme views on the threat of Islamic terrorism, questionable relationships with foreign entities and governments, and a rosy view of Russia. He had also been fired from his last government job for managerial incompetence. But Trump valued loyalty, and he ignored the entreaties of both President Barack Obama and Chris Christie, the original chair of his transition team, who warned the incoming president against appointing Flynn.

Flynn was in over his head from the outset. He was supposed to establish himself as the single center of power on national security affairs in the White House. But instead he competed for access, attention, and control with figures such as Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, who secured a seat on the main Principals Committee of the National Security Council (NSC), and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who served as the main conduit between Trump and certain foreign governments.

Before Flynn could do much more than hire a few people who shared his dark view of the world, he was embroiled in controversy centering on his contacts with the Russian ambassador after the election. Ousted just 24 days into the job, Flynn set a record for

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Like the president, Bolton preferred to work alone, behind closed doors, and he communicated with staff mainly by e-mail rather than face-to-face. the shortest tenure of anyone serving in the position.

Flynn was one of few national security figures Trump knew personally, and when it came time to replace him, Trump had to improvise. For other such appointments, he had opted for people who looked the part—either strong generals such as James Mattis and John Kelly, whom he appointed as secretaries of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, or successful corporate executives such as Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil CEO who became Trump’s first secretary of state.

Now Trump found another broad-shouldered army officer, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, to take the national security adviser job. McMaster had a storied career as a combat veteran in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also a well-respected defense intellectual, having helped draft the army’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and written a stinging critique of military leadership during the Vietnam War. McMaster’s appointment was widely welcomed in Washington’s corridors of power.

Arizona Senator John McCain, long a leading Trump critic, noted approvingly that he “could not imagine a better, more capable national security team than the one we have right now.”

Though he had never before served in Washington, McMaster approached the job with textbook precision. He met with all of his living predecessors and asked for their advice. He weeded out some of the more ideological staffers Flynn had brought in and reassured the many diplomatic, military, and intelligence officials detailed from other agencies that he respected their service and work, even if they hadn’t been part of the Trump campaign.

He reinstated the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence director to the NSC’s Principals Committee (Flynn had removed them) and brought homeland security back under the NSC’s auspices (Flynn had separated it). He moved Bannon off the NSC committee. And he established routine meetings at multiple levels for the purposes of both long-term planning and crisis response. McMaster’s was a textbook NSC process.

But Trump had no interest in detailed policy briefings or long meetings devoted to considering all available options. The president believed in his gut over advice and process: “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” Trump once declared.

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McMaster never caught on. He would brief the president with formal, elaborate presentations. He called meetings to go over every detail of policy. But he never established the sort of close, informal relationship with the president that was essential for success. Other players soon understood that Trump was ignoring McMaster’s process—and so they began to ignore it as well.

Mattis and Tillerson met frequently to decide what to do, leaving McMaster out of their deliberations. And they would often ignore his directives or send lower-level people to the meetings he called. McMaster soldiered on. But in the end, he was no doubt relieved when Trump told him in March 2018 that it was time for him to go.

A BRASH ADVISER ON A LEASH Enter John R. Bolton, a national security player with long experience and strong views, many of which were more aligned with Trump’s “America first” perspective than McMaster’s had been. Bolton understood that Trump didn’t want structured meetings and detailed briefings. He set out to streamline the NSC staff by eliminating positions dealing with such issues as cybersecurity and global pandemics. He reduced the frequency of interagency meetings. And he focused on supporting the president by giving him his best advice.

Like the president, Bolton preferred to work alone, behind closed doors, and he communicated with staff mainly by e-mail rather than face-to-face. He favored one-on-one meetings with other principals over the larger advisory meetings that characterized the NSC in previous administrations. The new tone was set within weeks of his coming to the White House, when Bolton decided not to convene a single meeting of the NSC principals

Bolton was an ideologue who thought he knew the answers, excluded those who disagreed, and destroyed relationships and institutions that took his predecessors decades to build.

prior to Trump’s historic Singapore Summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June 2018 or before the president met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki the next month.

By acting outside of formal processes, Bolton, who was 70 years old, could seize what was probably his last opportunity to change policy to his liking. He had long seen arms control, international agreements, the United Nations, and other multilateral institutions as unacceptable constraints on U.S. power and sovereignty. Now he moved quickly to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal and the Reagan-era treaty eliminating intermediaterange nuclear forces. He was the force behind Trump’s speech to the UN General Assembly last fall, which was a broad indictment of multilateralism and defense of sovereignty. He put his stamp on hard-line policies with respect to Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.

As long as he was pushing in a direction that Trump supported, or for policies that didn’t engage him, Bolton enjoyed a lot of leeway to get things done. But sometimes his views ran afoul of Trump’s instincts—notably, the president’s conviction that he

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Former US National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on April 2018 ,3 at The White House in Washington, DC. (Getty)

President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse on June 2019 ,24 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

could negotiate great deals with everyone and his fear of getting dragged into a new war.

Trump made clear, for example, that he disagreed with Bolton’s uncompromising line on North Korea—so much so that he left Bolton out of the last-minute meeting with Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone earlier this year and openly contradicted his assessment of the North’s missile threat. Bolton was also initially left off the invitation list for a meeting with Trump and his top advisers on Afghanistan, in that case because he opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from the country. Trump likewise reversed Bolton’s push (supported by many other top advisers) to retaliate when Iran downed a U.S. drone. “He wants to start 3 wars a day,” Trump once complained of Bolton, “but I have him on a leash.”

To those concerned about Bolton’s inclinations, such restraint was reassuring—to a degree. “I am the national security adviser,” Bolton has admitted. “I am not the national decision-maker.” But there was only so much comfort to be found in a willful president constraining a willful national security adviser. For Bolton was the polar opposite of the model for the job established by Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.

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W. Bush, and followed in the main by Scowcroft’s successors.

Bolton was an ideologue who thought he knew the answers, excluded those who disagreed, and destroyed relationships and institutions that took his predecessors decades to build. To the extent his tenure served the president, it came at great cost to the nation.

Sooner or later, most presidents settle on a national security adviser who meets their personal and operational needs. Sometimes that choice is good for the republic, sometimes not. For the office is a two-edged sword. In a harmonious administration, the occupant both serves the president and runs a policy process that engages senior officials and prepares issues for presidential decision. But in a fractious administration, the adviser can use that closeness to the president to drive rash actions that reflect the idiosyncratic predilections of the adviser, the president, or both.

“Presidents get the national security process they deserve,” Stephen Hadley, President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, once rightly observed. But the nation deserves better.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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To Counter China, Out-Invent It Trump’s Trade War Ignores the Real Threat From Beijing

by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson China’s economic strategy is no secret. In the short term, Beijing will grow the country’s economy by manufacturing and exporting cheap, globally competitive goods. Over the longer term, it will build the capital, infrastructure, and expertise necessary to make the country an innovation powerhouse.

China is not the first to adopt this strategy. The same measures powered the rise of countries such as Germany, France, and Japan over the last 70 years. And even then they caused considerable trade friction with the United States. Washington accused all three of those countries of unfair trade and monetary policies— Germany and France in the 1970s and Japan in the 1980s. Recent

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China is poised to become the global leader in scientific and technological innovation in the near future, displacing the United States from a position it has held for 70 years.

But Trump’s sights are set on outdated threats. China’s economic strategy has already mostly succeeded. As a result, Beijing hasn’t artificially depressed the value of its currency in over a decade, and it has begun to improve intellectual property protection as a way to encourage local innovation. The bilateral trade deficit, while asymmetrical, is a bad reason to launch a trade war. There is no need to balance trade with any single trading partner, only to make sure the overall balance doesn’t become too lopsided.

The biggest threat from China is both much more serious and considerably easier to address than any the Trump administration has identified. Through government-led investment in research and development, China is poised to become the global leader in scientific and technological innovation in the near future, displacing the United States from a position it has held for 70 years. China’s rise in this area will not only threaten U.S. national security but deprive the U.S. economy of a great many good jobs. Instead of sparring with China over trade, the United States should dramatically increase its own investment in research and development. Only by spurring domestic innovation can the United States counter China.

A staff member works at a China Mobile 5G open laboratory on March 2019 ,21 in Tianjin, China. (Getty)

U.S. administrations have accused China of the same. But this time around, the tension is more concerning. China is much more populous than Germany, France, or Japan, and its economy could easily become the world’s largest. Beijing also projects influence beyond its borders, sharing technology with smaller countries and endeavoring to create a set of close trade and investment relationships—ones that may one day be based on Chinese renminbi instead of the U.S. dollar.

In his second term, President Barack Obama tried to pressure China to change its behavior through alliances and international cooperation, most notably in the form of a trans-Pacific trading bloc. More recently, President Donald Trump has taken a confrontational approach and imposed tariffs on Chinese goods.

Trump has labeled China a “currency manipulator” and seeks to end intellectual property theft and narrow the U.S.-Chinese trade deficit by waging a trade war.

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THE REAL CHINESE THREAT That China might one day lead the world in technological innovation would have seemed laughable a generation ago.

The Cultural Revolution decimated higher education in China. For a decade beginning in 1966, authorities shuttered schools and universities, sent intellectuals to labor camps, and effectively suspended scientific research. The educational system was gradually restored under Deng Xiaoping, but only in the 1990s and the first decade of this century did investment in higher education produce significant progress in science and engineering. From 1990 to 2010, Chinese enrollment in higher education rose eightfold, and the number of college graduates exploded from 300,000 to nearly three million per year. Over the same time period, China’s share of total world higher educational enrollment increased from 6 to 17 percent.

In 2017, seven million students graduated from Chinese universities. By comparison, roughly three million students

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graduated from U.S. universities that year.

The quality of scientific education in China can be debated, but the numbers cannot. In 1990, the United States graduated 20 times more science and engineering Ph.D.’s than did China.

Just two decades later, China overtook the United States on that metric, minting 29,000 new Ph.D.’s in 2010 to the United States’ 25,000. Chinese universities are still weaker than their U.S. counterparts, but the gap is closing. Six Chinese universities now rank in the top 100 global universities, according to the Times Higher Education ranking.

More scientists and more engineers add up, over time, to more innovation, especially when given adequate funding. Total worldwide spending on research and development ran about 2$ trillion in 2015, the last year for which data are available. The United States accounted for roughly a quarter of that spending, down from 37 percent in 2000. China’s share was 21 percent of world R & D spending, or 408.8$ billion, up from 33$ billion in 2000. In cutting-edge fields such as synthetic biology, clean energy, and artificial intelligence, China has quickly become an important player.

TECHNOLOGY IS POWER Nothing illustrates the power of technological innovation better than the last hundred years of U.S. history. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, U.S. federal and state governments together spent roughly 0.075 percent of GDP on scientific research, a miniscule amount. By 1944, federal and state (but mostly federal) governments were spending nearly 0.5 percent of GDP on science—a sevenfold increase that was used to develop radar systems, penicillin, and the atomic bomb.

The trend continued into peacetime (and into the Cold War), as

The best way to counter China is to out-invent it—and to turn inventions into products and services that people around the world want to buy.

the U.S. government channeled public resources into scientific research on an entirely new scale. From 1940 to 1964, federal funding for research and development increased twentyfold. At its peak in the mid1960-s, this spending amounted to roughly two percent of GDP. Modern pharmaceuticals, microelectronics, digital computers, jet aircraft, satellites, GPS, the Internet, and much more resulted from this investment. New ideas that came out of government-funded R & D blossomed into iconic companies like IBM, AT&T, and Xerox.

But in the late 1960s, government spending on research and development began a slow and steady decline. By the early 1980s, public spending on R & D had slipped to 1.2 percent of GDP and by 2017 it had fallen to just over 0.6 percent. Nine countries now outspend the United States on R & D, when measured as a share of GDP. The picture is slightly more complicated when private sector spending is taken into account, but the United States lags behind seven other countries in total public and private R & D spending. China still spends less than the United States—both in public spending and in combined public and private spending on R & D—but it is catching up fast.

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This photo taken on July 2019 ,19 shows students during a class at Elite Scholars China (ESC), a boutique college consultancy where students can receive application guidance, mentoring, and advice on the best courses for their interests and skills, in Beijing. (Getty)

A BETTER STRATEGY To avoid being overtaken by China, the United States should increase federal government support for scientific research as well as efforts to translate that research into products and services that can be brought to market. Government R & D spending has a remarkably high rate of social return, meaning that the benefits are spread widely throughout society. Based on recent studies of government support for civilian- and military-oriented research in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand, we estimate that, a federal government commitment of 100$ billion per year to R & D would help create roughly four million good new jobs.

The most productive use of such funding would be to upgrade the physical infrastructure that supports science, including new laboratories, expanded graduate programs, and incubators for developing capital-intensive technologies that may take a long time to perfect.

Wherever possible, the government should look for productive ways to spread this investment around the country. Innovation increasingly takes place in a few highly concentrated hubs where talented people congregate—places such as Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. But with restrictive zoning and high housing prices, these hubs have become expensive and congested.

Investing in places where land is cheap and people have the potential to become much more productive will help redress regional disparities in opportunity and employment, while at the same time building an advantage over international competitors by drawing more Americans into the scientific enterprise.

The private sector in the United States continues to innovate, but mostly in the kinds of software projects favored by modern venture capitalists. Outside of the life sciences, the private sector doesn’t spend much on attempting fundamental breakthroughs, such as finding new energy sources, because while new knowledge is great for the economy as a whole, it seldom pays off for the investors who fund the work. As a result, businesses have moved away from research that doesn’t have an immediate commercial application, precipitating a 60 percent decline in publications by corporate scientists between 1980 and the early 2000s.

In the promising fields of synthetic biology and hydrogen power, for example, the private sector has largely avoided the kinds of long-term investments that spawned previous breakthroughs. The United States pioneered both fields, but they seem more likely to develop in China and other countries that offer them ample support. And by 2025, China will displace the United States as the world R & D leader in pharmaceuticals, according to a recent analysis of medical research published by The Journal of the American Medical Association.

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In our book Jump-Starting America, we identify 102 urban communities that are plausible next-generation tech hubs. Spread across 36 states in all regions of the country, these cities and towns have large populations, highly educated workers, and a low cost of living. Examples include Rochester, New York; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Topeka, Kansas. To turn these cities into tech hubs, the federal government should support collaboration between universities, private businesses, and local governments with the aim of making higher education more affordable, expanding practical and technical training, and creating pipelines from local educational institutions to employers. Together, these public-private consortiums could work to keep housing costs affordable by overhauling zoning law to allow for sufficient construction.

The best way to counter China is to out-invent it—and to turn inventions into products and services that people around the world want to buy. The United States was once very good at this. China’s rise should remind the United States that it can and should renew its commitment to technological and scientific advancement.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Italy’s Precarious Triumph Over Populism Reports of Matteo Salvini’s Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated 28

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Although migration into and migration out of Italy were causally unrelated, together they created, for the average Italian, the impression of a country headed in the wrong direction. then the government’s principal opposition.

And so Salvini had transformed what appeared as a moment of historic triumph for the right into a major opportunity for the left. Salvini had committed what the Italians call an autogol, a soccer term for accidentally kicking the ball into your own net.

“The idea of saving our country from a swerve into dangerous populism based on hatred prevailed,” said Nicola Zingaretti, the secretary of the Democratic Party. When the new coalition was announced, many commentators breathed a sigh of relief that Italy had prevented what some feared would be the “Orbanization” of Italy, or the emergence of a far-right government, led by Salvini, that would follow the neo-authoritarian model of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Head of the far-right Northern League (Lega Nord) party, current Italian Senator and former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (C), standing between fellow senators Gian Marco Centinaio (L) and Roberto Calderoli (R), speaks on September 2019 ,10 during the new government›s confidence vote at the Senate in Rome.

(Getty)

by Alexander Stille Last month, Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s right-wing populist Lega party, attempted a Machiavellian power move. Hoping to take advantage of his soaring popularity, he brought down his own government, with the clear intention of forcing elections that would return him as Italy’s uncontested strongman. To his own and most Italians’ surprise, his jilted coalition partner, the Five Star Movement, turned around and formed a new government with the center-left Democratic Party (DP), until

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But whether the new government halts the rise of right-wing populism more than temporarily will depend on its ability to improve Italy’s standard of living and reverse some negative trends that have made the country one of the weaker links in the European Union. To fix all this would be a tall order for any government, let alone one composed of two parties—each riven by serious internal divisions—that were bitter rivals until a few weeks ago. In other words, if Italy does not begin to address the problems that paved the way for Salvini’s ascendancy, the country will have him to contend with whenever elections are held next.

THE RISE OF THE POPULISTS In the early 1990s, Italy’s GDP was on a par

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with that of the United Kingdom. Now it is more than 30 percent smaller. In fact, it is still about 10 percent below what it was before the financial crisis of 08–2007. Since the crisis, Italy has also become the favored destination for refugees looking to reach Europe from North Africa. In 2012, only 13,267 illegal immigrants arrived in Italian ports. That number rose to 170,000 in 2014 and 181,436 in 2016. At the same time, nearly as many younger Italians were leaving the country to seek their fortunes elsewhere—a serious brain drain that reflects widespread pessimism among many Italians about their future.

Although migration into and migration out of Italy were causally unrelated, together they created, for the average Italian, the impression of a country headed in the wrong direction.

This malaise provided the perfect opportunity for Salvini, who campaigned with the Trumpian slogan “Italians first!” and promised to put a stop to illegal immigration. It also fueled Five Star, an antisystem party founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo, to wage a long “Up Yours!” campaign against Italy’s political establishment.

The face of that establishment was the DP, the main party in power between 2013 and 2018.

In order to seriously undercut Salvini—and those like him—Europe must revisit the Dublin Regulation, which established that demands for asylum must be handled by the countries in which the applicants arrive, placing an unfair burden on Italy, Greece, and Spain.

Successor to the old Italian Communist Party, the DP had over time become the party of fiscal responsibility. In government, it had tried desperately to reform the Italian economy while respecting the spending restraints imposed by Brussels and European banks, imposing austerity measures that sapped its popularity.

In the national elections of 2018, Five Star emerged as Italy’s largest party, with more than 32 percent of the vote. Salvini’s Lega won 17 percent of the vote, up from four percent in 2013, and emerged as the natural junior partner in a Five Star–Lega coalition. Once in government, however, Salvini stole center stage. He shrewdly

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Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte delivers his speech during the confidence vote for the new government at the Italian Senate on September 2019 ,10 in Rome, Italy. (Getty)

The change in the balance of power became apparent in the European elections held in May. Lega nearly doubled its share of the vote, taking 34 percent, while Five Star dropped to 17 percent.

On the strength of this result, in what some have described as “a delirium of omnipotence,” Salvini brought his own government down on August 8. He assumed that new elections would follow, in which he would emerge as the most powerful politician in Italy.

He had forgotten that in the current Italian Parliament, Five Star and the DP have more than enough seats for a working majority. And although their coalition is a marriage of convenience, the match is less unlikely than it might appear. More Five Star voters identify with the left than the right.

The DP had desperately sought an alliance with Five Star in 2013, but Five Star contemptuously rejected the entreaty, forcing the DP to govern with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Five Star’s move was a cynical one at the time, based on the calculation that a left-right coalition would have trouble governing and that its failings would discredit the DP with the public.

But once Five Star’s own popularity tumbled, the party was more than ready to bargain.

DON›T COUNT SALVINI OUT

demanded for himself the position of minister of the interior and began turning back boatload after boatload of refugees, enraging humanitarian organizations but gaining credit with his fellow Italians.

On the strength of his increased popularity, Salvini was able to push his coalition government further to the right. He was also able to split the base of Five Star, a heterodox movement made up of disillusioned leftists, disaffected young people, and older working-class voters angry about trade and the European Union—a mix of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump voters, in American terms.

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Salvini’s unforced error may yet work to his advantage. The advent of a new government saves him from having to own the modest results of his coalition’s 14 months in power. Although the problems that propelled his rise were real enough, his solutions were largely empty demagoguery.

Turning back immigrants proved much easier than jump-starting the Italian economy. The centerpiece of Lega’s economic plan was to lower Italy’s retirement age from 66 and in some cases to encourage workers to retire in their late 50s or early 60s. The intention was to free up jobs for younger people, but reducing the retirement age in a rapidly aging society is a catastrophically poor idea. A diminishing number of younger workers would then have to support an increasingly large number of retirees. To simultaneously stanch the flow of immigrants, who are generally of working age, pushes folly into madness. Rather than grow,

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the Italian economy began to shrink during the 14 months of Five Star–Lega government.

The new Five Star–DP government can fix this situation only at great risk. Italy’s national debt is 132 percent of its GDP—about 50 points higher than the EU average—leaving the country very little margin for borrowing or spending to stimulate growth. Italy spends about half of what other industrialized nations do on research and development. Only 23 percent of Italians graduate from university, compared with 33 percent of Americans and 40 percent of British citizens.

At the same time, Italy’s personal tax rates are among the highest in the world. Reversing the country’s economic decline before the next scheduled elections, in 2023, will be a herculean task. The job would be difficult even for a unified government with a powerful mandate, let alone one comprising two parties with a long history of mutual distrust.

Yet the Italian electorate may soon forget the mediocre performance of the Lega–Five Star government. In 1994, Berlusconi—the rising populist of that era—became prime minister.

Several months later, his coalition partner, Lega, pulled the rug out from under him and formed a government with the left. Many gloated. “The effect of his seduction dance is wearing out,” said Marco Formentini, the mayor of Milan, while lifting a glass of champagne during a 1994 Christmas toast. The journalist Indro Montanelli, however, warned that the Italians had not yet had enough exposure to Berlusconi to build up an immunity to him. He was right: Berlusconi was re-elected in 2001 and again in 2008.

One external factor that could make an important difference in Salvini’s fortunes is the European Union. The leaders in Brussels would make a serious mistake if they assume that they can return to business as usual now that an EU-friendly government is back in place. In part, right-wing

populism has grown because the social compact within many European countries has broken down. Tone-deaf EU bureaucrats have appeared more concerned with fiscal rigor than the quality of life in member countries. They have had little patience with countries such as Italy that have struggled to meet EU deficit targets. At the same time, the EU has left Italy (and other frontline countries such as Greece) alone to contend with mass migration from Africa.

In order to seriously undercut Salvini—and

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People watch as twentyseven unaccompanied minors aboard the Guardia di Finanza boat are escorted to the Italian island of Lampedusa on August 2019 ,17, after being evacuated off the Spanish migrant NGO rescue ship Open Arms moored off the coast of the island. (Getty)

those like him—Europe must revisit the Dublin Regulation, which established that demands for asylum must be handled by the countries in which the applicants arrive, placing an unfair burden on Italy, Greece, and Spain—also the countries that were hardest hit by the crash of 08–2007. Europe must act collectively to reduce the flow of refugees, combat human trafficking, and process the cases of asylum seekers. In the same spirit, it needs to show greater flexibility about spending limits, worry less about inflation, and pursue a more growth-

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oriented economic policy. Paradoxically, the recent slowdown of the German economy might favor this prospect.

In other words, unless the current government and its allies in Brussels take concrete, meaningful steps to improve the lives of ordinary Italians, Salvini’s power grab may turn out to have been delayed but not denied.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Hedy Naguib Mahfouz to Majalla: “I fear that future generations will forget my father and I wish that he would become part of school curricula.”

In an Exclusive Interview with Majalla Hedy Naguib Mahfouz Speaks about Her Father’s Museum, How His Work has Been Misunderstood and Her Family’s Disputes with the American University in Cairo.

by Safa Azeb History will remember Naguib Mahfouz for being the first Egyptian and Arab author to be awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 and for his efforts in enriching Arab literature.

His works include the Cairo Trilogy which consists of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. He is also known for The Thief and the Dogs, The Harafish, Miramar, Chitchat on the Nile, Al Madak Alley and Love on the Pyramid’s Plateau.

Some of his works have been controversial, and by far Children of Geblawi has proven to be his most contentious novel. Many Azhar imams accused the novel for belittling religious figures, and called for it to not be published. It was for that reason that there was an eight year delay that prevented it from being fully published. In 1967, Lebanon’s Dar Al Adab published the novel, while it was banned in the author’s home country.

Almost 40 years later, in 2006, Dar El Shorouk published the book on Egyptian soil for the first time. In spite of these setbacks, Mahfouz was able to publish this novel as a series of short stories in Al Ahram newspaper back in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, Mahfouz only gained more enemies after he won the Nobel Prize as he soon faced an assassination attempt when an extremist stabbed him in the neck. Though he survived,

the attack had a lasting impact on his right hand which meant that he could no longer write. He also could not do his favorite activity after the attack, namely walking among the people in the street for an hour a day. Mahfouz’s works have also been made into various films and TV series, which only made him well known among the public rather than just Egypt’s intellectual and intelligentsia class.

Just recently, the Tkeit Abu el-Dahab building at the center of Fatimid Cairo has been renovated into a museum commemorating the Nobel Laurette. As the thirteenth anniversary of his death recently passed, Majalla had the pleasure to interview his daughter Hedy. In the interview she expressed her desire that her father would be taught at schools all around the world, as she fears that he will be forgotten among the younger generations.

She also spoke about the unfair libel her father endured during his lifetime, and also said that the person who attempted to kill him must not have read his literature. Furthermore, she revealed more about the tensions between the Mahfouz family and the American University in Cairo, which publishes his English translated books, and the fact that the family is seriously considering looking for an alternative publisher.

Q: Describe how you feel on the thirteenth anniversary of

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Hedy Naguib Mahfouz

“I have thought of taking away publishing rights from AUC, and I even filed three lawsuits against the institution.” anniversary different and the fact that the opening happened during the life time of one of his family members has made this event even more special. While there are criticisms and observations on the museum, I am sure that they can be addressed, but the important thing is that it has finally come to the light of day.

your father’s passing which coincided with the opening of the Mahfouz museum, something you have been waiting for a long time?

A: Of course, the opening of the museum has made this

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Q: I feel that you’re not as thrilled as you could be with the grand opening. Did the long time it took to establish it cause you to lose interest in it?

A: I am happy with it, but I hope that Mr. Youssef El Akeed, its managing director, also makes it into a cultural center since it was planned to be both during its initial planning period.

Q: Do you feel that your father’s cultural and literary legacy is properly commemorated on an annual basis?

A: It differs year to year, some years his legacy is well honored

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and remembered and other years it is not. With the exception of the museum, this year’s anniversary of my father’s death has been met with silence and little commemoration.

Q: Why is that?

A: I couldn’t give a reason why.

Q: Do you ever fear that general interest in your father’s work will decline, something that has happened to other major authors in the past?

A: That is something I am afraid of since his works aren’t taught in schools. As you can see, English, French and German authors who have been dead for centuries are still remembered to this day because schools assign students to read their books. If my father and other authors don’t get the same treatment, then they might be forgotten by future generations.

Q: Are his works not taught at any school level?

A: I am speaking on the general scholastic sphere, I was told that he was part of academic curricula at one point, but has since then been removed. I also know that schools generally teach kids about the lives and general works of major authors, for example I remember that I was taught about Shakespeare when I was at an American school.

Q: Do you want your father to be part of general school curricula?

A: Of course I do, and not just my father but all Arab and Egyptian authors. It is a tragedy that non-Arab authors are taught more in our schools and that Arabic literature is not an integral part of our school system. The only exception to this is “The Days” an autobiography by late Egyptian author Taha Huissien, which is taught in high schools.

Q: Are those differences the reason why you stopped attending the annual Naguib Mahfouz award ceremony at AUC? A: I have never spoken to the press on this topic and as a result, many unfounded rumors have been spread about it. I never intended on boycotting the ceremony, nor did I want to publically announce my non-attendance, but it all happened suddenly when a journalist said to me “I’ll see you tomorrow (at the ceremony)” and I said that I was in fact boycotting the university. And for the record, the Mahfouz family as a whole

Q: Do you think non-Arab audiences care more for father’s works more than Arab audiences?

A: The American University in Cairo (AUC) has always had good partnerships with Arabic authors such as my father, but recently it has focused mostly on publishing academic works rather than literary works and most authors it is currently contracted with write exclusively in English. Moreover, there are some differences that have arisen between my father’s estate and the University.

” My father tried teaching me and my sister story writing while we were schoolchildren, but in the end we chose different paths for ourselves.”

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“My father was nothing like Si-Sayed in our household, he was very kind and sympathetic to me and my sister.” father passed away, but it continued to sell the rights to his scripts and it also got involved in the publishing rights of his Arabic work, which it doesn’t have any rights in. Legally, an agent does not own the works it is representing; rather it should only provide a service to the owner of the text.

doesn’t attend that many events hosted by the university due to several disputes we have with the institution, which it has shown little interest in resolving.

Q: Have you considered contracting with a different publisher?

A: I have indeed thought of taking away publishing rights from the university, and I even filed three lawsuits against the institution. The university had two jobs with regards to my father’s works, first of all it published and translated his novels and second it was contracted to act as an agent for his TV and film scripts. This agency contract should have ended once my

Q: Do you feel any resentment towards those who treat your family differently after your father’s passing?

A: Thankfully, my close friends never abandoned me after my father’s passing, but there were acquaintances that never gave me the time of day since his death. I keep those friends close to me, and choose to not think about the others since I do not like those who only befriended me to get close to my father.

Q: My question was geared more towards institutions, such as AUC. A: Unfortunately, our family isn’t the only one that has grievances with AUC. I read in Akhbar El Adab newspaper, that Mr. Bahaa Taher also has his own conflicts with the institution.

AUC has treated my family in such a conceited manner despite the fact that my father won the Nobel Prize before his agreement with the university, since other publishers were translating his work into English and the Nobel Prize committee read these pre-AUC translations. I understand that the university has a vast history, but it has no right to do this to us because we had a mutually beneficial agreement.

Q: Do you have any dreams you wish to fulfill?

A: As I said, I wish that my father and his fiction would be taught in schools the same way non-Arab authors are taught in schools. I also wish that more people truly understood what my father was trying to convey in his books since he was unjustly misrepresented and his use of symbolism was gravely misunderstood. He was even faced with an assassination attempt from an ignorant person who never read his works.

Q: How can your father’s public image be ameliorated in your opinion?

A: By having his work taught in schools. The reason being that classes allow students to deeply delve into these literary texts, thus they tend to read books differently than most other readers.

Q: Do you think the cinema industry has embellished your father’s work?

A: My father always participated in the scriptwriting process, since he knew that the cinema industry tends to change the

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source material to make it more appealing to general audiences.

He always told me that anyone who wanted to judge his writing needed to do so through his novels, rather than his films.

Q: Which film did your father think changed the least from the original source material?

A: I never asked him, but I think many of the films based on his works were badly made. I remember once he read me and my sister a speech from one of his critics, said critic called my father a “belly dancer enthusiast”. The critic was mostly refering to the film adaptation of the Cairo Trilogy which focused heavily on the bellydancer plot from the books. Naturally, anyone who sees the film without reading the novels would think that the books are about the history of bellydancing in Egypt, but as I said reading the original source material is critical before making judgements.

Q: Did your father object to how the Cairo Trilology was presented on film?

A: I don’t think he had any reservations to how Hassan El Imam directed the film.

Q: Was your father democratic, or was he similar to the patriarchal Si-Sayed character from the Cairo Trilogy?

A: Si-Sayed was actually based on his own father, but he also told me that the art of novel writing depeded on both reality and fictionalization, as such he used creative liberties to create his characters. And to answer your question, my father was nothing like Si-Sayed in our household, he was very kind and sympathetic to me and my sister and my mother would often tell him that he’s spoiling us. He also wanted to teach us how to write so we could follow in his footsteps. So how could he be SI-Sayed if he wanted us to be as successful as he was?

Q: Did your father’s fame benefit you or hurt you in the long run?

A: I did not exploit my father’s fame in any way, for instance I

My father always participated in the scriptwriting process, since he knew that the cinema industry tends to change the source material to make it more appealing to general audiences.

got my job at an American company through my hard work and neither through my connections nor my relation to my father.

Q: I meant your psychological wellbeing; sometimes having a famous parent can be a psychological burden on a person, so did you ever feel any pressure for being Mahfouz’s daughter?

A: As a family, we stayed away from the limelight and we were comfortable with such arrangements. Even today, I am not comfortable with making media appearances and the interviews I give are few and far between. Even when I appeared on TV, I had the precondition that the interview would be prerecorded rather than live since I am not used to it.

Q: Did your father insist on your family staying away from the limelight?

A: No, it was entirely our choice.

Q: Did he allow you to meet his houseguests?

A: I remember that my father often had guests over and he would have no problem with us speaking to them, for example I remember “Uncle” Tharwat Abaza and Tawfiq El Hakim would often visit my father. We would love having them over as they were his best friends. However, I don’t recall my father’s students frequently coming over to our house, as he often met them at a public place like a café.

Q: What do you miss most about your father?

A: I miss everything he used to teach me, as he was an absolute gentleman when it came to how he treated others. He was a role

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I did not exploit my father’s fame in any way, for instance I got my job at an American company through my hard work and neither through my connections nor my relation to my father. model in manners, class and humility.

Q: Did he have any final wishes for you before his passing?

A: He didn’t have any final wishes for us per se, but throughout his life he wanted either my sister or I to follow in his footsteps and become a novelist. He tried teaching us story writing while we were schoolchildren, but in the end we chose different paths for ourselves.

Q: What would you like to accomplish by next year’s anniversary?

A: I want to dedicate a section in the museum to the Harafish group, who were among my father’s closest friends. I would also like to exert more effort in ameliorating my father’s reputation.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1766- september - 20/09/2019

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Just How Special is the Spire of Salisbury Cathedral? www.majalla.com

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Just How Special is the Spire of Salisbury Cathedral?

How the Russian Oligarchy Utilizes the Kremlin

by Bryn Haworth IMPLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY The fact that the cathedral at Salisbury – a small medieval city in Wiltshire – boasts the tallest spire in England is, by now, a matter of common knowledge. People the world over are apprised of the existence of its chief embellishment, a spire so large that it exceeds in height any of the spires that dream in Oxford, or that grace our tawdry capital (unless you include that Shard thing). Even the lofty spire of Norwich, in medieval times the nation’s second city, seems mean and squat in comparison with the spike at Salisbury.

And yet, no one in a radius of ten or fifteen miles would ever have heard of this architectural wonder had it not been for two dedicated spire enthusiasts from a very remote country. It was they who quit the simple comforts of their beloved motherland, and braved the conditions of late winter in a country as notoriously lawless as England, just to visit the cathedral and to gawp at its monumental dimensions. Oh, they also came for its old clock.

It all seems like a long time ago now, and the world has moved on. Salisbury, which at that exact same time suffered an attack by unknown agents that led to the death of one of its inhabitants and the near death of a Russian spy and his daughter who happened to be living close by, has long since cleared up the mess left

behind by whomsoever it was that tried to kill them and learnt to deal with the damage to its income from tourism. Everyone now accepts that the absurd way the British chose to point the finger at two innocent spire enthusiasts just goes to show that rogue states will stop at nothing to misattribute blame.

But, of course, the torrent of lies from the British state, as well as from the local media, continues unabated. When they’re done accusing one innocent party, or two innocent parties, or potentially an entire nation of innocent parties (for Russians, as I shall demonstrate shortly, are uniquely innocent), they remorselessly move on to other victims.

Lately, it has been the turn of the new president of Brazil.

Despite the fact that Jair Bolsonaro is on record as having stated, with some emotion, that he ‘loves’ the Amazon, they have gone on the attack. In order to extend their imperialist influence over a defenceless South American country, the press and other state propagandists have accused Mr Bolsonaro of having burnt down vast tracts of the rainforest in the interests of turning the land over to cash crops.

This is the kind of thing one has to deal with, if one is the ruler of a tiny third world country no one has even heard of. Mr Bolsonaro – who has a very fragrant wife, by the way, far more fragrant than the wife of the French president – has been treated with such single-minded vindictiveness that they have blamed him for doing something that is patently impossible. Have any of the president’s critics ever tried setting light to a rainforest? It’s

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Its fame spread as far as Suffolk (painting by John Constable, 1823)

called a rain forest for a reason. I happen to have been there, and I can tell you, the heavens are like one giant sprinkler system.

You’ll be telling me they’ve had wild fires in the Arctic next.

Despite the self-evident absurdity that anyone could manage to light a match, let alone start a fire and singe the tails off the monkeys, in such a moist environment, some people still believe this obvious slander. But hey, let’s not be naïve; these days, people will believe anything.

In the case of the events in Salisbury, however, perfidious Albion had taken on a far greater foe. The Russians were not only quick to rubbish the claims made against them; they rubbished the idea of verifiable truth itself. They responded with what Timothy Snyder has called implausible deniability: ‘a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.’

You should have seen the Russian ambassador, for instance. The way he kept such an even temper, in the face of the outrageous charges being made against his country and its secret service, was a small miracle of diplomatic decorum. Despite relentless grilling, he managed to preserve an impish sense of humour throughout, fielding (seemingly without effort) the barrage of lies the Western press trained upon him. The Brazilians should pop round to their own Russian embassy if they ever have a problem with the environmentalists again. Get some advice.

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If they’d bothered to ask the ambassador who was his favourite figure from history, he would probably not have answered (like Nietzsche before him) that it was Pontius Pilate, and yet the cleverest thing to be found in the New Testament (according to the German philosopher) was Pilate’s question: “What is the truth?” It isn’t so much the prevailing philosophy in modern Russia, as the country’s unacknowledged motto.

THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM Eager to find out where the Russian ambassador had learnt his techniques for disarming British journalists, I decided to read up about the country that taught him all he knew. Initially, I turned to a book called The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder.

It is a tough read. Snyder is no stylist, and he sets out early on a scheme of politics that he then repeats, over and over again, as if he assumes his readers are amnesiacs. It’s reminiscent of Naomi Wolf’s clanking iron maiden. Even at the best of times, brainwashing is a rinse and repeat process.

In essence, Snyder claims that the conclusion of the Cold War ushered in a ‘politics of inevitability’. This saw the triumph of the West and of capitalism as inevitable and the progress that came from it as the only kind possible. However, when the market, democracy and happiness the West promised failed to

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materialise, they were replaced by the ‘politics of eternity’ in which no progress is possible and people cease to believe in the future altogether. The steady improvement of social conditions and the amelioration of inequality become elusive, making way for spectacle, crisis and the demonising of the other.

It’s quite a beguiling analysis. For a start, it looks like an explanation of something I have spoken about already, in previous articles, the failure of utopian thinking, of expecting anything good of the future. It even helps explain the odd sensation of history coming to a juddering halt – things happen, but with no discernible reason. With this dichotomy, then, Snyder seems to have grasped the peculiar inertia of the times. I just wish he wouldn’t bang on about it quite so much.

But more specifically, he offers a surprising insight into the philosophical origins of Russia’s present experiment with eternity. President Putin was once asked who his favourite historian was, and he chose to name a philosopher instead.

Unsurprisingly, given the president’s courting of the Orthodox church, it was not Friedrich Nietzsche he chose. Surprisingly, though, given his career in the secret service, it was not Pilate either. It was someone called Ivan Ilyin.

Who’s he? It turns out that, in order to understand something of what has been going on in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is necessary to delve back in time, back to before the Soviets had even come to power, to a figure who fled the country as soon as they did achieve control and who favoured the cause of their enemies, the Whites.

Ivan Ilyich was a bitter man. In the inter-war years, he admired the fascist dictators for bringing Europe to its senses and halting the decline of civilisation. He despised individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality. Praising Mussolini, he compared Italy’s fascists to “my White brothers” back in Russia.

He also praised the ‘spirit’ of Nazism. As for Bolshevism, that was the fault of the West. It would be superseded by Christian fascism and with the fall of the Bolsheviks, Russia would be the beacon of the world.

Now this is where it all gets a bit mystical. Any casual reader of Russian literature will know that the cliché of clichés when it

In Russian art, there is ‘soul’ everywhere you look. It’s interesting that Ilyin praised the German’s ‘spirit’ as rediscovered by Hitler. He could perceive soul even among the soulless.

comes to things Russian is that the people have soul. There is a Me? Bitter? great deal of soul to be had if you read Dostoyevsky. For all I know, Gogol was trying to say something ironic about it when he wrote about dead souls, an idea he got from Pushkin. In Russian art, there is ‘soul’ everywhere you look. It’s interesting that Ilyin praised the German’s ‘spirit’ as rediscovered by Hitler. He could perceive soul even among the soulless.

The soul of Russia is in its people, and the people are innocent.

We are told that, because of this innocence, the Russian populace are uniquely gifted with a messianic destiny. The country is white, pure, virginal, and the West’s corrupting influence has so far failed to soil this purity. Russia is ready for the arrival of its redeemer. They will elect this man, but not by secret ballot, which only perpetuates individualism. They will choose him and he will choose them. An election in this system is a willing subjugation by the people to the leader. Welcome to what Vladislav Surkov (of whom more anon) has called ‘sovereign democracy’.

According to Ilyin, Russians had a ‘special arrangement of the soul’ allowing them to suppress their own reason and accept the law in their hearts.

Eternity, the rule of (my) law, a zero-party state, no great need to plan for a succession, the people so full of soul they are ripe to receive their redeemer… Is it surprising that Putin’s officials were given free copies of the old fascist’s thoughts? Dmitry Medvedev even recommended the old fascist’s musings to Russian youth, and a 2017 film about the October Revolution depicted the old fascist, obscure at the time and in exile, as the unsung hero of the whole shebang.

But no one liked the old fascist more than the president. He

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Vyacheslav Tikhonov portraying Stierlitz

sought out his papers, which were parked in Michigan State University, and brought them back to Russia. Then, at great expense, he had Ilyin’s remains repatriated from Switzerland. Of course, people were bound to point out that Putin was a former Chekist (the word, from Bolshevik times, still used to describe members of the secret service), and Ilyin had spoken with relish of ridding the country of Chekists, but he was also the man who wanted to reconcile the red and the White, terror and God. A number of his contemporaries had even called him ‘a Chekist for God’. And so, as Snyder (no stylist) puts it: ‘He was reburied as such, with honours conferred by the Chekists and the men of God, and by the men of God who were Chekists, and by the Chekists who were men of God’ (p. 58).

The legacy of this philosopher no one paid any attention to in his lifetime is best summed up in the words of a biker, one of the Night Wolves who were despatched to Crimea on the day of the annexation: “You have to learn to see the holy war underneath the everyday.

Democracy is a fallen state. To split ‘left’ and ‘right’ is to divide.

In the kingdom of God there is only above and below. All is one.

Which is why the Russian soul is holy. It can unite everything.

Like an icon. Stalin and God.” This, as Snyder points out, is Ilyin’s philosophy, Surkov’s geopolitics and Putin’s civilisation all bundled up in one quote, though Snyder fails to mention his source for this marvellously contradictory and mystical biker. The biker’s name was Alexey Weitz, and the man who had a conversation with him was not the stiffly academic Snyder, but a writer of great flare and oodles of style by the name of Peter Pomerantsev.

But before leaving the eternal Snyder, it’s worth noting that he is very good on Eurasian theory, the idea that underpins Russia’s incursions in Ukraine, most notably in Crimea where the bikers like to hang out.

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He also speaks about this Surkov character I’ve been referring to, the so-called ‘demiurge’ of the regime, a writer and art critic as well as chief adviser to the president. Surkov wrote a book under a very obvious pseudonym (he used his wife’s maiden name), though he persists in disclaiming any hand in it. The book is called Almost Zero and I shall, of course, endeavour to read it one day, I promise, so that you don’t have to!

The hero of the book is Egor. The author calls him a ‘vulgar Hamlet’, ‘almost autistic’, but no one has ever gone to ‘Surkov’ for political correctness. Snyder, who is not fooled for a moment by the pen name, says the book is ‘a kind of confession’: ‘In the story, the only truth was our need for lies, the only freedom our acceptance of this verdict. In a story within the larger plot, the hero was troubled by a flatmate who only slept. An expert issued a report: “We will all be gone,” the expert confided, “as soon as he opens his eyes. Society’s duty, and yours in particular, is to continue his dream.” The perpetuation of the dream was Surkov’s job description. If the only truth was the absence of truth, the liars were honourable servants of Russia’ (p. 159).

‘Surkov’ also writes that knowledge ‘only gives knowledge, but uncertainty gives hope.’ Or, as a great songwriter once said, you’re innocent when you dream. This is the terrain of the self-styled inheritors of Ilyin. It’s thanks to characters like the vulgar Hamlet or jesting Pilate that we got the two unlikely spire enthusiasts. But thanks, also, to a long-dead, best-forgotten, in all probability clinically insane fascist called Ivan.

NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE In the Bloomsbury district of London stands a house dedicated to the memory of the poet Pushkin. Last year I went along out of curiosity, having heard that they were giving a marathon three-day performance of an old Soviet television drama called Moments of Spring from the seventies. I arrived as the afternoon light was fading to be told that all the tickets were sold out, but a woman working there took pity and sneaked me down to have a glimpse.

The small basement room was packed. From the back I could barely make out the subtitles, but there, on the small screen, in grim black and white, was the main character, Max Stierlitz, chain smoking and looking very serious. The spartan rooms were supposed to evoke Germany at the time of the Nazis. Stierlitz was a communist spy in Nazi uniform. He had the brooding presence of all spies, and I immediately picked up on the tense, stately pace of the narrative, but I left with a sense of disappointment.

Here, apparently, was a cultural artefact every Russian was familiar with, and to me it was virtually impenetrable.

What I didn’t know was that Stierlitz has a lot to answer for. When Boris Yeltin’s popularity was waning and the need arose for someone to replace him, the first thought of his minders was to organise an opinion poll on favourite heroes of popular entertainment. The winner was Stierlitz. It seemed like an obvious choice, then, to offer the Russian people the future redeemer we now know as President Putin. Admittedly, he didn’t

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look anything like Stierlitz. He wasn’t remotely pretty, his face was expressionless, and the public were yet to be wowed by his bare torso, but he had served in the KGB in East Germany. A ‘meaningless post’ Snyder calls it. By the time they appointed him prime minister to Yeltsin in August of 1999, he had an approval rating of fully two percent. Still, the very fact they’d tried to borrow some macho stardust from the show business world was a sign of things to come. In a way, Putin’s bare flesh as he wrestled Siberian tigers to the ground would only be an extension of the same logic, just as it would owe a fair bit to Il Duce’s gratuitous display of his moobs as soon as he got near a beach. If fascism was ever mistaken for fashion, it was only some drunk slurring their words.

Anyway, it didn’t work. In the end, it would take a manufactured crisis, and Putin’s steady hand in dealing with it, to lift his profile clear of almost perfect anonymity. As Snyder puts it, ‘the ink of political fiction is blood.’ This line actually made me queasy, but I always get like that at the sight of a bloody metaphor.

While a clunky forensic analysis of Putin’s rise to power and the Russian state’s ideology has its virtues, nothing beats the genuine experience of life in the actual country. If Snyder has any of this experience, he is not letting on.

Peter Pomerantsev, in contrast, spent the best part of ten years in the country. He also has a vivid descriptive style and an obvious appetite for meeting people. One chapter in particular gives us a flavour of the crazy milieu that money has given rise to, that of the ‘gold-diggers’ or women whose sole ambition is to find themselves a rich sugar daddy, or as they would call it, a Forbes (they themselves are less charitably referred to as cattle).

These Forbeses are men on the rich list of that name. They are hugely wealthy, drive a Maybach and probably own half of Chelsea, if not the whole of its football club. The women in pursuit of them have to know how to please, but that’s really all they need to know.

In order to learn this, they can attend the Gold-digger Academy.

Courses teach them such helpful hints as the following: On a first date, never talk about yourself. Listen to him. Find him fascinating. Study his hobbies; then change yourself accordingly.

It then starts to get more surreal, as if the course had been

dreamt up by Aldous Huxley on an especially bad trip, while trapped in an overheated Soviet hotel room: “Today we will learn the algorithm for receiving presents”, the instructor tells her students. “When you desire a present from a man, place yourself at his left, irrational, emotional side. His right is his rational side: you stand to his right if you’re discussing business projects. But if you desire a present, position yourself by his left. If he is sitting in a chair crouch down, so he feels taller, like you’re a child.”

[That part of the presentation was surely written by a man!]

“Squeeze your vaginal muscles. Yes, your vaginal muscles. This will make your pupils dilate, making you more attractive.”

[There’s no way this part was written by a man.]

“When he says something, nod; this nodding will induce him to

By the time they appointed him prime minister to Yeltsin in August of 1999, he had an approval rating of fully two percent.

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Only if you ask nicely

agree with you.”

[He is doing the speaking, so how can he agree with her exactly?]

“And finally, when you ask for your car, your dress, whatever it is you want, stroke his hand. Gently. Now repeat: Look! Nod! Stroke!”

The girls chant back in unison: Look. Nod. Stroke… Look. Nod. Stroke. (p. 15).

I now know why I have so consistently failed to get a free car in life, or whatever I wanted for that matter. Basically, because when someone served up cod behavioural psychology like this, I always smelt something fishy.

One assumes the intended recipients of this doting must be as dumb as its practitioners or none of this would work. There must be legions of women in Moscow, sitting at the feet of men, doe-eyed, stroking and nodding with conspicuous vigour. One also assumes this is what the Forbeses, the ‘baby-faced billionaires,’ like so much.

However, Pomerantsev is no inverted snob appalled at new money’s offences against taste. Instead, he views these people with something like tenderness. He argues that the apparent supplication by the women is deceptive, and that both parties are essentially equals, in the sense that both are struggling to clamber out of the same Soviet ruins. Oil money may have transported them to a different financial universe, but they are still aware that yesterday ‘they were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems.’ And over this unreal transformation presides one man, as symbol of the surreal change from dour Soviet greyness to post-communist glitter. For the females, he is the ultimate sugar daddy: ‘Do I need to mention that [these women] grew up fatherless… A generation of orphaned, high-heeled girls, looking for a daddy as much as a sugar daddy… [their] cunning comes with fairy-tale fantasies about the tsar who… will jet them off to his majestic Maybach

kingdom. And, of course, it’s the President who encapsulates that image. All the shirtless photos hunting tigers and harpooning whales are love letters to the endless queues of fatherless girls’ (p.17).

Everything comes back to the President. In a way that’s unimaginable in the West, it is the head of state who embodies the machismo of these tacky night clubs, where the graduates of the ‘Are you just pleased to see me?’ course meet their quarry.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the President.

Actually, this is not a picture of the President. It is the relic of a time, before he had quite reached the Kremlin’s empyrean he occupies now, when a certain level of satire was more prevalent.

The man you see here, creating a simulacrum of Putin, was Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe. Here he is as another authority figure, portrayed (for reasons best known to himself) as an Indian woman: Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe said “I want to try on every persona the world has ever known.” Pomerantsev opines that Vladik’s many guises were a symptom not of freedom, but of delirium. He was Warhol mixed with RuPaul.

He was certainly prepared to suffer for his art. He spent no less than three days pretending to be the President, a somewhat uncomfortable experience it would seem: “When I became Putin, I felt myself become a totemic maggot,” he reported, “about to explode with shit.”

If the language sounds a little plebeian, consider that Putin once said (in his best impersonation of a mobster) ‘we’ll shoot the enemy while he’s on the shitter!’ Vladik went on: “But I wasn’t the baddie, I was the janitor, who needed to eat up everything, Russia, the USSR, so the new life could begin… Putin will eat up our country.”

It’s obvious that machismo won the argument in Russia. It’s not the easiest environment for a man prepared to take perestroika to the extreme of bending Gorbachev’s gender.

Vladik later decamped (the word is exactly right) for Bali, where he died in a swimming pool, but before leaving he wrote a letter to Putin in which he declared it was time to ‘save millions of people from this simulacrum of power.’

Sadly, there’s probably no saving the orphaned ‘cattle.’

JESTING PILATE Pomerantsev sees the way ordinary Russians have adapted to postSoviet life, but more specifically he has worked in the media, in television no less. The way that information is exploited and news is generated is his area of expertise. He directly experienced the way the TV channels attempted to convey a youthful image and avoided politics where they could. Initially, he worked for the TNT network.

Funded by Gazprom and housed in a building called Byzantium, its logo was ‘designed in blindingly bright, squealingly happy pinks, bright blues, and gold.’

Over the logo appeared the network’s catchphrase, ‘Feel our Love!’ projecting an image of a youthful, bouncy, happy country beamed into ‘people’s darkling flats.’

As he points out in his book This is not Propaganda, television was the crucial medium even before Putin’s rise. Yeltsin had his own manipulator of public opinion, Boris Berezovsky, who started by

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reshaping Russian television at his company ORT, and managed to win Yeltsin an election by persuading people he was the only bulwark against revanchist communism and the new fascism.

It was Berezovsky who pioneered the society of pure spectacle and the rise of the ‘moth’ (as the anonymous Putin was then known), supporting his war in Chechnya and changing him into the macho figure we see today. He also invented fake political parties and overhauled what passes for democracy. But only three weeks into Putin’s presidency he turned against the constitutional changes being proposed, later posting a mea culpa on his Facebook page: “I ask for your forgiveness, oh People of Russia… for destroying freedom of speech and democratic values… for bringing the President to power.”

Gleb Pavlovsky, a relatively minor figure who sees himself as a political technologist, was also involved in the media. He once said ‘you can just say anything. Create realities.’ His mentor was a historian called Mikhail Gefter who, in the 1990s, predicted that the end of the Cold War would usher in an era of ‘sovereign murderers’. There are a few people in Syria and Ukraine that could attest to the accuracy of that prediction. Pavlovsky is more temperate in his language, but he shares a conviction that something precious has been lost. ‘The image,’ he says, ‘of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged.

Everyone invents their own “normal” humanity, their own “right” history’ (p. 225).

Russia is the most unequal society in the world. Its political culture has been captured by opportunistic fakery. And yet, if this was the end of the story, would the wider world be that bothered, aside perhaps from the occasional botched assassination in Wiltshire?

In Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Pomerantsev claims that the Russia of broken ideologies and divided populations, whose fractured politics resulted from a failure to cope with the shocks of Soviet collapse, has finally arrived in the

Instead of simply oppressing the opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains of totalitarian rule, the Kremlin climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.

West. It’s as if Russia has followed him home to England: ‘And the Russians are the pacesetters, the trendsetters. Because they’ve been perfecting this for just a few years longer, because the learning curve was so much harder and faster when their Soviet world disappeared and they were all shot into cold space.

They became post-Soviet a breath before the whole world went post-everything. Post-national and post-West and post-BrettonWoods and post-whatever-else. The Yuri Gagarins of the culture of zero gravity’ (p. 251).

It’s not as simple as totalitarianism. Satire, for example, is not at an end. On the contrary, it is flourishing on television, just as long as it offers a safety valve of sorts. A well-known comedy shows an honest policeman whose wife complains because they have no income from bribes. The Kremlin is sacrosanct, but the level of day-to-day corruption is fair game.

This coexistence of corruption and knowing ridicule is part of the post-Soviet subtlety. Instead of simply oppressing the opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains of totalitarian rule, the Kremlin climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.

At the same time, the very notion of objective truth is undermined. Newscasters can treat all political stances as equally valid, equally flawed. This is similar to the way the BBC has been criticised for allowing flat-earthers a voice and equal billing with proper scientists, on the grounds of impartiality.

Russia Today does something analogous. With its motto of ‘question more’ it appeals to the selective scepticism of its audience, that same simple-minded scepticism that rushes to conspiracy theories, for example, rather than contenting itself with the obvious. News is of lesser importance. The entertainment value of RT relies on its jesting Pilate method of news-making, insistently repeating the question “What is truth?” with regard to every item of news, every controversy. Like the Kremlin’s conflicting explanations for Salisbury, it’s downright

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Our man in leather

Trouble in paradise

sending-up of the idea of explaining anything, it is less a matter of arguing against the West than creating a counter-model, more about ‘slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside.’ As Charles Clover (a reporter) put it: ‘Putin has correctly surmised that lies unite rather than divide Russia’s political class.

The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin power.’

With a little help from his friends, naturally.

the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime,” says the author. “Any idea, not necessarily religious, finds itself magnified here to an iconic extreme. The Russian white supremacist will see Russia as the last bastion of whiteness in the world. The Russian nihilist will become the nihilist. Surkov’s triumphant cynic-mystic becomes post-Soviet superman.”

ALMOST SURKOV

John Constable painted his original version of the cathedral for the Bishop of Salisbury in 1831, respectfully including the bishop and his wife at the bottom left hand side of the picture.

The bishop was pernickety, however, and objected to a dark cloud hovering near the spire.

When Constable came back to paint the sequel, it was just one year after the death of his wife, Maria. He later added nine lines from The Seasons by the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson that revealed the new painting’s meaning: that the rainbow was a symbol of hope after a storm that followed upon the death of the young Amelia in the arms of her lover Celadon.

The second picture is a very different beast to the first. Here is Richard Cork writing in The Wall Street Journal: ‘The Salisbury Cathedral painting is a large, carefully designed and vigorously handled canvas he worked on for several years. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831, it was accompanied by a quotation from James Thomson›s poem ‘Summer’, which refers to a ‘danger past’ before describing how ‘a glittering robe of joy…invests the fields and nature smiles revived.’

Yet the painting is far from joyful; it is one of Constable’s most turbulent images. Devoted to the Anglican Church, Constable was worried about its future. So, Salisbury Cathedral is not allowed to dominate this painting in a smug, triumphant way. The largest form confronting us here is the ancient tree on the left, and it seems shaken by the impact of the storm. It may even be in danger of falling into the impenetrable darkness beyond, where a small church tower and houses look threatened by the black sky […] No wonder the dog isolated in the muddy foreground stares back at this tree. It must be wondering where the storm will strike next. Lightning flashes to the left of the cathedral spire, and the man in the wooden cart looks hunched, as if bracing himself for another apocalyptic downpour. The three horses pulling his cart through the water appear burdened by their task. Directly behind the cart, a tiny cottage is being smothered by a tangle of…’

And so on. ‘What,’ asks Cork, ‘were the dangers faced by the Anglican Church in 1829, that Constable should depict such a great Gothic cathedral under a cloud?’ Then he answers his own question: ‘Catholic Emancipation, of course.’ Of course!

Well, it’s an interpretation, though just possibly there is a lot more to this doom-laden scene than a current denominational squabble with the Irish. In a similar way, when Russia came to Salisbury on 4 March 2018, the dangers posed to its inhabitants were part of a far wider apocalypse.

One of the most dependable of those friends has been the smirk of Surkov, the original subject of my piece, who I now find I haven’t the space left to talk about. I sense a sequel coming on.

Pomerantsev says the Kremlin’s rulers ‘are particularly adept at gaming elements of this new age, or at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all.’

And this is the man he chiefly has in mind. Putin’s personal adviser, Surkov pens essays on modern art and likes gangsta rap (he has a photo of Tupac on his desk, next to one of the President), but he was not bothered after the invasion of Crimea when he was banned from the US and Europe. He smiled and pointed to his head, quipping “I can fit Europe in here.” He has been called the ‘political technologist of all of Rus’ and his strategy is to own the entire spectrum of political discourse. Accordingly, he will fund human rights NGOs and civic forums, then support nationalist movements that accuse the same NGOs of being tools of the West. The effect is to blur the outlines of politics in what Pomerantsev calls a grand pastiche, resulting in despair and a kind of delirium. “Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in

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POSTSCRIPT: THE BIGGER PICTURE?

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An Older Adult s Guide to Exercising in Cold Weather

The Proper Warm-up, Equipment, and Health Considerations are Key to Maintaining an Outdoor Routine

by Harvard Health Letter You›ve grabbed a hooded jacket, and you›re ready for a brisk walk in the great outdoors. But is that enough to keep you safe in cooler temperatures?

An outdoor exercise routine at this time of year brings unique risks and benefits. You need a

little planning and preparation to keep exercising outside in the weeks or months to come.

KNOW THE RISKS Being exposed to long periods of cold weather poses numerous health risks.

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Narrowing of blood vessels caused by cold weather could keep your muscles from getting the oxygen they need to work properly and stay warm and flexible. That could lead to muscle strain or injury. or because the arteries of your heart are narrowed by atherosclerosis, or both, it could put a strain on your heart or cause a heart attack,» explains Dr. Beth Frates, director of wellness programming for the Stroke Research and Recovery Institute at Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Muscle injury. Narrowing of blood vessels caused by cold weather could keep your muscles from getting the oxygen they need to work properly and stay warm and flexible. That could lead to muscle strain or injury.

Hypothermia. This condition occurs when the body loses heat faster than it can produce it, causing a dangerously low body temperature that can trigger a heart attack, kidney or liver damage, or worse. «Older adults lose body heat faster than when they were younger, and they may not be aware of it,» Dr. Frates says.

Frostnip or frostbite. Exposure to severe cold leads to the freezing and injury of body tissue.

Frostnip (when skin is red, swollen, and a little numb) hurts, but your body recovers when you warm up. Frostbite causes lasting damage.

Portrait of a senior man with gray beard in Primorska Region, Slovenia, Europe. (Getty)

Heart strain. Temperatures at or below °59 cause blood vessels to narrow, making it harder for the heart to pump blood throughout the body. «When your heart is asked to work harder, it requires more oxygen and greater blood flow. If your arteries can›t meet that demand because it›s cold outside,

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Falls. If the ground is icy and slick from freezing temperatures, there›s an increased risk for falling and suffering an injury like a hip fracture.

COLD WEATHER BENEFITS Despite the risks, exercising in cold temperatures

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does offer benefits that you don›t get in warmer weather. For example, exercising in the sunlight can help people who have seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression triggered by decreased exposure to daylight.

And some evidence suggests that exposure to cold weather may help activate brown fat cells, which are known to burn calories.

USE THESE STRATEGIES If you have any kind of cardiovascular, lung, or balance issues, check with your doctor before exercising outdoors in the cold, and do it safely.

Watch the weather. «If it›s extremely cold, rainy, snowy, or icy, exercise indoors,» Dr. Frates advises. A good rule of thumb: skip your outdoor workouts when outside temperatures drop to °32 F (°0C) or below.

Choose the right time of day. Try to exercise during the warmest part of the day, around lunchtime, when the sun is at its peak. (Of course, this is something you should avoid during the summer.)

Protect skin, lips, and eyes. Even though it›s cold outside, the sun still shines its powerful ultraviolet

A good rule of thumb: skip your outdoor workouts when outside temperatures drop to °32 F (°0C) or below.

(UV) rays on us. Use a broad-spectrum sunscreen (one that protects you from both UVA and UVB rays), with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 30. Use lip balm with sunscreen as well, to protect your lips from the sun, wind, and cold. Remember to wear sunglasses.

Bundle up. Dr. Frates recommends dressing in layers so you can be comfortable without getting overheated. «Once you get going and moving your muscles, you›ll get hotter. You may want to take off a layer and wrap it around your waist or put it in a small backpack.» Avoid cotton, and wear

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Senior citizens cross country skiing. (Getty)

athletic clothing that wicks away moisture while keeping you warm. Don›t forget a hat, gloves, and heavy socks; we lose a lot of heat through our head, arms and hands, and legs and feet.

Do the warm-up. No matter what the weather, a warm-up is crucial to help your body adjust to increased demands on the heart and to get blood and oxygen to the muscles. «A fit young person can start with a sprint, but an older person is risking muscle injury and heart strain by doing that,» Dr. Frates says. «Start exercising gradually: walk slowly or march in place for five minutes.

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Work out for 20 minutes, and then slow down for five minutes to cool down.»

Stay hydrated. «You need to stay hydrated, even when it›s cold outside, because you›ll still sweat and lose fluid,» Dr. Frates says. Drink water before, during, and after your workout.

ONE FINAL STRATEGY Don›t ignore your body›s warning signs. Take it seriously if you›re shivering, have chest pain, are out of breath, or feel extremely fatigued, and call for help immediately.

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Asmaa Mohamed Abd Allah: Veteran Diplomat becomes Sudan’s First Female Foreign Affairs Minister

by Moncef al-Mazghany -1 Early Life and Education:

-3 Separation of the Public she would even cook Sudanese cuisine for them from time to time.

Interest:

In 1991, now ousted president Omar Al Bashir sacked Abd Allah from the diplomatic corps and the foreign affairs ministry. This sacking came under a new law he had introduced called “separation of the public interest”, which meant to remove non-loyalist forces from state and government -2 Career in Diplomacy: Her academic pursuits enabled her affairs. to get an early career in Sudanese diplomacy. She was soon appointed -4 Creating a Refuge Home for to become the Deputy Director of the Sudanese Expats: Americas Department at the Sudanese Soon after her sacking, she moved to Foreign Affairs ministry. She also Rabat, Morocco with her husband, served in various diplomatic missions where she established a translation such as those in Stockholm, Rabat center. Moreover, she also turned her and was once Sudan’s Ambassador Rabat home into a “mini embassy” or to Norway. She even worked as a a refuge point for Sudanese students consultant in the Islamic Educational, where the kind woman would provide Cultural and Scientific Organization. them with advice, or general help and Asmaa Mohamed Abd Allah was born in Khartoum, Sudan in 1946.

She graduated from the University of Khartoum in 1971, majoring in Economics and Political Science.

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-5 Return to Diplomacy and Return to Sudan: Abd Allah returned to Sudan during the 2019-2018 protests against Bashir, where she joined the civilian Forces of Freedom and Change (FCC) and becoming part of its foreign policy team. Later as the military council and the FFC formed a coalition transitional government, the later added her to the candidacy list for prospective foreign ministers. Abdalla Hamdok, the country’s transitional Prime Minister, subsequently chose her to become the new Foreign Minister for the next transitionary period of 39 months. As a result, history was made as Asmaa Abd Allah became Sudan’s first female foreign minister.