- U.S.: The State of the Presidential Race
- Has Israel Committed Genocide?
- The Rise of Narendra Modi & India’s Deep Divisions
- Germany’s Surging Far Right
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
U.S. Primary Elections
History may not repeat itself, but it seems to rhyme, and it is rhyming pretty closely these days after Donald Trump’s primary election win in New Hampshire.
It is less than ten months away from what appears to be a re-match of the Biden-Trump competition after 2020 – short of a medical event affecting either of these two oldies around 80.
Trump’s wins demonstrate his strengths – he has now won both Iowa and New Hampshire with outright majorities – but also his weaknesses, in that non-Republican, i.e. Independent support for him is thin.
Support from more traditional Republicans is also uncertain. Trump’s ungracious, crude comments about Nikki Haley won’t help him with this.
It certainly won’t help him with women in general, exacerbating a political problem caused by the Republican stance on abortion, according to Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He clearly is not familiar with Churchill’s dictum that in victory, one should practice magnanimity.
As was the case in 2020, there are simply not enough MAGA Republicans [‘Make America Great Again’ – Motto of Trump’s misguided movement] to put Trump, or any Republican over the top, but he does not appear interested in winning over voters outside of his base.
These limitations, plus the fact that Haley plans to stay in the race for now, is good news for Joe Biden, as Haley’s recent statements show she is increasingly prepared to go on the offensive, writes Haass.
However, most US commentators no longer see a path for her to win; to paraphrase the great crooner Frank Sinatra, if she couldn’t make it there, it is hard at this point to see her making it anywhere, including her home state of South Carolina.
Difference between Primaries & the General Elections
Among the general electorate, Trump is still vulnerable to substantial political fallout from a conviction in one of his many trials.
In addition, the polls have largely been good for Trump as they reflect a race defined by a referendum on an unpopular incumbent president.
But Biden could change the narrative by accelerating an end to the war in Gaza and changing the situation on the southern border.
Biden could also benefit from an economic tailwind as the U.S. economy continues to grow steadily at 3.3 % percent and inflation is moderating.
However, the Republicans are doing the unthinkable. At the urging of the presumptive Republican nominee, they have decided to keep the border question ‘open’ instead of solving it in a ‘bipartisan’ way – as it will hurt Biden.
This is a mindless and asinine example of ‘putting party and a person’ before country!
Israel & Genocide: International Court of Justice’s Preliminary Decision
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague last Friday ruled that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel will proceed, and ordered Israel to limit harm to Palestinians as it continues its war against Hamas in Gaza.
However, the ICJ did not call for a general ceasefire, as South Africa had requested.
Legal experts from the Atlantic Council explore the practical effect of the preliminary ruling, and what’s next in the courtroom and on the battlefield (Jan. 27).
Why It Matters
While the court did not call for a cease-fire, it did find South Africa’s claims of genocide plausible and accordingly ordered Israel to “do everything within its power to prevent genocidal acts against Gazans” and “take concrete actions to ease what the court found to be a ‘catastrophic humanitarian situation’ and restore conditions that can support life in Gaza, not risk its destruction,” observed Elise Baker, senior staff lawyer at the Strategic Litigation Project.
Those concrete actions, Baker adds, should include Israel allowing more humanitarian aid, limiting its military operations to facilitate that aid, and halting its telecommunications blackouts in Gaza.
In the view of Thomas S. Warrick, senior fellow in the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and former senior official in the US departments of State and Homeland Security, the ICJ merely asserted that Israel must follow Genocide Convention rules to which it has already committed. The decision is “an important blow to the argument advanced by Israel’s critics that death and destruction in Gaza are sufficient to establish a violation of the Genocide Convention.”
But Gissou Nia, Director of the Strategic litigation Project, notes that a close reading of the order has led many experts to argue that “implementing these provisional measures is impossible without cessation of kinetic activity” and thereby the court may essentially be ordering a cease-fire without expressly calling for one.
Battlefield Realities
In Israel, leaders likely “breathed a sigh of relative relief,” Shalom Lipner, a former advisor to seven Israeli prime ministers, observed, noting that the court did not order a cease-fire. He says the decision is “unlikely to compel any drastic reconfiguration of Israel’s war deployment or narrative.
That’s in part because in Israel’s view, it is already taking all measures within its power to protect Palestinians and provide them aid, Lipner says, “despite the complex circumstances of fighting a terrorist group embedded among a civilian population.”
In the legal battle, Warrick says that South Africa “will now have to establish an intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in substantial part – not by inference alone , but by proof of actual intent.” This is “likely to fail,” he adds, when the court decides on the merits in the coming years.
Eye on Washington
Given Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu’s comments that Israel will settle for nothing less than “absolute victory”, Nia says that “the hope will lie with” outside countries [above all, the U.S.] “to recognize the gravity of the ICJ order and to urge compliance.”
The outside country with the most leverage is the United States. Nia predicts that “the US government may use the explicit lack of a cease-fire order as political cover,” claiming that it has met the ICJ’s standard by helping humanitarian assistance reach Gazans.
“Concerned governments and advocates should push back on any such cynical framing,” she adds.
At the same time, it is important to consider that South Africa’s motives have been totally self-serving. It is pursuing a transactional foreign policy and is attempting to polish up its international image.
It has scrupulously avoided condemning Russia for its brutal aggression in Ukraine, although it has been charged with war crimes.
It aspires to be a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Global South, but this is in contradiction to its membership of BRICS, which is fast becoming a competitor to the G-7 and the political West.
The ‘Ram Temple’ & the Erosion of India’s Unity
The consecration of the controversial Ram temple on supposedly Hindu holy land where the ancient Babri mosque once stood, was an occasion for Indian Prime Minister to call the fulfillment of “dreams that many generations have cherished for years” (Bloomberg/ Swati Gupta & Dan Strumpf).
With national elections only a few months away, the inauguration is symbolic of a changing India and marks the pinnacle of Modi’s ten years in power.
Three decades ago, the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya sparked bloody riots between majority Hindus and minority Muslims, who both claimed the mosque-land as their own. Out of that wreckage, Modi’s Hindu-dominated Bharatiya Janata Party became India’s most formidable electoral machine, hugely exploiting resentments between the nation’s two largest religions.
Without doubt, Modi has propelled India to ever greater heights on the global stage, rapidly expanded the nation’s infrastructure and maintained some of the highest approval ratings of any elected official.
Modi’s India is an increasingly important security partner to Washington and a manufacturing alternative to Beijing, a country that now makes iPhones, has a booming stock market and may soon become the world’s third largest economy.
But sectarian strife threatens to pull India in the wrong direction. Under Modi, press freedom has eroded , political opponents are being sidelined and Muslims and other minorities say they face greater discrimination.
Many worry that religious zealotry jeopardizes India’s growth at an essential moment for a rising superpower – even as it resonates well with voters.
Nearly one billion Indians will soon head to the polls and decide whether to extend Modi’s reign of Hindu majoritism for another five years.
The Ayodhya temple illustrates a pivotal choice at the ballot box. To Modi supporters, the consecration is the culmination of a great dream to reclaim Hindu heritage marginalized by centuries of Mughal and British rule.
To his detractors, the temple advances a darker project: changing India from a secular democracy to an explicitly Hindu nation.
Winning a third term would position Modi as arguably the most powerful prime minister in India’s history, alongside the greats from the Nehru family – Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi [she married a Gandhi – no relative of the Mahatma].
It would also empower Modi and the BJP to push forward with more projects like the temple in Ayodhya.
In the near term, India remains as diverse as ever. The country has 22 official languages [including Nepali-–the lingua franca of Darjeeling and Sikkim] and is one of the few nations to have elected a female prime minister, a Muslim, Sikh and Dalit president and a Christian army chief.
Germany: Rise of the Extreme Right Provokes Reaction
It seems that a nation’s conscience has finally stirred into action.
In cities across Germany, anti-fascist/anti-Nazi demonstrations took to the streets, protesting the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
The spark to the demonstrations came in the form of an investigative report published earlier this month that revealed how AfD members had participated in a November clandestine meeting with other far-right extremists where they discussed plans to conduct mass deportations should they come to power (Ishaan Tharoor/The Washington Post, Jan. 23).
The surging AfD is polling at 22% percent – a level of support greater than what each of the three centrist and centre-left parties in the country’s ruling ‘traffic-lights’ coalition currently command.
It seems poised to break the “cordon sanitaire” erected around it by Germany’s more mainstream parties that have so far refused to entertain coalition talks with the far-right party and possibly shoulder its way into power in state elections later this year.
That AfD officials were openly entertaining the idea of forced repatriation of migrants and even German nationals of foreign origin horrified many in country with a deep memory of its dark Nazi past.
By some accounts, more than a million people participated in the anti-AfD protests.
“In Hamburg and Munich, rallies had to be dispersed because significantly more people than expected attended. Aerial images from across the country showed masses of people braving bitter January temperatures to fill city squares and avenues,” reported the Washington Post.
“According to police figures, in Berlin on Sunday, about 100,000 people gathered on the lawns of the Reichstag , which houses Germany’s lower house of parliament (Bundestag).”
Signs and slogans at the rallies made clear what many Germans believe is at stake. Banners warned of the return of “Nazis” – and marchers summoned the legacy of the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler and his allies seized control via the ballot box; and Germans then perpetrated the Holocaust because many played along, and the majority kept quiet.
“Everyone, together, against fascism” was the chant in Berlin.
Hand-painted signs read messages as “Nie wieder ist jetzt” (Never again is now).
Germany’s ‘Erinnerungskultur’ (culture of remembrance) – long attacked and derided by AfD leaders – includes the awareness that democracy and human rights require vigilant people to protect them (DW/Deutsche Welle, Jan. 23).
The investigative report by the nonprofit research institute Correctiv detailed the extensive private discussions between AfD members and a coterie of influential right-wing extremists and wealthy business executives at a November meeting in a hotel in Potsdam, outside Berlin.
This included talk of a “remigration” plan that would deport asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights and even “non-assimilated” German citizens.
Martin Sellner, a far-right extremist and leader of the Austrian “Identitarian Movement”, attended the gathering and floated a “master plan” that could even see these deportees sent to an imagined “model state” in North Africa.
The party’s extended surge in the polls comes on the back of mounting discontent with the ruling coalition.
“Even though 2024 is just a few weeks old, Germany has already been rocked by huge blocking cities and motorway junctions this past week alone,” detailed Spiked’s Fraser Myers.
It has been crippled by transport workers’ and doctors’ strikes. Factories in its much-vaunted manufacturing sector are shutting down and shipping production elsewhere. The federal government is struggling to reckon with a budget crisis and is ushering in a new age of austerity. Data released this week showed that Germany had the worst economic performance last year of any major economy.”
Against this backdrop, the avowedly anti-establishment AfD is picking up momentum.
“Calls for the AfD to be banned are completely absurd and expose the anti-democratic attitude of those making these demands,” said Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader to Politico.
In an interview with The Times of London, Weidel looked confidently ahead to the coming months, when the AfD is expected to perform well in upcoming European parliamentary elections.
She even raised the possibility of her nation following Britain out of the European Union.
“If we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the E.U. member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she told the British newspaper. “And we could have a referendum on “Dexit” – a German exit from the EU.”
For now, the AfD’s opponents – all the mainstream German political parties – hope to block the far-right before it gets close to achieving its goals.
“You are a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Lars Klingbeil, leader of the Social Democrats, told Weidel during a Bundestag debate last week. “But I’m telling you, your façade is beginning to crumble. People are finally getting to see the real face of the AfD.”
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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