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Albanese addresses supporters in Sydney after winning Australia's election.
What We’re Watching: Australia elects new PM, Poland hearts Ukraine, Saudis stand by Russia
Albo takes over in Oz
After his Labor Party won Saturday's parliamentary election, Anthony Albanese, known popularly as Albo, is set to become Australia’s new prime minister. But it remains unclear whether Labor has a parliamentary majority: if his party falls just short in the end, it'll be a minority government, so Albanese will need some support from the Greens and climate-focused independents to get laws passed. In a gesture toward both, Albanese announced Sunday that he wants to make Australia a renewable energy superpower — a sharp departure from Scott Morrison, aka ScoMo, his coal-loving conservative predecessor. While mail-in ballots are still being counted, Albanese was sworn in Monday as acting PM in order to attend the Quad Summit in Tokyo on Tuesday. Albanese will need to hit the ground running because Australia is also in the AUKUS security partnership, which China doesn’t like one bit. Just weeks after Beijing inked a deal with the neighboring Solomon Islands that'll allow the Chinese to gain a military foothold in the Pacific, expect the China question to continue dominating Australian foreign policy under the new government.
Poland has Ukraine's back
On Sunday, Polish President Andrezj Duda became the first foreign leader to address the Ukrainian parliament since Russia's invasion began. The political moment was hardly surprising, given that Poland is hosting the bulk of Ukrainian refugees and, more importantly for Kyiv, is lobbying aggressively for the EU to fast-track Ukraine's application to join the bloc ASAP. Duda said he hopes the European Council will formally accept Ukraine as a candidate on Wednesday because those who "shed their blood" for Europe must be respected, "even if the situation is complicated, even if there are doubts." Still, Polish efforts have run into stiff opposition from France, whose EU affairs minister estimates it'll take Ukraine a couple of decades to gain EU membership. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that while he wants to end the war through diplomacy with Russia, he won't agree to give up any territory in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces are intensifying their assault in Luhansk, one of the two territories that make up the contested Donbas region.
Russia gets leverage from OPEC
For years, Saudi Arabia — the world’s top oil exporter, OPEC heavyweight, and traditional US ally — has dealt with Russia’s production through OPEC+, the larger group of oil-producing economies. But despite Western sanctions against Moscow, Riyadh has indicated that it will still continue to stand by Moscow as a member of the powerful alliance. With Russia increasingly isolated, its oil production falling, and an EU ban on Russian oil in the pipeline, Brent crude, the global benchmark, was being priced at about $112 a barrel last week, a 10-year high. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been shunned by the Biden administration, has refused to lower oil prices, and along with regional ally UAE, has been pushing for a more balanced position on Russia. Expected to expire in about three months is a set of production quotas for OPEC+, which would leave open space for Russia to continue to produce, and sell, more oil.
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What We’re Watching: Sudan softens laws, Duda wins by a whisker in Poland, protests erupt in Russia's Far East
Sudan legalizes booze (for some): Three decades after Sudan's strongman president Omar al-Bashir introduced draconian measures mandating the death penalty for those who "abandon" Islam, the country's new transitional government has introduced sweeping reforms to its criminal law. The changes allow non-Muslim Sudanese to consume alcohol and bans female genital mutilation. Sudan's transitional government, a joint civilian-military body which took office in August 2019 after popular protests pushed al-Bashir out of power, says that the reforms aim to counter the long-running persecution of black and Christian communities. But is there another motive at play? As Sudan's economy teeters on the brink of collapse, its government wants to be removed from the US State Sponsors of Terrorism List, which would open it up to international investment. The US says it's open to this, but only if it sees meaningful progress on human rights and democracy — and efforts to counter financing of terrorist regimes in the region. Sudan's nascent transitional government might be hoping that these changes help accelerate its removal from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List, which currently makes it ineligible for financing from the IMF and World Bank.
Poland's deep divisions and coming clashes: President Andrezj Duda eked out a narrow victory in the runoff of Poland's presidential election on Sunday. The result, the closest electoral result since the end of communism in 1989, highlights the political divide in the country, with mostly older and rural voters turning out in support of Duda's extreme social conservative views, while the younger, urban electorate supported opposition candidate Rafal Trzaskowki, the socially liberal mayor of Warsaw. The reelection of Duda, an ally of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party, paves the way for the PiS to approve new laws — including on control of the judiciary and media censorship — that are expected to set Poland on a collision course with the European Union's rules on democratic institutions and the separation of powers. We're watching to see what Brussels does, but also whether there is further domestic pushback against PiS in a country that is increasingly polarized.
A protest in Russia's Far East: Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the Far Eastern Russian region of Khabarovsk in a rare mass protest triggered by the arrest of governor Sergey Furgal, who is accused of ordering the murder of several businessmen in the early 2000s. Furgal is a member of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia led by the eccentric ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, which is normally loyal to the ruling United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin. However, two years ago Furgal took office by defeating the United Russia candidate in a landslide, and has since remained popular. The Kremlin wasn't happy about it, and protesters — many of whom were chanting anti-Putin slogans — believe that Furgan's arrest is politically motivated payback from the Kremlin. We are watching to see if the protests, which police did not stop, continue and more broadly whether this is a bellwether of growing dissatisfaction with Putin, whose approval ratings have recently touched their lowest mark since he came to power in 2000.