The tide is turning
I hope I’m right: the tide is turning. President Trump, Prime Minister Johnson, President Putin, and President Erdogan are all being taken out to sea. I won’t miss any that drown in the polluted waters they have created.
- Donald Trump
He has had a terrible summer on many fronts, not just his prediction that Hurricane Dorian would make a beeline for Alabama. The G7 treated him like a pariah. The North Koreans continue to launch missiles. The Iranians are amping up their enrichment of uranium. He has suspended the Afghanistan negotiations he hoped would allow a drawdown of American troops and canceled primaries in states where he feared facing an opponent. He is misappropriating money from the military to build a border wall that won’t prevent most illegal immigration. The economy is slowing and the deficit is ballooning. China is still absorbing trade war blows without yielding at the negotiating table.
2. Boris Johnson
It is hard to recount all of the new prime minister’s comeuppances in the past few weeks (his mandate began only on July 24!), but suffice it to say he has lost his majority in parliament (including his brother), lost his bid for a very snap election, and lost the legal means of crashing the UK out of the the European Union while suspending parliament in a way that has generated widespread protest. None of this seems to phase him or his supporters, but I think there is a pretty good chance his party will do poorly in the election when it happens sometime in the next couple of months. Only Labour’s weak leadership is helping the Conservatives at this point. It is now completely unclear whether or when the UK will exit the EU.
3. Vladimir Putin
His losses in the Moscow municipal election are not enormously consequential to running the city, but Putin made concerted efforts to prevent them so they matter nevertheless. The opposition is learning how to challenge him successfully, even if only symbolically so far. But as one Russian put it to me: “we love our czars until we don’t. Then we string them up.” The Russian economy and Putin’s popularity are both sinking fast, as did a Russian nuclear missile under development that Putin had boasted of.
4. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Turkey’s economy is also in big trouble, along with its president. Erdogan’s party has lost mayoral elections in both Ankara and Istanbul, even if it did well in other places. He has the Turkish Army stuck in several dicey situations inside Syria, where the Russians, the regime, and the Kurds are all taking pot shots at Turkish soldiers and their Turkoman and Arab allies while Ankara tries to force Syrians back. Erdogan has strained relations with the US and much of the rest of NATO almost to the breaking point by buying Russian air defenses. He is still campaigning ineffectually for extradition of his arch-nemesis and alleged coup-plotter Fetullah Gulen from the US but hasn’t been able to convince an American court to send him to Turkey.
All four of these leaders are wannabe autocrats who come from a common political perspective: they are ethno-nationalists who respectively seek to protect the interests of dominant ethnicities at the expense of other citizens of their countries. They have all denigrated foreigners and minorities as well as immigration and liberal democracy while trying to maintain their own dominant ethnic group in power.
But they also all govern in nominal, if illiberal, electoral democracies. We’ll have to wait a while to see how far the tide has turned. Johnson faces an early election, likely within the next few months. The US will go to the polls in November of next year. Erdogan is relatively safe, with presidential elections required only in 2023. Putin is in principle term-limited, though he may seek to change that, but in any event safe from electoral challenge until 2024. All will do their best to bias the media and the electoral systems in their favor, but I think there is a pretty good chance we’ll see the backs of all of them. The sooner the better.
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