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Israel-Palestine conflict worsening and could lead to a war
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics this week:
Why has there been a recent escalation of violence in Jerusalem?
Well, it started with demonstrations of the Palestinians expecting a verdict on these cases of Palestinians that have been pushed out of their homes in East Jerusalem by settlers, contested territory that has belonged to the Palestinians. You've had lots of violence against them by Israeli police, then you had Gaza missiles from Hamas, and then Israeli missiles into Gaza, and now we've got a couple dozen Palestinians dead and the potential for this to get a lot worse is real. The shekel has even moved a little bit because there's concerns that this could lead to a war. It's not a broader war. This is not as much of a priority for the Arabs in the region, so it doesn't kill the Abraham Accords, Iran is still moving ahead with a deal, but in terms of potential for real bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinians, absolutely. That's something to worry about.
What's happening in Colombia?
There was an effort by President Duque in his last year, he can't run for another term, to increase taxes to deal with their fiscal balance. And it's still in the middle of a pandemic, the timing was really difficult, especially because it hits the poor too, it's not just wealthy taxes, even things like funerals. Massive outcry, now anger about all sorts of things, a lot of violence, police brutality in the response. His popularity has hit the toilet as a consequence and a lot of instability on the ground of Colombia. This is not just a Colombia problem. You have this kind of outcry against established political figures across South America, right now, as they're dealing with some of the worst outbreaks of coronavirus. This is a region that's been hit both economically and healthcare-wise really bad.
Finally, what's the concern with China's population growth decline?
Well, every 10 years they have a census and the population is flat. There was some belief it might even have decreased a little bit, but it's certainly not growing. India's population is growing. When you look at India versus China, there is a lot of sense of, "Well, how can China become a superpower if their population is going to get old before it gets rich, and if they're running out of workers and if not as many people are consuming, especially when they focus on dual circulation, which means more domestic demand?" But this is a longer-term issue. Near-term, the more proximate point is that the Chinese are at parity with the Americans on key technologies, and that makes them, by far, the most important competitor and national security threat to the United States. Ain't going to change.
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What We're Watching: Israel-Hamas escalation, Scotland's independence drive, Colombian strike continues
Israel strikes Gaza after Hamas rockets: Things escalated very quickly on Monday in Jerusalem. For weeks, violent clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians over tensions surrounding access to the Old City and Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as an anticipated verdict in the eviction of several Palestinian families from East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, spread throughout the city. While Israeli police used heavy force to crack down on Palestinians throwing rocks and launching fireworks, the Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip used the clashes as a pretext to launch a barrage of rockets into Israel. Hamas usually restricts its reach to southern Israel, but this time it launched dozens of rockets into Jerusalem, causing a mass evacuation of the Knesset, Israel's parliament. Israel responded swiftly Monday by bombing the Gaza Strip, resulting in at least 24 Palestinian deaths, including nine children. Since then, Hamas has fired at least 250 rockets into Israel, including several that landed on houses in southern Israel, while Israeli forces have struck 140 targets in the Gaza Strip. For now, both sides appear to be preparing for a massive escalation, raising fears of an outright war.
Scotland's drive for indyref2: The votes are counted from last week's UK elections, and the pro-independence Scottish National Party will again dominate Scotland's parliament. Though the party fell one seat shy of an absolute majority, the pro-independence Green Party will be happy to add its eight votes in support for a second independence referendum. For now, SNP leader and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says COVID recovery is job one. But she also says a new independence vote is a matter of "when not if," setting up a showdown with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose approval is needed (via a majority vote in the UK Parliament) for a binding vote. Here's where the politics becomes fascinating. Today, polls suggest Scots are about evenly split on the independence issue. If Johnson tries to block them from voting, he might inadvertently increase support for breakaway. But agreeing to a vote as soon as next spring is a high-stakes roll of the dice. The question looks likely to end up in court.
"The strike continues" in Colombia: After a meeting with Colombian President Ivan Duque on Monday evening, the leaders of the protests that have rocked the country for nearly two weeks now had a simple message: "the national strike will continue." Earlier in the day, Duque made a last minute trip to Cali, Colombia's third largest city, which over the weekend was wracked by violence including a lethal flareup between indigenous protest groups and other armed civilians. While there Duque acknowledged the frustrations of Colombia's young people. Across the country, nearly two dozen people have been killed in clashes with the police since protests began over a botched tax reform last month, while strikes and roadblocks have begun to crimp food supplies in major cities. The tax bill was withdrawn, but protest leaders are now demanding broader concessions, including holding police accountable for abuses, reforms to the health and education systems, and more than 100 other specific demands including an array of measures to help Colombia's poor, protect the environment, and advance the country's stalled peace process (source in Spanish). Meetings between the federal government and various groups — local officials, unions, and activists — will continue throughout the week. But for now, protest leaders have called for another nationwide demonstration on Wednesday.
Demonstrators take part in a protest against the tax reform of President Ivan Duque's government in Bogota.
Don’t tax the dead: Colombia’s crisis
There's never a great time to impose higher taxes on funeral services — but doing it in the middle of a raging pandemic is an especially bad move. Yet that was one of a number of measures that the Colombian government proposed last week in a controversial new tax bill that has provoked the country's largest and most violent protests in decades.
In the days since, the finance minister has resigned, the tax reform has been pulled, and President Iván Duque has called for fresh dialogue with activists, union leaders, and opposition politicians.
But demonstrations, vandalism, and deadly clashes with police have only intensified. Two dozen people are dead, 40 are missing, and the UN has criticized Colombian police for their heavy-handed response.
How'd we get here? The Colombian government has a common math problem: it spends more money than it raises.
Even before the pandemic, the country's oil exports — a major source of government revenue — were dwindling, and over the past year, the deficit tripled. Now, to pull the country out of its worst economic crisis in decades, it's even more urgent to top up state coffers.
But Colombia has one of the lowest tax hauls of any country in the OECD, and ratings agencies warn that without a tax reform of some kind, a downgrade awaits. That would make it more expensive for Colombia to borrow money abroad, depleting state resources even further.
Duque's proposal would have raised levies on corporations and the rich, while boosting social spending to alleviate poverty. But it also expanded taxes for the middle class and poor, eliminated exemptions for pensions, and added a sales tax to many staple consumer goods and services. Even water would have gotten more expensive. Water!
The math may have been sound but, in a country reeling from the pandemic, the politics were horrific. Over the past year, 3 million more Colombians fell into poverty, raising the poverty rate by 7 points to a staggering 42 percent of the population (source in Spanish.) Thousands of businesses have closed. And the country is now in the throes of a third COVID wave: daily new cases have soared sixfold in the past two months.
Small wonder that when the tax bill was unveiled, three-quarters of Colombians supported a national strike in response.
But these protests are about more than taxes. For several years, a large part of Colombian society has been upset about rising inequality, an epidemic of violence against human rights leaders, rising crime in the cities, and poor healthcare and education.
Just before the COVID crisis started, in late 2019, mass protests over these issues shook Bogotá for days. Today's protests are in part a resurgence of grievances bottled up — and made worse — by the pandemic.
Elections loom. Next year, Colombians will elect a new president. Term limits keep Duque from running again — and with his meager 30 percent approval rating, that's probably just as well. But the social crisis has boosted the fortunes of Senator Gustavo Petro, a leftwing former mayor of Bogotá who got his start in political life as part of the M-19 urban guerrilla movement.
A recent poll showed Petro would get close to 40 percent of the vote if the ballot were held today, an increase of 15 points since last fall (source in Spanish). That a leftwinger should be so popular is a sea change in Colombia, long a center-right country in which decades of war with Marxist-inspired militants — and the recent disaster next door in socialist-led Venezuela — had created a stigma around leftist politics at the national level.
Colombia's crisis is also a broader caution: Many countries are staggering out of the pandemic with weak state finances. The IMF recently found that debt as a percentage of GDP in emerging market economies soared 10 points last year to an average of 65 percent. Meanwhile, poverty and social spending needs have only risen as a result of the economic crisis.
The current upheaval in Colombia is a taste of what could come for many middle-income and poorer countries if they botch the politics of raising revenue.
But no matter how they go about it — not taxing the dead is a smart way to avoid antagonizing the living.
What We're Watching: Africa's vaccine shortage, Colombian unrest, Bibi fails to form government
India's COVID crisis hurts Africa: As COVID started to ravage India in March, New Delhi announced a ban on all vaccine exports to prioritize the domestic crisis. This development was a massive blow for the COVAX facility, which is relying on India's Serum Institute manufacturing the AstraZeneca shot for low-income countries. The impact of this export ban is now being felt acutely across Africa, where many countries have received a scarce number of doses. The World Health Organization says that at least seven African countries including Rwanda, Ghana, and Senegal have already exhausted all their vaccine supplies — and because of delays from India, will now need to wait several weeks for more to arrive. COVAX, which has received 90 million fewer doses to date than it was initially promised, says it needs an extra 20 million doses by the end of June to offset shortfalls caused by the worsening crisis in India. It's a worrying trend: while inoculation drives in places like the US, the UK and Israel are allowing their economies to reopen and life to slowly return to normal, many low-income countries will not return to normalcy for years, experts warn. To date, only 2 percent of all doses administered globally have been in Africa, despite the continent accounting for 17 percent of the global population.
Colombian unrest over tax reform: The UN has called out Colombia for using excessive force to disperse recent street protests against the government's planned tax hikes, which left at least 19 people dead in Cali, the country's third largest city. The protesters wanted President Iván Duque to withdraw his controversial proposal to raise taxes for the middle class, which Duque says is needed in order to raise revenue to help the Colombian economy recover from the pandemic. But the backlash against his measures was so strong that the government quickly relented. The fact that Duque caved after just a few days of rallies underscores how unpopular his proposed reforms are, and will likely limit his government's ability to cut back on any social spending before his term ends next year. Whoever takes over from Duque will now have to deal with a sizable hole in Colombia's finances, and the economy could become a big campaign issue in the 2022 presidential election — in which the frontrunner is now Gustavo Petro, the big-spending former mayor of the capital Bogotá.
Israel's political stalemate persists: Four weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party won the most seats in parliamentary elections — and was then tapped by President Reuven Rivlin to try and form a coalition government — Israel's political stalemate continues. After Bibi has failed again to bring enough parties together to form a workable coalition, there are several potential scenarios for how this could all play out. Rivlin could ask Yesh Atid (There is a Future) leader Yair Lapid, who heads the anti-Bibi opposition bloc and came in second in the March vote, to try and reach a 61-seat majority. Israeli media report that this is the most likely scenario, though it won't be an easy feat for Lapid amid Israel's deeply divided political milieu. Rivlin could also throw the mandate to Naftali Bennett, a former Netanyahu ally who leads a small right-wing party but whose support both sides need to form a government. Center left-leaning Lapid and Bennett might try to work together to oust Netanyahu, but ideological differences would likely undermine that effort. Both politicians say they are committed to doing whatever it takes to avoid another election, which would be Israel's fifth since April 2019. But if the current political stalemate persists, that's exactly where this is all heading.
What We're Watching: Colombians hit the streets, Indian state elections, Turkey locks down
Protests are back in Colombia: This week, tens of thousands of Colombians hit the streets of the country's big cities in the first major wave of street action since the late 2019 mass protests over inequality. The primary trigger for the current demonstrations was a major proposed tax increase. The government says the tax hike is necessary in order to give the state the resources it needs to pull Colombia out of the COVID-induced economic crisis, but critics say that some of its provisions — in particular services taxes — inflict too much of a burden on an already-suffering middle class. Protesters also highlighted other issues, such as the unchecked killing of social activists, broadening insecurity in the country, and frustration with the slow pace of the five-year old peace process. When GZERO Media spoke to prominent Colombian journalist Camila Zuluaga last year, she warned that pent-up grievances from before the pandemic would lead to a fresh "social explosion" this year. It looks like the fuse has been lit. The next major protest has been called for May 19.
Crucial state elections in COVID-devastated India: India is now the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with over 3,600 deaths recorded on Thursday alone. But that didn't stop Prime Minister Narendra Modi from urging millions of Indians to vote in-person in the final stage of a state election in West Bengal, a race with nationwide political implications: Modi's ruling BJP party thinks it has a shot at winning in West Bengal, which the BJP has never governed and is currently run by Mamata Banerjee, one of the PM's fiercest critics. However, Modi's flouting of COVID safety norms in order to secure a political win may have backfired: exit polls now show Banerjee is likely to stay in power despite the BJP's strong performance in recent voter surveys. If the numbers hold, it'll be a major blow to Modi, who has until now defied political gravity to maintain a high public approval rating despite his government's poor handling of the pandemic and other political crises. We'll be watching to see if the BJP receives further blowback from Indians if bodies keep piling up across the country.
As COVID crisis worsens, Turkey locks down: As many parts of Europe start to reopen after a relentless third wave of infection, Turkey is now entering a strict national lockdown for the first time since the pandemic began. Although the country was praised by the World Health Organization last fall for its containment efforts, the COVID crisis has exploded there in recent weeks, and it's now the worst in Europe: Turkey recorded a high of 60,000 daily infections in late April, 10 times more than in February. Critics say that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lifted COVID restrictions too early, and that the vaccine rollout remains sluggish (because of vaccine shortages, second shots in Turkey are being given six-eight weeks after the first dose, rather than the advised 28 days). The highly contagious UK variant B.1.1.7 is the most dominant strain throughout Turkey, experts say, and reflects the fact that despite fast inoculation drives in countries like Israel, the US and the UK, the global health crisis is far from over. Turkey's lockdown measures will be in force until at least May 17, a massive blow for Turks wanting to spend Ramadan and Iftar meals with extended family and friends.