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A group of people thought to be migrants arrive in Dungeness, Kent, after being rescued in the Channel by the RNLI following following a small boat incident.
Hard Numbers: UK vote may scrap Rwanda plan, Orban visits Ukraine, India mulls marital rape, Bannon reports for prison, Beryl turns deadly, Fuji for a price
320 million: If, as widely expected, the Labour Party wins Thursday’s national elections in the UK and scraps the outgoing government’s controversial plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda, the British government will have spent more than £320 million that can’t be recovered. Labour has pledged instead to spend state funds to build a new Border Security Command that dismantles the people-smuggling gangs that help asylum-seekers cross the English Channel in small boats.
1: Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister and Europe’s most pro-Russian leader, made an unexpected visit to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This marks Orbán’s first trip to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. The visit coincides with Hungary assuming the rotating EU presidency, which happened despite concerns from other European politicians over Hungary’s frequent clashes with Brussels. Discussions are expected to focus on peace possibilities and bilateral relations between Hungary and Ukraine.
36: India’s supreme court has promised to rule later this month on whether India’s much-anticipated new penal code will make it acrime for a man to rape his wife. For now, India is one of the world’s 36 countries that have not criminalized marital rape.
4: Former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon reported to prison on Monday. He’ll now serve afour-month sentence for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Bannon, who has called himself a “political prisoner,” remains influential with pro-Trump conservatives.
5: Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 165 mph, caused widespread destruction across the southeast Caribbean on Monday, killing at least two people. Beryl is the first Atlantic hurricane of the season.
12: Early Monday, Japan’s park rangers began a crackdown on the surge of visitors hoping to walk up the iconic Mount Fuji. Climbers will now have to pay 2,000 yen (about $12) to hit the trails, and the number of hikers will be limited to 4,000 a day to limit the overcrowding and litter that have drawn more complaints in recent years.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a Conservative general election campaign event, in London, on June 24, 2024.
Viewpoint: Expect more drubbings for incumbents in France and the UK
Upcoming elections in France and the UK appear likely to deliver historic defeats for both countries’ ruling parties in a challenging electoral cycle for incumbents around the world. The polling shows the centrist alliance led by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Rennaissance party trailing both the far-right National Rally and the left-wing New Popular Front ahead of the legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 – pointing to an extremely difficult government formation process.
Meanwhile, the UK’s ruling Conservative party's dire polling ahead of the July 4 elections has prompted speculation of an “extinction event” that renders it virtually irrelevant in the next parliament. These votes follow others in countries including South Africa and India where the incumbents performed worse than expected.
What’s going on here? Eurasia Group expert Lindsay Newman says it’s a “long-COVID story” of the pandemic’s economic aftershocks fueling a political backlash. We asked her to explain.
This year is shaping up to be a bad one for incumbents. What are the lessons from elections so far?
In a series of surprise electoral outcomes, the ruling parties in South Africa and India both lost their parliamentary majorities, while the government-backed candidate lost Senegal’s presidential election to a little-known opposition figure. The driving narrative in all three is the long-COVID story – more specifically, historically high inflation levels.
Mexico, where ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum easily won the presidential election, is one country that bucked the trend. Sheinbaum benefited as the hand-picked successor of the popular President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has advanced an agenda focused on addressing economic headwinds through job creation and wage increases.
Can you explain the long Covid effect a little more?
Following the economic dislocations of the pandemic, inflation has been elevated and persistent around the world. We have higher-for-longer cost of living pressures and unemployment rates – factors that are shaping how voters think and particularly what they think about their governments. Pocketbook issues always tend to be salient during elections, and many peoples’ pocketbooks seem especially light in the aftermath of the pandemic.
So, do you think this trend will continue this year — for example, in the outcomes of the elections in France, the UK, and the US?
That’s what the polling is telling us. The electoral reckoning with post-pandemic conditions, including the inflation shock, is a global story. The outcomes thus far in 2024 suggest this will remain a difficult cycle for incumbents. We have to expect more of the same in these upcoming elections.
Interestingly, the political backlash seems to be coming even in relatively healthy economic environments, right?
There is nuance to what we are seeing. Voters are responding to how they feel about the economic environment they find themselves in, rather than the statistics or the nuts and bolts of the economic outlook. In the case of the US, for example, the country’s economic recovery has been one of the bright spots of the post-pandemic period, yet it’s not perceived that way domestically, and surveys show that inflation, the economy, and immigration are key concerns for voters going into the fall.
There was a similar dynamic at play in India, which has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, yet the felt experience of unemployment, rising prices, and inequities is likely behind the election results.
How worried are you about the potential for this backlash to destabilize political systems around the world? Where do we go from here?
Given the disruption and disorder we have seen over the last five to ten years, we have to expect more rather than less uncertainty ahead. This year’s voter backlash ties into another trendline I have been watching: a rising new radicalization of attitudes as well as actions. It has its roots in tectonic shifts in well-established public opinion, such as the 18.5-point average decline in support for Israel across dozens of countries registered by a January poll. Another driver is a broad political realignment away from the center and toward the poles.
The political consequences of these shifts are seen in the US in President Joe Biden’s outreach to younger and more progressive voting blocs and in Donald Trump’s appeals to his base. In Europe, nearly one-third of voters now opt for antiestablishment parties, either on the far right or far left, while in Latin America, antiestablishment candidates have secured a wave of victories in the post-pandemic period. We will get through the 2024 election cycle, but the risky times are likely to persist as these dynamics continue to ripple through the global system.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor at Eurasia Group.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivers a stump speech to party members at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, while on the General Election campaign trail.
Sunak picks a generation fight
The golden rule of desperate politicians? Find a target, pick a fight.
In Britain, they are frantically rewriting dictionaries to ensure the word “desperate” is spelled “Sunak” after the poll-parched British PM Rishi Sunk – I mean Sunak – launched his campaign for the July 4th election.
Because Ian wrote about Sunak’s quizzical election call yesterday in his GZERO newsletter, I won’t warm over the fandango of foozles that have left Sunak a gaping 27 points behind Labour – from the now infamous rain-soaked “Drowning Street” launch to his follow-up visit to the Titanic shipyard. But desperate times call for desperate policies, so as sure as Pimm’s at Wimbledon, Sunak has predictably picked a target: young people.
“There’s no doubt that our democratic values are under threat,” Sunak said as he sprung a new promise to bring back a compulsory service for young people in Britain decades after the last one was disbanded in 1960. “That is why we will introduce a bold new model of national service for 18-year-olds.” For once, a Sunak policy announcement made more headlines than his campaign clangers.
The plan would require that all 18-year-old Brits give a year of service in the military (up to 30,000 people could do this) or, for the rest of the 700,000 members of that demographic, some other form of community service for one weekend a month, working with organizations like the police, NHS, and fire service.
The plan would cost about 2.5 billion pounds a year and its goal is to unite diverse Britons in a shared mission of values, selflessness, and service.
How popular is the idea? According to a new YouGov poll, 47% of Brits support the idea, while 45% oppose it. Even better for Conservatives looking for a wedge: 63% of folks over age 65 – voters who go to the polls and who often vote Conservative! – support the idea, and 53% between the ages of 50-64 support it. That adds up to a winning issue for Sunak.
Who’s against it? The vast majority of young people, with 65% of those aged 18 to 24 and 47% between the ages of 25 and 49 opposed to it.
This is what you call an intergenerational political war. For a policy meant to unite the country, the first thing it has done is divide it.
Still, to Sunak’s credit, the idea has got folks talking and it has merit. He has finally seized back some control of the agenda with a provocative idea instead of a pratfall. He has pointed out that a similar program has been successful in Sweden and that he is building on David Cameron’s 2010 volunteer program, the National Citizens Service, which is still in place.
There are also similar programs in the US and Canada. Every year over 200,000 young Americans participate in AmeriCorps, getting them to volunteer in community programs across the country, while generations have gone overseas to work in the Peace Corps, the famed international development program set up by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
In Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau started a youth volunteer program called Katimavik in the late 1970s. It’s now funded under the larger Canada Service Corps, which gets young people experience in community-based programs.
All these programs are seeds of the Kennedy “ask not what your country can do for you” generation. In principle,it’s a very good thing for leaders to push for public service and to engage with youth, giving them guidance, skills, opportunity, and structure.
However, the difference between AmeriCorps or Katimavik and Sunak’s idea is that the former two are voluntary programs, not mandatory ones. If a government wants to impose mandatory service on a generation, it would be wise to spend a long time socializing the idea, getting support, and, in general, building a consensus. Springing it on the public and using it as a major campaign platform signals to young people that they are the problem Britain needs to fix.
Really? The problem is young people? It’s not the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which Sunak supported, that tanked the economy? It’s not the struggling NHS health care system? It’s not years of inflation, high housing prices, climate issues, security issues, immigration challenges, or the scandals that have riven the government for 14 years? Nope, forget all that. The problem is the 18-year-olds who inherited this screwed-up world. Now they are being told they must fix it.
No wonder they don’t like the idea. The young people who will be forced to start this program were only three and four years old when the Conservatives took power and steered the country to this desperate point. These same young people already had one mandated behavior policy forced on them during COVID, when they were told they must stay inside their homes for the good of the country. Now, the same folks who made them lose precious years of socializing while they held secret COVID parties at Downing Street and drinking merrily are telling youths they must “get out of the house for the good of the country.” Stay in. Get out. Make up your mind, old people.
Drafting young people into service to clean up a mess they did not make is as old as politics – every wartime draft faces this issue – but it can also point to a deep lack of accountability by governments, especially those that rely on older voters for success.
Encouraging public service is a good thing, but politicians might first want to do their jobs and create a high-growth economy before forcing young people to work (or “volunteer”) to fix the very system the politicians got paid to break.
Here is an idea. Maybe Sunak & Co. should offer to work as volunteers for one full year as politicians – do their job for free for 12 months – as an example of public service to young people.
Is that a fight worth picking? Politicians forced to work for free in service of the country they are leading? Outrageous. No way. Would never fly.
Especially when they can get young people to do the job for them.
UK Prime Minister Sunak's push for early election will hardly boost his chances
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Halmstad, Sweden.
Does the decision by Norway, Ireland, and Spain to recognize Palestine as an independent state further increase the isolation of Israel?
Not necessarily, but it does further reinforce the determination that is there throughout the international community, I would say, that it's only a two-state solution that over time, can bring peace and stability to the troubled region of the Middle East. In that sense, of course, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his resistance to move towards a two-state solution is increasingly isolated in the global community. And this particular decision is a further sign of that.
Does the decision by the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, to call an early election increases his possibility to retain his position at Downing Street?
Hardly likely, I would say. There are different theories why he decided to do the gamble. And though, it’s early for an election, it's not quite certain it would have been better to, it could have been equally bad to wait. So, he probably said, “Let's just get over with it.” But the Conservatives are 20% behind in opinion polls. It might not be that bad when it comes to the election. Election campaigns tend to have the effect of changing these particular figures, slightly. But the likelihood of, him still being prime minister of the United Kingdom by the end of July, that is, I have to say, very slim.
- Sunak says the UK is ready to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda ›
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- Sunak fires the starting gun ›
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- Britain’s next prime minister ›
- Ian Explains: How political chaos in the UK, France, & Canada impacts the US - GZERO Media ›
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivers a speech calling for a general election outside No. 10 Downing Street, in London, Britain, on May 22, 2024.
Sunak fires the starting gun
For embattled leaders with the power to call elections, it’s all about the timing. In Sunak’s case, though his Conservative Party has trailed badly for months, some factors suggest things might only get worse in the fall. More migrant arrivals by boat over the summer will add to his political headaches, particularly if the government’s plan to fly some to Rwanda runs into more legal challenges and delays.
He does have some positive economic news to work with.Newly released data from the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday indicated that UK inflation fell to just 2.3% in April, allowing Sunak to say he kept his promise to cut inflation in half during his tenure.
Will Sunak’s earlier-than-expected election date help Tories stage a stunning comeback? Not likely, says Eurasia Group’s Mujtaba Rahman. Instead, he forecasts, “Labour will capitalize on the public’s desire for change after 14 years of Tory rule and will win a comfortable majority.”
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 22, 2024.
Sunak says the UK is ready to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda
On Monday, Britain's parliament voted to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the UK would be ready to begin deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda within the next few months.
Sunak has vowed to put a stop to the some 30,000 refugees who entered the UK by crossing the English Channel last year. The idea to send migrants to Rwanda was first introduced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022. Under the plan, regardless of a refugee’s country of origin, they will be shipped to Rwanda and forced to submit their asylum applications there instead of in the UK.
The legislation is a response to a UK Supreme Court ruling that deemed such deportations a violation of international law because of Rwanda’s poor human rights record and because refugees would be at risk of being returned from Rwanda to their home countries, where they could face harm.
The plan is being criticized as a highly expensive gimmick for Sunak, who is facing significant political pressure as his party risks defeat in the upcoming general elections. The UK has already transferred $178 million to Rwanda although no refugees have been sent so far. He remains committed to the plan, asserting that preparations, including chartered jets and an airfield on standby, are complete for the flights expected to start in 10 to 12 weeks. However, UN rights experts have cautioned that airlines participating could face legal repercussions for complicity in violating international law.
Former PM David Cameron has been appointed foreign secretary by PM Rishi Sunak.
David Cameron returns to British government
A familiar face has returned to Britain’s government. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reshuffled his cabinet on Monday, pushing Home Secretary Suella Braverman out and installing James Cleverly in her place. Cleverly, who had been serving as foreign secretary, is being replaced by none other than former Prime Minister David Cameron.
The surprise move comes just days after Braverman wrote an op-ed for The Times, in which she said the police “play favorites” and described rallies in support of Gaza as “pro-Palestinian mobs.” The column caused a backlash among Conservatives.
Cameron has not been in Parliament since standing down in 2016, but he has been granted a seat in the House of Lords, which allows him to take up the new position — one he says he “gladly accepted.”
Sunak is clearly trying to stabilize his government ahead of the next general election, due by January 2025, and we’ll be watching to see whether Cameron’s appointment helps the Conservatives, currently down in the polls, woo voters.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty at the Conservative Party's conference.
Sunak makes his big pitch
In his first major address to the British Conservative Party conference since becoming prime minister last fall, Rishi Sunak certainly ruffled some feathers.
The biggest announcement at the conference, held in Manchester, was Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern part of the HS2 railway project, Britain’s first extended high-speed rail network, planned to run through the country’s nucleus. Scrapping this leg of the route means severing the path between Birmingham and Manchester.
Sunak says the move will save billions of pounds amid a cost-of-living crunch that’ll be directed to other railway and bus services. But many critics – including Tory stalwarts like former PM David Cameron, who pioneered the project back in 2013 – are calling the decision a mistake.
Sunak allies say that the cost of the project, which the Cameron government earmarked at £37 billion a decade ago, is rising too much and cutting back could save important tax dollars.
But business leaders say Sunak’s flip-flopping will undermine investor confidence in government decision-making and that ditching a much-needed infrastructure overhaul will negatively impact economic growth.
Sunak pitched himself to the forum as a changemaker after years of failed leadership – Tories have ruled for 17 of the past 30 years – in a clear effort to mix things up. After years of political tumult, the Tories are now trailing the Labour Party by 16 percentage points in some national polls.
It’s clear that Brits have soured on the Conservative Party and that the Labour Party would win if elections, set to take place before Jan. 2025, were held tomorrow. Still, polls suggest a gap between disdain for the Tories and enthusiasm for the alternative. Next week, it’s Labour leader Keir Starmer’s turn to address his party’s conference in Liverpool and put forward a positive policy message. The pressure is on.