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In global elections, incumbents are in trouble
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. Lots going on especially big elections. We have the France results. We have the UK results. We have the Iran results. We have a lot of uncertainty of course, here in the United States. My big takeaway is this is a horrible time to be an incumbent.
It's really challenging and what a huge reason for it that people aren't talking about, because it's already way in the rearview mirror is the pandemic. If I'm talking to you right now, your life was really changed by the pandemic in ways that you never would have expected before, right? I mean, we all had to deal with social distancing and masking and vaccine and not only that, but of course, the global economy seized up and people also stopped moving around for like a couple of years. An enormous amount, trillions and trillions of dollars were spent and that got us through an incredibly difficult time. But on the back of that, you suddenly have no more money that's being thrown at everyone, and you've got inflation that comes from, all of a sudden, the supply chains moving and demand moving. You know that these are costs that people are paying, that people no longer have those checks that were coming in during the pandemic, and those savings have been deployed already if you're working or even middle class. And people are moving again, people are moving not just from city to city, but also around the world. So migration is really picking up. And you really don't want to be the leader who's holding the bag when that happens. That's absolutely a big piece of what happened in France. It's a big piece of what happened in the United Kingdom, South Africa, India.
Lots of these elections are people that are unhappy with their existing leadership because it is such an unprecedented environment, and they're having a hard time dealing with that. There are other issues, too, don't get me wrong. And certainly in the UK, the fact that this also comes on the back of Brexit and a level of perceived incompetence on the part of successive conservative prime ministers who were not elected by the population but were selected by the party. The Labor Party did just as well in 2024 as they did in 2019. I think they picked from 33% to 34% total population. It was hardly a landslide, but the Conservative Party imploded because people were unhappy with them. And that is very much the story. It's that the existing incumbents are not doing well.
Macron is not doing well. He's lost so many seats in France and the far right has doubled their number in the parliament and the far left and the left coalition that is not Macron's centrist have also done far better, far better than anyone expected.In fact, they came in number one. Percentage wise, it's Macron in the center that is falling apart in France. That's the big lesson. It's not that the far right is doing well or badly. Some of the far left is doing well or badly. It’s that the incumbent, whoever they are, are really getting hit. Now that leads to a big question here in the United States.
November is coming up. Our elections are way too long. They're way too expensive. But, you know, four months, it's now starting to really be silly season in the United States. And, even if Biden was an incredibly robust and reasonably popular candidate, he would have a hard time in this environment. And of course, that's not the case. He's by far the oldest person that's run for the position in the United States. And he's showing that age, he is showing it more and more every day. I worry about that, of course, for him and for all of those that support him, certainly doesn't seem as if he's about to step down. But of course, that's what he has to say if he's intending to continue to fight until the moment that he changes.
On the other hand, Trump is also historically unpopular in the United States. If this was another candidate on the Republican side, this would be an easy call. This would be a Republican landslide. And Biden or anyone that the Democrats would put up would have a really hard time. And that's because, you know, immigration issues, inflation issues, anti-incumbency very strong in this environment. But because Trump himself is so extraordinarily unpopular and polarizing, it's actually still pretty close. And most of the polls show that that we're talking about a small number of swing states and a very small number of voters. And if you're Biden, you can convince yourself in that environment, “hey, I'm the guy that's going to be, you know, as useful as anybody else. It's too dangerous this late in the race to bring in another candidate.” I would agree with that. I would, if I really believe that what we saw at the debate was a one-off event and not a condition as former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said. I don't believe that, certainly don't believe that on the bases of conversations that I've had with the CEOs, the heads of state, the heads of the multilaterals, the senators, the members of the House that have been engaged with Biden regularly and routinely.
Now, that's different from what the people inside the Biden staff are saying. They are on message. They are very loyal, and they are all saying Biden can do it. If you've seen the schedule, he's so robust, he's so active, he's with it. But anyone outside that who is not like being paid to be completely on message is saying Biden has a serious problem. And in that regard, the likelihood that this doesn't go away, that his principal vulnerability gets worse, I think is very high. So if I were in a room advising him personally and he was willing to listen to me, I would tell him to step down. Having said that, I would have said it a year ago. But, you know, it is what it is.
We'll see what happens this week at the NATO summit with all of these world leaders coming in that are very concerned about what's happening in the United States and going forward, we've got the Republican convention real soon. We’ve got the Democratic convention, and everyone is going to be laser-focused on what's happening in the United States.
So much for that. I'll talk to you all real soon.
Tucker Carlson, Liberator?
Tucker Carlson visited Canada this week to “liberate” it from … from what exactly?
Well, that’s what thousands of people – including the premier of Alberta – came to Calgary and Edmonton to hear in packed arenas.
Tucker’s two-day liberation tour from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “authoritarian dictatorship” is timed perfectly around two political pieces of populist kindling: Trump’s march to victory in the US presidential primaries and a Canadian judge’s ruling that the Liberal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Trucker pandemic protest was “unreasonable” and unconstitutional.
It all sent a message: The populist forces are gathering and ready to take down Trudeau (and Biden) and save Canada from “disgusting decline.”
Here are the things destroying Canada, according to Liberator Carlson: mass immigration, medical assistance in dying (“genocide”), legalized pot, transgender people, the woke folks, the media, big tech, a “metrosexual” prime minister, anti-Christian groups, solar panels … and then, the great biggie, the authoritarian state itself, which exposed itself during the pandemic. “This is a destruction of you and your culture and your beliefs and your children and your future,” Tucker breathlessly summarized.
Pause for a moment on that sentence, because in it lies, perhaps, the most challenging dynamic facing democracies worldwide: hate disguised as anger. The stark casting of politics as a personal, apocalyptic battle over the imminent destruction of … everything. Your culture. Your beliefs. Your children. Your future.
In Tucker’s End-of-Days casting, this is not a mere election cycle, a debate of ideas, or even a culture war. It is a war. Period. Mao Zedong once said “politics is war without bloodshed,” but as the rhetoric keeps getting hotter and political opponents are increasingly viewed as personal enemies, the lines between politics and war are dangerously blurred. And it raises the question, how to respond to this?
The first thing to establish is that a fierce debate of ideas is the core of democracy. Freely disagreeing with others is the whole shemozzle here, so protecting and defending the right of people to say things you disagree with (outside of hate speech, etc.) is foundational. Disagreement doesn’t make someone the enemy; it makes them a partner in democracy. That’s why the arrest of a commentator from Rebel News as he chased down a Canadian minister was fundamentally wrong. And why having Carlson come to Canada is perfectly normal. It may have a political impact, but it was not and should not be banned. Questioning power and protecting speech is core democratic stuff.
It's also why debates and court cases over, say, the government’s use of the Emergencies Act in Canada are critical.
But contrary to Carlson’s distorted mirror, this happens all the time. That’s why willfully twisting facts, playing footsie with hate speech – Carlson’s stock in trade as he profits from paranoia – needs an equally robust response.
For example, the Emergencies Act is a controversial tool, but the fact is, it was heavily scrutinized when invoked. There was a vote in Parliament, a built-in sunset clause (it was only in use for nine days), an inquiry headed by Justice Paul Rouleau (whose scope included access to confidential cabinet documents), and court cases from civil liberties groups … who just won!
Hardly the hallmarks of a dictatorship. It is the robust debate about a government’s use and overuse of powers, which is ongoing in any democracy. Torquing this stuff as some kind of fascistic conspiracy erodes the hard work it took to build these check and balance systems in the first place.
On one hand, the media and politicians have to be extra transparent, open, and fair, and they should take criticism about their own biases and assumptions. On the other hand, they can’t be scared to check facts, call bullshit, and avoid promoting hate.
For example, as Carlson raged about the government’s overreach on COVID – “hey Canada forcing people to take an untested medicine is not a good idea” – he left out the fact that in January, February, and March of 2020, HE was one of the leading voices calling on the government to do MORE. “People you know will get sick …Some may die. This is real,” he said. In March, he actually visited Donald Trump in the White House to urge him to take stronger action. “Anybody who imagined that this was just media hype turned out to be wrong,” Carlson said. “Feb. 3 is the day that it was confirmed to me by a US government official that this was a huge problem and that a lot of people could die. That’s when I learned it. And that’s the night we went on the air and said, "Wow this is something you really need to worry about.’”
Did Tucker mention any of this during his liberation tour? Is calling out his own call for action against the dangers of COVID political bias or just fact-checking
the revisionist history he’s peddling?
I guess this used to be called “standards,” but standards of shame, debate, and humanity have been abolished by the anonymous shield of social media, the political efficacy of disinformation, and the profitability of anger. Both the far right and the far left, among other culprits, bear responsibility. This is not bothsidesism. The fringes of both political spectrums have destroyed the middle ground on a host of issues – the pandemic, Ukraine, Israel-Gaza – and made reasonable dialogue a helluva lot harder.
Where does it end up?
Look, people are scared about where we are headed, but let’s not arm up.
Maybe it’s just good to remind folks that in the US and Canada, though there are real and deep problems, we have it pretty darn good next to, well, almost anywhere.
In the US this week, inflation was 3%, wage growth was 3% and employment was 3%. Look around the world. That’s not bad.
It sure as heck doesn’t look like the apocalypse or like your children will be destroyed.
Wars require liberators. Democracies require candidates.
“Health is a human right”: How the world can make up progress lost to COVID
The state of public health in the developing world bears some deep scars from the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past three years, immunization rates have dropped to levels not seen in three decades. 2 billion people are facing "catastrophic or impoverishing" health spending worldwide according to the World Health Organization. And governments in the Global South are taking on more and more debt at the expense of investment in health and social services.
Kate Dodson, the Vice President of Global Health Strategy at the UN Foundation, is on the frontlines of the fight to give the most vulnerable people in the world access to proper healthcare. She works to connect experts and innovators with the UN, and find resources to support their work.
She’s calling on governments to invest in basic elements of public health, including primary care access, and properly remunerating healthcare workers — the majority of whom are women, worldwide. And more fundamentally, she wants leaders to treat health as a human right that all deserve to enjoy.
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A chart comparing life expectancy in the US with the rest of the G-7 countries.
The Graphic Truth: No country for old men
US life expectancy has declined two years in a row, meaning that babies born today are expected to live about 2.5 years less than those born in 2019, according to the CDC. Americans on average will now kick the bucket at 76, the lowest age in the 21st century — and more than six years earlier than the rest of the G-7.
The biggest contributor to Americans’ shortening life spans is drug overdoses, especially from fentanyl. The pandemic — and the mental health crisis that ran alongside it — is also to blame. The US saw more COVID deaths than other G-7 nations, while fatalities from suicide and alcohol-induced liver failure skyrocketed. Many of these deaths were of young people, which has a compounded effect on the national average.
While COVID took a toll on life expectancy across the G-7, all but the US rebounded after the first year. The US knocked off a whopping 1.3 years in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 and has continued to slide. The speed of America’s decline marks the biggest two-year drop in life expectancy since 1921.
The common wisdom is that wealthier countries should enjoy higher life expectancies than poorer ones, as they have the resources to invest in healthcare and better standards of living. This rings true for the rest of the G-7, which have a combined average life expectancy of 83 years old. But the US — the only G-7 country without free national healthcare — has lagged behind throughout the 21st century, plateauing at 78 in 2008 while fellow G-7 nations continued to climb.
We compare US life expectancy to the G-7 average (minus America) since 2000.
China-US tensions over COVID origins & Russia's war
But a couple of points here. First, this lab-leak concept was one that would get you banned on social media if you came out with it a year ago. And it just goes to show how you can have a dominant narrative that gets picked up politically and suddenly no one's allowed to ask questions anymore. That doesn't make it a conspiracy theory, it means that people are still trying to understand where it is, what's going on. There was so much that was uncertain about this disease in the early days. One of the things that annoyed me about Fauci, who I've interviewed a couple of times myself, gotten to know him a bit, is the fact that he came out feeling like he was so certain in some of his early communications, on things that he obviously wasn't certain about, and ended up undermining and de-legitimizing science and the medical community in the US in a way that we really cannot afford to do so.
Saying you don't know something is okay. I mean, back last May, I published the fact that I had no idea if it came from a lab or if it came from a wet market. What was clear to me is that it was getting politicized. What was clear from the scientific community is that the disease had not been bioengineered, that it was an accident that it came out. What was also clear is the Chinese lied to their own citizens and internationally, about the virus's origins, when they knew that there was human-human transmission. They lied to the WHO, the World Health Organization, and as a consequence, it was much worse for everyone. And they're still not allowing the WHO or others to investigate appropriately the origins. The fact that the country that the virus came from is not willing to be transparent with the global scientific community. I mean, thankfully there were a bunch of doctors and scientists in China that had humanity and said, "We got to get this out no matter what." Or it would've been even worse.
But it's an enormous problem when politics intervenes in what needs to be just a follow-the-science situation. And that's true on climate, it's true on the pandemic, it's true in so many areas of the world. And in that regard, we haven't changed much at all from today through the beginnings of the pandemic. This, of course, is going to make the Americans feel tougher about relations with China. That is also true on the back of China embracing, welcoming Belarus President/Dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, completely illegitimate leader of that country, using all sorts of repression and force against his own domestic opposition. No free press of course. Again, not surprising for the Chinese at all, but one of Russia's key allies, this on the back of Wang Yi visiting Moscow, and what I expect, relatively soon, will be an announcement that Xi Jinping is going to Moscow. There is a greater comfort of these two countries working more closely together.
Does that mean that the Chinese will provide weapons directly for Russia? I don't think so. I think that's indeed why the Americans put the Chinese on notice. They had intelligence that the Chinese were considering sending drones over. The UK, the NATO Secretary General, also making those statements very strongly. The Europeans and the Americans would have a very different reaction if the Chinese decided to go ahead and put those weapons forward. Now diplomatically, what the Chinese have been saying to the Europeans behind closed doors is, "Look, you guys are providing all these weapons. You're escalating. We are showing restraint." Having said that, if you want to call BS on what the Chinese are saying, you say, "Look, a majority of the world's countries recognize, and have recognized for three straight General Assembly resolutions, that this is an illegal invasion that needs to be condemned and ended immediately. The Chinese have decided that they're going to be neutral and abstain. But most of the world's countries, even the Global South, do not agree with China on this.
That's important, because if the Chinese were to provide weapons to the country that actually invaded, illegally, against the will of the General Assembly, the Chinese are putting themselves in the position of supporting a rogue state. And that is not a position China wants to be in. Not a country that needs economic support and integration from all of the world, not just countries they dominate economically. So I believe that the Chinese may have been fooling around with the idea of providing some weapons to Russia, may have been floating that because they wanted more influence with their own 12-point peace deal. But I would be very surprised if they proceed in providing that support. That's a good thing, in the context of US-China news that right now have very few positive headlines that we're talking about.
So that's it for me. Hope everyone's well, I'll talk to you all real soon.
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"We're in this together" — UN Foundation chief
Global development has been going backwards since even before the pandemic, and there's no end in sight.
Extreme poverty is now rising again, and fraught politics at every level is making it harder to fight inequality around the world.
But it's not an irreversible trend, UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
“The challenge of our times," she says, is "to re-galvanize that spirit of 'we're in it together' — [that] we have more in common than we have that divides us.“
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
Our unsustainably unequal world
The past is still very much with us.
It's almost the first anniversary of Russia's war in Ukraine. On March 11, it'll be three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And 2022 was the sixth warmest year on record since ... 1880.
We are still dealing with the fallout from all three events. But not equally.
Since 2020, the richest 1% of people has accumulated nearly two-thirds of all the new wealth created in the world. Just 10% of the population owns three-quarters of global wealth — and account for nearly half of carbon emissions.
What can we do to turn this around?
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
Why China is leading economically: infrastructure, energy, & tech
Most of the global economy is more likely than not headed toward a recession in 2023. But don't only blame it on inflation and Russia's war in Ukraine.
The economic slowdown face this year "is an acceleration of already structural problems around growth, that really started before the pandemic," renowned economist Dambisa Moyo tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Among the G-20 economies, the only country that has been serious about industrial and strategic policies to address those problems is China. That's why, she says, many Western nations were so shocked by the economic fallout of COVID.
For Moyo, for instance the US didn't have an off-the-shelf plan to respond to the pandemic. Still, she sees an opportunity for a reset in Western capitalism.