Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 210

Now It’s France’s Turn

Five months after the surprise election that brought Donald Trump to the White House, it is now France’s turn to elect its President. On April 23, eleven candidates will compete in the first ballot for two spots in the decisive run-off two weeks later, on May 7.

Over the past few years the French have anxiously awaited this moment, not only because it would put an end to the failed presidency of socialist incumbent François Hollande but also because the election of a new President could provide an opportunity to put France’s sputtering economy and increasingly fractured society back on track. Many observers expected that the neo-Gaullist “Les Républicains” (LR), the dominant Center-Right party, would win the presidency and a parliamentary majority in a separate election in June. Former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Alain Juppé was considered the favorite to succeed Hollande. “Les Républicains” have been keen to bring about the profound economic changes a majority of French people have long expected, but which neither Sarkozy on the Right nor Hollande on the Left were able to deliver during their presidencies. While the popular National Front (NF) and its candidate, Marine Le Pen, have offered a more radical program, the assumption has been that, once again, voters across party lines will mobilize in favor of the more moderate candidate, as was the case in the 2002 presidential and 2015 regional elections.

This scenario unraveled with the surprise victory of François Fillon, Sarkozy’s former Prime Minister, in last November’s LR primaries. Two months later, the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé revealed that Fillon’s wife had received generous salaries for a fictitious parliamentary job, derailing Fillon’s position as the new favorite to win the presidency.

Amplified by social media, this scandal unleashed an anger against elites, persistently high unemployment, and social fractures that had been simmering for years in French society. Once thought only to fuel the rise of the National Front and Marine Le Pen’s candidacy, the winds of revolt have been blowing through every corner of the electorate and have imparted a new, more populist dynamic to the entire campaign. Even before a single vote is cast in the upcoming presidential and legislative elections, the campaign has triggered a process of profound renewal of political leadership, partisan boundaries, and ideological cleavages in French politics that could ultimately shake the foundations of the Fifth Republic.

Never before in the Fifth Republic have the odds regarding the outcome of the two presidential ballots been so unpredictable on the eve of the vote. Whereas in the past, the two favorites to qualify for the run-off emerged several months before the ballot and represented the leading parties of Right and Left (with the notable exception of 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen surprisingly eliminated the socialist candidate from the run-off), this time, no fewer than four candidates may still qualify. All four have been approaching the 20 percent threshold and are within the statistical margin of error. The candidate of the main party of the Left, the “Socialist Party” (SP), with a paltry 9 percent in the polls, is not even among them, and former favorite François Fillon scores third or fourth in the polls (although there are signs of a possible surprise comeback). The others are Marine Le Pen on the far Right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far Left, two extremist and populist candidates, who score an unprecedented 45 percent among likely voters.

The fourth, 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron, has risen as rapidly as Barack Obama and expresses the same promise of renewal for French politics that JFK did for the United States. But with 34 percent of eligible voters planning to abstain—in protest or out of sheer confusion—and 40 percent still uncertain about whom they will vote for, the volatility of the electorate precludes any serious predictions. The only predictable features of this campaign are that, among the 11 candidates, five are “énarques” (alumni of ENA, the elite school that trains senior civil servants and politicians) and another five are Trotskyists or former Trotskyists. Lampedusa had it right: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

This campaign has been dominated by a succession of surprises that put personalities, tactics, scandals, and social media in the driver’s seat, at the expense of a much-needed yet overshadowed public debate on the crises facing France. Even the current “state of emergency”, enforced for the first time during a presidential election in the wake of the massive terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015 and 2016, has not prompted any semblance of a debate on Islamist terrorism and national security. In fact, no over-arching theme has dominated the campaign, despite the ominous challenges facing the country and the remote but real possibility that Marine Le Pen and her National Front could win the presidency. Any debate about the reasons why the FN’s momentum has strengthened over the years has been conspicuously absent from politicians’ discourses or in the media. Rather than questioning the political assumptions and practices that have led France to the brink or borrowing from the successes of other Western democracies, a large segment of the electorate prefers to return to ideological purity and utopian visions, as Le Pen, Mélenchon, and Hamon, three of the five leading candidates, illustrate. No wonder that 75 percent of French respondents consider this a “botched” campaign, with a lingering legacy likely to burden the future President. Instead of becoming an opportunity to solve France’s problems, as many had hoped, this campaign reflects the continuing deadlock that characterizes the political crisis.

How has this campaign so thoroughly reshaped French politics?

On the incumbent side, the Socialist Party, for the third time, opted for open primaries modeled after those of the United States, despite the expectation that President Hollande would seek re-election. But with a low of 9 percent in his approval ratings last fall, François Hollande was in no position to resist the demands of the left-wing of his party, which had revolted against him after he advocated a pro-business agenda. Last December, reformist Prime Minister Manuel Valls convinced Hollande that he would be the better candidate, forcing him to step aside—the first time this has occurred in the Fifth Republic. But even Valls grossly underestimated the anti-Hollande wind blowing in his own party: In last January’s primaries, he was roundly defeated by one of the anti-Hollande candidates, Benoit Hamon, a second-tier politician.

What mattered for the grassroots voters in the primaries was not so much choosing a leader capable of winning the presidential election, but “punishing” Hollande for having betrayed the values and core identity of the Left. The fracture between the reformist and the radical Left, which led to the implosion of the Hollande government in the first place, further vindicated Valls’ own diagnosis of “two un-reconcilable Lefts.” Hamon did not attempt to re-unite his party by re-centering his discourse: His goal was less to compete for the presidency than to re-build a Socialist Party solidly anchored on the Left after the June parliamentary elections, reflected in his program, which included a €400 billion “universal income,” a reduction of the work week to 32 hours, and lowering the standard retirement age to sixty. Thus mainstream socialists, including many Hollande cabinet ministers and Valls himself, gravitated toward the more centrist program offered by Emmanuel Macron.

Hamon also resisted voters’ pressure for a merged candidacy with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the far Left. Their agendas are not far apart and certainly much more radical than that of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries. But each candidate was eager to capture the lead in the reconstruction of the Left after the electoral cycle ending in June.

The result for the Socialist Party is Hamon, a weak, uncharismatic candidate anchored on the narrow bedrock of its Left-wing in direct competition with the better known and more charismatic Mélenchon for the soul of the “real” Left. In the final stretch of the campaign for the first ballot, Mélenchon’s superior eloquence, posture of revolt, and creative social media operation have propelled him far ahead of Hamon. In flocking to Mélenchon, Left voters expect their so-called “tactical vote” to prevent their most dreaded outcome: a run-off between far Right Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron. For the hard Left, both candidates embody their “bêtes noires”: nationalism and fascism on the Right versus betrayal of the Left by the architect and implementer of Hollande’s pro-business policies (and a former Rothschild banker to boot).

Shrinking support, fragmentation and radicalization are likely to end the life of the Socialist Party as we have known it since it was re-invented by François Mitterrand in 1971 to pave the way for his own victory in 1981 and that of his protégé François Hollande in 2012. Its demise would accelerate if Mélenchon pulls ahead of Hamon in the first ballot, as forecasted, and if Macron, thanks in part to the exodus of many moderate socialist voters, wins the presidency and draws many incumbent deputies to his side in the legislative elections.

For the first time, the Right also chose to organize primaries despite the fact that they fly in the face of Gaullist philosophy. However, primaries appeared inevitable to settle the rivalry between Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Juppé and unite the party behind a strong and legitimate candidate to face Marine Le Pen. Juppé insisted on an open primary in order to dilute the pro-Sarkozy base of the party. To contrast himself with the Right-leaning Sarkozy and to anticipate his run-off strategy in the subsequent presidential election, Juppé chose to campaign on the Left of his party, even appealing to constituencies outside LR. That fatal mistake gave Fillon, a less polarizing figure than Sarkozy who is closer to the party’s center of gravity than Juppé, his opening: Fillon rode on LR’s small but cohesive socially conservative base, which was recently mobilized against the socialist-supported gay marriage law. He also offered a clear and ambitious free-market economic program, including eliminating half a million civil servant jobs, the 35-hour work week as well as the wealth tax, and cutting €100 billion of public spending. The neo-Gaullists chose in Fillon their most anti-Hollande candidate. Armed with the legitimacy of a clear victory in the primaries as well as an ambitious and credible program, Fillon immediately succeeded Juppé as the election’s overall favorite.

The scandal that cut short Fillon’s momentum two months later revealed that the primaries had deepened divisions among the various candidates as much as they had seemingly united LR behind their new champion. These divisions between the Fillon, Juppé and Sarkozy camps facilitated the exodus of supporters of the losing candidates toward Emmanuel Macron and, to a much lesser extent, Marine Le Pen. The same divisions also prevented LR from agreeing on a replacement candidate after Fillon lost between 7 and 8 percent of his support in the wake of the scandal (although Fillon himself deserves credit for his spectacular resilience in countering the putsch). On both the Left and Right, the choice by the base of a hard liner as the nominee (reminiscent of the U.S. primaries) shrank the appeal of the party and its candidate and fostered the dispersion of their traditional voters among candidates of other parties, Mélenchon on the Left, Le Pen on the Right, and Macron in the middle. Hamon and Fillon were “squeezed” between two other candidates who became potential options for their supporters. In each camp, the volatility of the electorate, instead of decreasing as the vote nears, is on the contrary continuing to climb to unprecedented levels in French presidential politics.

More than Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron was the main beneficiary of the results of both the primaries and the Fillon scandal. Between February and March, Macron climbed from 13 percent to 26 percent in the polls, just as Fillon went from 32 percent down to 17 percent. By contrast, Marine Le Pen gained “only” three or four points but consolidated her lead. The nomination of Hamon and Fillon opened a wide space in the middle of French politics, where Macron positioned his new, fledgling movement “En Marche” meant to be the vehicle for his candidacy. In fact, the surprising circumstances of the campaign justified Macron’s boldness and vision in founding a new movement that allowed him to run as an independent, resigning his position in Hollande’s cabinet, and declaring his candidacy for the presidency this past December. Macron avoided the socialist primaries because he knew his social-democratic, market-oriented reformism would not be in sync with the rebellious Socialist Party. He rightly bet that his mentor, François Hollande, would realize he was too weak to seek reelection. Then, all heavyweights among his potential rivals in the political Center were defeated in the primaries, including Alain Juppé on the Right and Manuel Valls on the Left. François Bayrou, who more than anyone embodies centrism in French politics and ran three times for the presidency, surprised observers and Macron himself by deciding not to run. The icing on the cake came when Bayrou simultaneously offered Macron his full and active endorsement.

Macron managed somewhat successfully to present himself as an “anti-system” and “revolutionary” candidate (the title of his recent book is Revolution), an approach one would think was more suitable for Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This shows us exactly how much chutzpah Macron can muster. After all, he was a high civil servant trained at the elite school ENA, a member of the even more prestigious “inspection des Finances” corps, and a former investment banker at Rothschild before becoming Hollande’s main economic adviser and Economy Minister. As such, Macron embodies both the political and business establishment as well as a certain continuation with the Hollande policies that he himself devised. He shares the same social-democratic and reformist vision as Hollande and Valls, with the noticeable difference that, having run on a reformist platform, he would not be perceived as betraying his electoral base. It is not political philosophy that separates Macron from Hollande but his political vision and method: for Macron, Sarkozy and Hollande failed because they had to rely on all-Right or all-Left majorities in parliament. He believes that the Right vs. Left dichotomy has lost its relevance in French politics: One half of France cannot be pitted against the other, and in any case each camp is split down the middle by deepening cleavages between anti-European sovereigntists and nationalists, on the one hand, and globalist reformers, on the other. Bringing the progressives together in the middle around compatible ideas is Macron’s approach to achieving meaningful reforms. Yet, so far, his proposals have stood out for their fuzziness and carefully balanced appeal to both Right and Left.

One could argue that splitting the political spectrum in three instead of two has many disadvantages as well. As illustrated in the Fourth Republic by the “Troisième voie” (the “third way”, already!), central governing coalitions make alternations of power either impossible or dangerous, since they can only benefit the extremes. The other downside of Macron’s centrist path would be to add to the social chasm a political one as well—between the well-educated, moderate elites in the middle and the more populist and protectionist Right and Left on the fringes. But should he win the presidency, Macron would be the first to do so in the institutional context of the Fifth Republic, which has encouraged bi-polarization, notably through two rounds of elections with only the top two candidates (presumed representing the Left and Right) competing in the run-off.

Like the Center, the far-Right is another strain of French politics that has successfully been marginalized by the Fifth Republic, at least until Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 and began to make his mark on French politics in the 1980s. In 2002, it took only 18 percent in the first ballot for Le Pen to qualify for the run-off. With the same score in 2012, his daughter Marine finished a distant third. Yet, the Hollande presidency has been fertile ground for the FN: It achieved its best results ever, 28 percent of the vote, in the 2014 and 2015 local, European, and regional elections, a gain of 10 percent over Marine Le Pen’s 2012 presidential performance. With a wide and deep geographical presence, 43 percent of the working-class, 35 percent of the youth, and 37percent of the farmers’ vote, the NF has arguably become the leading political party and certainly its most dynamic one. It broke into the duopoly formed by the neo-Gaullist and Socialist parties to create a third major political force in France.

Yet one of the many surprises of this presidential campaign is that Marine Le Pen, despite often leading in the polls and without a doubt representing the greatest potential challenge to France and Europe, has not stood at the center of this campaign. In contrast to Fillon’s misfortunes and Macon’s spectacular rise, Marine Le Pen’s campaign has been in line with what was expected. Marine Le Pen and her party have become familiar fixtures of French politics and it was widely anticipated that she would do well in this race. In fact, unlike most parties, the NF has an undisputed leader, a clear ideology and program, and thousands of motivated activists. The FN behemoth is not susceptible to scandals, such as the one involving Marine Le Pen’s staffers at the European parliament, since such scandals are not enough to keep new voters away; rather, they only reinforce the assumption among the rank and file that their party and leader are the unfair scapegoats of the sinking political establishment.

There is a second reason why Marine Le Pen’s candidacy has not received all the attention it might have deserved: the widely shared assumption that she would qualify for the run-off. She has consistently scored above 20 percent in the polls, climbing above 25 percent and even 28 percent in the wake of the Fillon scandal. She has led in the polls more often than Fillon or Macron. About 80 percent of her would-be voters say they will not change their mind, more than Fillon and 25-30 percent more than Macron, Hamon, or Mélenchon. Half of Macron voters say they will vote for him as a default, not as an expression of support. With Marine Le Pen considered a shoe-in for the run-off, the campaign’s focus has been on the rivalry between her challengers, especially Macron and Fillon. As a result, Marine Le Pen and her ideas have not become the main target of her rivals or the media. The battle between her opponents will leave scars that could fissure an anti-Le Pen front in the run-off.

A third reason why Marine Le Pen’s profile did not hang over the other candidates is that she has never been considered a likely winner of the run-off. No poll has ever shown Marine Le Pen in a close race with any match-ups for the run-off, with the exception of Mélenchon early on. Of course, this does not prevent a majority of French voters from believing that she has a chance to win. But being a formidable first-round candidate with a strong and loyal base of support is seldom enough in French presidential races; winning the run-off has always required being able to gain votes from the losers of the first ballot, and Marine Le Pen has none. Whether Fillon or Macron, her opponents will be able to draw from others to form a bloc against the far-Right—the rationale behind the “tactical vote.” Of course, the scenario that unfolded in 2002 and 2015 might not work in 2017. Even if she is not the favorite to win the run-off, Marine Le Pen will regain a central role in the campaign.

Arguably, foreign observers had more reasons than their French counterparts to put Marine Le Pen center-stage. She and her party are much less familiar overseas than in France, and her victory would have a far greater international impact than that of any of the other candidates. From a distance, it is easier to concentrate on the “elephant in the room”. Americans and others also tend to view this French election through the lenses of the recent Brexit and Trump victories. But in France, the dynamics expected from the upheavals of the campaign and the two-round electoral system center around the serendipitous local context.

The high volatility of a disenchanted and confused electorate has been a key feature of this campaign. The vote itself is expected to be marred by a high level of abstention, especially in the first ballot, as well as a strong strategic calculation to defeat Marine Le Pen. As a result of having four candidates running neck to neck in the polls for the first ballot, that “tactical vote”, unusually, will come into play in the first ballot against the two extremist candidates, Le Pen and Mélenchon.

Traditionally, the second round of presidential elections amplifies the dynamics at work in the first. The crucial televised debate usually contributes to it. However, extrapolating the run-off from the first ballot might be insufficient or even misleading this time around: the rise of the FN next to LR and the SP means one of the three political forces in the country will be left out of that decisive confrontation, a key difference with the United States. The electoral dynamics and cleavages will be more unpredictable than ever. This is why polls taken before the first ballot, which all show Marine Le Pen losing by a wide margin, have limited credibility.

Let’s examine the scenario in which Marine Le Pen qualifies for the run-off. In addition to the scores of all eleven candidates in the first round (most supporters of the losing candidates will turn out in the run-off), four key variables are likely to shape the final outcome: turnout, the potential “hidden” vote, the “tactical vote”, and the overall dynamics of the campaign. The conventional wisdom is that a depressed turnout (the average has been 20 percent) would benefit Le Pen, who has a low yet solid and reliable electorate. But a reverse argument is that, since the sociology of the FN electorate overlaps with the sociology of abstention (young, working-class), Marine Le Pen will have the largest reserve of voters of any candidate should she prove able to mobilize them. Recent regional elections in France and national ones in the Netherlands have shown that high turnout has put a lid on the rise of populist candidates. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, support for Hillary Clinton seems to have been overestimated, especially among the young and African-Americans, while Donald Trump’s support among the working-class was underestimated. Could Le Pen benefit from a similar surge of voters “hidden” from the pollsters? Although possible, this is unlikely. Pollsters no longer need to adjust the results of their surveys to take account of the embarrassment of FN voters to disclose their opinions; such reluctance to respond has waned now that the FN has become an established party and surveys are conducted online.

What, then, about the prospects for a “tactical vote”? How tight is it likely to be? Strong mobilization against Jean-Marie Le Pen emerged in the second round of the 2002 presidential elections, with incumbent Jacques Chirac receiving the overwhelming support of the Left and winning with a stunning 82 percent of the votes against 18 percent for Le Pen. In the upcoming run-off, history will not repeat itself: the FN under Marine Le Pen is a more “normalized” party, and the French electorate as a whole is more divided than ever before. The Left is repelled by Fillon almost as much as Le Pen. Fillon is under examination by the judiciary, does not hide being a practicing Catholic and living a bourgeois lifestyle, and is proposing a radical liberalization of the economy, including the elimination of half a million civil service positions. For the hard Left, Macron is guilty by association with Hollande’s most pro-business policies and was an investment banker. Only about 40 percent of Fillon’s first-round voters would support Macron, while the other 60 percent would be equally split between Marine Le Pen and abstentions (or blank ballots). But a weak “strategic vote” would still not be enough to take Marine Le Pen to the Elysée palace.

A face-off between the two extremist candidates of the Right and Left, Le Pen and Mélenchon, would naturally be the worst possible scenario, for both politicians are statist, protectionist, and anti-capitalist. They reject the European Union, NATO, and the U.S. role in the world yet are fascinated by Vladimir Putin (not to mention Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in Mélenchon’s case). Both programs are un-realistic, ruinous, and dangerous. Such a match-up—and its likely electoral result—would trigger a political crisis of unexpected proportions in France as well as in Europe, a severe financial crisis in the Eurozone and beyond, Transatlantic tensions, and, ultimately, the unraveling of the European Union.

The level of abstention would be high, perhaps 40 percent or 45 percent. Most centrist Macron voters in the first round would be inclined to abstain, and only a fraction of Fillon and Hamon voters would cast their votes for Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon, respectively. Extreme political rhetoric and street violence could degenerate into major social upheaval. Unrest would be reinforced by the fact that Le Pen and Mélenchon’s electorates are disproportionately young and working class.

If Marine Le Pen qualifies for the run-off, let’s hope that she faces either Fillon or Macron. Attacking Fillon on the grounds of embezzlement of public funds would probably expose Marine Le Pen to easy reprisals. Fillon is likely to look experienced and statesmanlike in comparison to her. Unlike Marine Le Pen, he would obtain a majority in the June parliamentary elections. Fillon’s main asset is the credibility of his economic program, which most voters believe is the only one ambitious enough to turn the French economy around. Both candidates would inevitably clash on Europe, since one is a free-market reformer and the other seeks to exit the euro. Among the 68 percent of French citizens opposed to leaving the euro, many are seniors (a large Fillon constituency) who fear for their savings. Marine Le Pen is well aware of the electoral liability of her proposal and might change tack in the run-off to broaden her support.

On the rising issues of law and order, immigration, the integration of Muslims into French society, and the preservation of French culture, the approach of the two candidates partly overlaps, but Fillon will be able to exploit the extreme, dangerous, and unpractical nature of Le Pen’s proposals.

Against Macron, the opposition would be even more frontal. Macron has long been Marine Le Pen’s preferred opponent for the run-off because he embodies the political cleavage she believes has replaced the obsolete Left vs. Right one: sovereigntists and nationalists versus pro-Europeans and globalists; losers vs. winners of globalization; secularist vs. multiculturalists. Her goal would be to turn the race into a referendum on Europe: Since 2005, when the referendum to ratify the European constitution was defeated in France (and the Netherlands) by narrow margins, Euro-skepticism has gained strength throughout Europe. The NF would also target Macron for representing the continuation of Hollande’s policies (Fillon has successfully coined a new name for Macron: “Emmanuel Hollande”) and a former investment banker. Macron has downplayed the critically important issues of crime, immigration, and French identity while making two controversial statements—one denying the existence of a French culture, the other denouncing, on Algerian soil, the former French colonization of Algeria as a “crime against humanity.” The FN is convinced a majority of French people would fall into its camp on all such statements and issues.

The run-off campaign would underscore the radical contrast between their constituencies: Both disproportionately attract the young, but Le Pen disproportionately draws the least-educated and most economically challenged while Macron appeals to the highly educated, better off, more urban, more mobile, and entrepreneurial. In a recent computation of a “Happiness Domestic Product,” Macron’s supporters were at the apex, Le Pen’s at the bottom.

Four highly uncertain rounds of election, including the legislative ballots in June, are now set to unfold before we know the shape and direction of France’s next government. Let’s hope the French will make the best use of them.

US Shale Working Smarter and Harder

The popular adage contends that you can either work smarter or harder, but the American shale industry is busy doing both to stay competitive in today’s market. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling may have set of the shale boom, but a host of different technological advances and innovations—from big data analysis to microbial identification—are keeping this renaissance going. Bloomberg reports:

[Energy companies are] using DNA sequencing to track crude molecules and mapping buried streams with imaging software. Robots are fitting pipes together. Roughnecks consult mobile apps for drilling-direction advice. Oilfield services providers find themselves in a new arms race, led by giant Schlumberger Ltd., which recently opened an office on Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley. […]

[Several] companies, including Norway’s Statoil ASA and Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp., have hired Biota Technology to help them identify the most bankable parcels [of oil fields]. By comparing microbes in rock samples to those from oil produced in the area, Biota can map out choice draining spots and, according to founder Ajay Kshatriya, boost a well’s output by millions of dollars. […]

EOG Resources Inc., an Enron Corp. castoff that is now the second largest independent U.S. oil explorer, has embraced big data analysis to such a degree that Wolfe Research analyst Paul Sankey called it “the best oil company we have ever covered.” The Houston-based company has, among other things, invented proprietary iPhone apps that field crews use to calculate how hard to frack particular stretches of crude-soaked rocks.

Meanwhile, OPEC and its ilk are worried about how much they’re capable of cutting production to prop prices up—a belated attempt to stop the bleeding caused by the price collapse over the past two and a half years. U.S. shale is going up against a cabal of producers and, thus far, it’s the American suppliers that are winning. U.S. production is up nearly 800,000 barrels per day since October, buoyed by the recent oil price rebound and, as you can see above, by a bevy of new operational advances.

In this battle between upstart producers and the old guard, one group has gone the route of relentless innovation, while the other has reluctantly pursued a strategy of weak market intervention to maintain yesterday’s status quo. And that really tells you all you need to know about the state of American energy security in the world today.

Xi Reshuffles Chinese Military

Xi Jinping has taken another step forward on his reform agenda, with a massive reorganization and streamlining of China’s armed forces. Reuters:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced a military restructure of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to transform it into a leaner fighting force with improved joint operations capability, state media said.

Centered around a new, condensed structure of 84 military units, the reshuffle builds on Xi’s years-long efforts to modernize the PLA with greater emphasis on new capabilities including cyberspace, electronic and information warfare. […]

Retired PLA Major-General Xu Guangyu, a senior researcher at the Beijing-based China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, said the restructure represented the second major phase of Xi’s reforms.

“Since military reforms started it has been one step at a time,” Xu told Reuters. “The high-level framework is now in place, now this is the second phase targeting the entire mid-ranking levels of the military.”

Military reform has long been high on Xi’s agenda, with the goal of both purging the ranks of corruption and modernizing the PLA for a 21st century threat landscape. That agenda has never been without controversy: there have long been signs of daylight between the PLA leadership and the party over Xi’s troops cuts and efforts to consolidate control over the army.

Nevertheless, Xi persisted—and as China watcher Bill Bishop notes in his must-read newsletter Sinocism, the restructuring may have more buy-in from the army ranks than is commonly assumed. Some officers will indeed suffer a status cut due to the reforms, but many others will owe their promotions and new assignments to the president himself—”a countervailing force often forgotten,” Bishop writes, “amidst some of the exaggerated talk that Xi has upset the PLA with his reforms and corruption crackdown.”

In any case, the military modernization is another sign of Xi’s determined ambitions to reshape China as a great power according to his own vision. Expect a lot more of these dramatic moves this year, as Xi builds momentum for this fall’s Party Congress and makes the case that his “core” leadership has already left its mark on China for the better.

How Shale Gas Is Helping Renewables

Wind and solar power have an intermittency problem, and natural gas can help solve it. Those two renewable energy sources are on the rise, but as they seek to gain a foothold, suppliers and utilities are scrambling to figure out how to account for the fact that they can only provide electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Lacking scalable, cost-effective energy storage, wind and solar have to be relied upon for “peak power” generation, while more traditional fossil fuel and nuclear power plants provide the more consistent “baseload” supplies.

But on those particularly sunny or windy days when renewable power generation ramps up, some of that baseload supply has to be turned off. Conversely, when wind and solar aren’t supplying much, those shuttered baseload plants need to ramp up again. That’s an expensive endeavor, prohibitively so for energy sources like coal or nuclear, both of which require capital investments large enough so as to make that renewables-forced variation financially devastating.

Enter natural gas, which only recently supplanted coal as America’s largest source of electricity generation. Gas-fired plants are cheaper to construct than coal (and much cheaper than nuclear), and are also cheaper to scale up as needed. That makes the economics of turning them off and on according to the whims of weather a lot more viable, and as a result makes them ideal complements to intermittent renewables.

Plenty of these natural gas “peaker” plants are already in use in the United States, but they consume a lot of energy staying in stand-by mode. Now, General Electric says it has a solution to make these peaker plants more efficient by incorporating batteries to make those stand-by operations more efficient. Ars Technica reports:

This week, General Electric (GE) and Southern California Edison (SCE) announced that they had retrofitted a natural gas peaker plant with a 10 MW, 4.3 MWh battery installation to create the world’s first hybrid electric gas turbine. […]

“The energy storage capacity of the battery has been specifically designed to provide enough time coverage to allow the gas turbine to start and reach its designated power output,” GE writes. This eliminates the need to burn fuel while the gas turbine is kept spinning in standby mode.

This is an important step for natural gas power generation, but it’s even more critical for renewables. Wind and solar continue to improve efficiencies while bringing costs down, and it’s now no longer inconceivable that they might operate without government subsidies. Still, their intermittent nature places a hard limit on how far they’ll be able to penetrate power markets. Renewables need natural gas, and as it so happens, the U.S. is flush with that particularly energy source at the moment (thanks to fracking).

Shale gas is already responsible for bringing U.S. emissions down 3 percent last year, and it’s going to be a necessary condition for wind and solar’s future growth. It’s past time for this hydrocarbon to get the green credit it deserves.

The Specter Haunting France (and Europe)

Given the amount of coverage this year’s French presidential race has already received, it’s easy to overlook just how historic it promises to be: For the first time since World War II, a communist and a nationalist stand a real chance of winning, while representatives of the two mainstream parties could easily find themselves shut out of the second round of voting. The story of this campaign has been one of competing insurgencies.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the communist candidate, has surged at the polls in the run up to the vote scheduled for this weekend. His left-populist campaign, formally associated with no established party but rather based on a movement he founded last year (La France insoumise), has earned him comparisons with Bernie Sanders.

The nationalist Marine Le Pen, who stands a strong chance of winning the first round, is  the closest thing to a “known quantity” among the frontrunners, leading the well-established (though far from “establishment”) National Front.

She has been running neck-and-neck for first place with the centrist Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker and Economy Minister in Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, who abandoned his party to form a movement of his own (En Marche!). Macron’s moderate pro-European supporters are passionate, but beyond this core group, his prospects are less certain; some polls had as much as 40 percent of the electorate undecided with a week to go before the vote.

And the only major party candidate who still stands a chance to advance, Francois Fillon of the center-right Les Republicains, ended up clinching the nomination because, although he served as Prime Minister for more than five years, he is seen as more of an outsider than his rival, the aging Alain Juppe.

After Brexit, Donald Trump’s win, and even the recent Dutch elections, the French race feels eerily familiar. Voters are disenchanted with politics. Burned by years of economic policies that have failed to deliver broad-based prosperity, and unable to recognize the people living in their own countries, they are looking to new leaders who, unencumbered by governing legacies or political correctness, will be able to shake things up. This is an election about sticking it to the man.

Many invoke a “demand side” explanation for the surge in populism: that it is a reflection of voters’ unaddressed grievances and anxieties being unmet for far too long by the ruling elites. Certainly, voters’ fear and anger are a real part of the equation, but consider a “supply side” framing: the rise of the fringes is the result of the collapse of the neoliberal center, which itself was only compelling to voters when juxtaposed with a thriving and viable welfare state model.

A case in point: the travails of the British Labour Party. Well before the Brexit referendum, Labour had been losing ground. With the Cold War over and communism so thoroughly discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union as even a theoretical alternative, Tony Blair successfully managed to pivot his party toward the emerging neoliberal consensus. It was only with Blair’s departure from politics that it became clear how much of his success was due to his enormous reservoirs of personal charisma. Under Gordon Brown, the soulless technocratic heart of neoliberalism was laid bare to voters, and they wanted none of it. Voters were not exactly thrilled with the alternatives either: David Cameron won the elections, but not the majority, resulting in the first hung parliament since 1974.

The Conservatives’ decisive win in 2015 was less the product of brilliant leadership on the part of Cameron and more the result of Labour’s remarkable implosion. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn—a radical trade unionist pacifist who has advocated the renationalization of various industries—can be interpreted as an attempt to re-root Labour in an authentic Leftism. Part of Labour’s implosion has to do with Corbyn’s profound incompetencies as a politician, managing to alienate both working class communities and socially liberal urban voters. But it also is due to the perceived irrelevancy of his program: Socialism as a governing agenda just doesn’t seem to catch fire quite like it did when the left had a real progressive message of shoring up social safety nets and giving labor a voice in corporate governance. The era of welfare state capitalism is over, and center-left parties are finding themselves in the position either of having to implement austerity measures or swinging even further Left. Corbyn chose the latter, and it’s not working.

Now that the British Prime Minister Theresa May has called for snap national elections on June 8, Labour will likely to take a big hit. Early projections have the Conservatives winning 381 seats, a net gain of fifty from Labour, which would end up with 182. With Corbyn refusing to step down, the party seems to be headed further into oblivion. But even without Corbyn, it is not clear what Labour stands for any more.

A similar story is evident in the Netherlands. While most observers were obsessing over the prospects of Geert Wilder’s far-right party defeating incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right VVD, the real story of the Dutch elections was the implosion of the center-left PvdA. And PvdA’s self-immolation has, if anything, been more spectacular than that of Britain’s Labour: In 2012, the PvdA won 25 percent; in 2017, that number had dwindled to 6 percent, the worst result since the party’s founding in 1946. Again, a pivot to the bloodless center was to blame. PvdA was seen by its base as being too willing to implement the austerity agenda of Rutte’s VVD, its coalition partner since 2012—a betrayal of its traditional Leftist principles. A leadership struggle, with an attempt to pivot back to “true” socialism is likely, but electoral success less so. Though Wilders’ party only gained five seats in Parliament, he is now setting the terms of the debate. Shopworn socialist pieties about class struggle sound irrelevant.

The dynamics of the French race are easier to understand with this framing. Francois Hollande’s approval ratings plunged to single digits following the terrorist attacks in Paris last fall, making him the most unpopular president in French history. But the truth is that he had earned that moniker as early as 2013: With the exception of brief rally-round-the-flag blips like the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Hollande has struggled to get his approval rating above 30 percent throughout his term, evidence of the staleness of his technocratic meliorism masquerading as some kind of center-left alternative to years of UMP rule. After he announced that he would not seek reelection, his Socialists nominated Benoit Hamon, the founder of the Young Socialist Movement and the leader of the leftist faction of the party, for the presidency. Hamon has been compared to Corbyn, and just like Corbyn, his more “authentic” socialism has failed to catch fire with voters.

Unlike Corbyn, of course, Hamon has had to face a challenger from an even more “authentic” communist Left in the surging Mélenchon. But there’s reason to be skeptical that Mélenchon’s success is due to anything other than a series of stirring debate performances and rallies. His outsider status, coupled with a charismatic firebrand act, may be giving undecided voters a reason to give him the nod. But in contrast to polls, where Mélenchon is virtually tied with Fillon, betting markets give him only 7:1 odds of winning it all (compared to Fillon’s 3:1, tied with Le Pen).

Which brings us back to Emmanuel Macron, who is still favored to win, by both polls and punters. Europeanists tell themselves that it is his centrist, pro-EU message that is resonating with voters, but as with Mélenchon, his popularity might have more to do with his image as an outsider. After all, Pew last year found support for the EU dropping to all-time lows in France. Macron’s edge over his rivals may lie in his nebulous messages of hope through unity, and an implicit promise to be all things to all people—a campaign only a broadly unknown quantity could plausibly run. Le Pen, by contrast, is by now a professional dissenter, and her National Front has a strong and well-defined brand.

A specter is haunting Europe, but it isn’t communism, and it almost certainly isn’t a warmed-over centrist neoliberalism. Some might argue that the specter is nationalism, but that, too, is not quite right. The specter is (perhaps fittingly for Marx’s original metaphor) a vacuum—political emptiness. The rise of formerly fringe populisms is not just a story of one country and one election, nor is it solely about specific demands of angry voters. Rather, it is a symptom of the lack of political options, vision, and compelling narratives from both the broad center and the ideological Left it successfully opposed throughout the Cold War. In a quest for meaning, voters are casting about for outsiders who can provide it for them.

In France, anyway, that may not be enough to hand a victory to Le Pen’s brand of too-well-established nationalist right-wingery. But even if she loses, one shouldn’t feel too good about European politics as a whole. Overall, this is not a healthy situation.

(H-1)Back to the Drawing Board

President Trump ordered a review and overhaul of the H-1B visa system on Tuesday that is supposed to redirect the program away from lower-paying service jobs toward high-end tech jobs. Bloomberg reports:

“Right now, H-1B visas are awarded in a totally random lottery and that’s wrong,” said Trump, who traveled to a tool factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to sign the order. “Instead, they should be given to the most skilled and highest paid” and should “never, ever be used to replace Americans.” […]

Employers seeking H-1B visas for 2018 submitted 199,000 applications this year, far exceeding the 85,000 available visas, which are currently distributed by lottery, according to figures released Monday by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But the number of applications for the lottery, conducted earlier this month, declined from 236,000 last year, possibly reflecting concern about new restrictions.

The changes are not yet specified, but the reforms are aimed at curtailing outsourcing related to H-1B visas. As the Bloomberg report continues:

In the U.S., outsourcers often bring staffers into the country on work visas, train them in the tech departments of leading corporations and then rotate them back to India where pay and living costs are lower.

Outsourcing companies now get far more visas than traditional technology companies, according to data collected through Freedom of Information Act requests by Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University who has done extensive research on the H-1B program. Tata Consultancy received 5,650 H-1Bs in 2014 while Amazon, the largest recipient in the latter group, got 877.

About 6 percent of the visas currently go to the Labor Department’s top skill level, while eight in 10 workers on the visa are paid less than the median wage for their fields, the White House said in a fact sheet distributed to reporters.

The shift in policy is expected to benefit Silicon Valley, where companies are looking to use the visa to fill positions that are relatively higher-paid (and higher-skill) than the kind of jobs that Tata Consultancy and others use it to fill. Leading Silicon Valley tech firms have lobbied heavily and often in high-profile ways for increased visa allotments in recent years. Their efforts took on an increasingly left-leaning tone in the run-up to 2016; you have to wonder if someone smart in the Trump Administration knows this new move could be read as an overture to the Zuckerbergs of the world.

In any event, the start of H-1B reform is a welcome move. We’ve been following the problems with the H-1B visa for some time at TAI. Outsourcing is certainly one of them. Advances in technology and globalization have wrought significant disruption on lower- and mid-level white-collar workers. Though these workers and their plight haven’t received the same sort of high-profile media coverage as their blue-collar counterparts, they an important source of support for Trump and their problems are real. The Administration has done a clever thing here.

But if this is all good, it is still only a start. An even bigger problem than outsourcing remains: the H-1B program incentivizes companies simultaneously to take advantage of foreign workers and to favor them over American workers. That’s because anyone brought here on an H-1B must leave the country if they are fired. This makes for more compliant workers, who on margin will take lower wages—two potential advantages, in management’s eyes, over American employees.

And there’s a third “advantage”: H-1B employees cannot leave their parent company to start start-ups. This may prove more significant in Silicon Valley than anywhere else. We’re all for strategic thinking to maintain an optimal inflow of talent to the tech world, which is one of the major drivers of America’s economy. But the H-1B as currently constituted, even after these reforms, isn’t smart—it’s a hand-out to management at the expense of laid-off American workers, exploited foreign ones, and a country deprived of the full economic dynamism of immigrants.

Long-term, the solution is legal immigration reform with a greater skills component, probably in the form of a points system. One traditional concern with a points system is that skilled immigration would become racism by another name, favoring educated, i.e. European, countries. But the shape of the H-1B debate itself points up ways in which facts on the ground are undercutting that premise. Increasingly, educated immigrants come from what was once the third-world—particularly, but not only, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. Combined with points allocations for nuclear family reunification from the end of the Second Great Wave from Mexico and Latin America, this provides (potentially) the basis for a truly global, diverse, yet more skills-based immigration reform.

For now, though, these concerns lie in the future; a somewhat-improved but still-troubled H-1B is what we’ve got. This was a good step. It would be a better one if it were a first step.

Taxing Times in Jordan

Tax season is tough for most Americans. Not typically so for Jordanians. In the Kingdom of Jordan—arguably Washington’s best Arab ally in the war against the terrorist Islamic State organization—historically only about 3 percent of the locals pay taxes.

But this year is different. Facing a burgeoning budget deficit, months ago in an effort to raise revenues the Government levied a 16 percent Value Added Tax or “VAT” on the population. Irrespective of income, citizens of the Kingdom now have to pay tariffs on a broad range of goods and services.

For a plurality of the kingdom’s families currently under the poverty line of 500 dinars—or $705—a month, this regressive tax is a having a serious impact. Although the VAT doesn’t cover medicines and many food staples like rice, sugar, wheat, bread, chicken, fish, and meat, the new tax is proving a bitter pill to swallow because the costs of gas, oil, diesel fuel, kerosene, and electricity have all increased. Annual vehicle registration fees are up, too. On some cars, fees have spiked from $120 to $268 per year.

Adding insult to injury, the price of Jordan’s favorite desert, knafeh—a sweet confection of sugar, cheese, pistachio nuts, and rose water—has swelled from $6.50 to $9 per kilo.

Other vices have also been targeted. For the nearly 45 percent (conservative estimate) of Jordanian men who smoke, the cost of cigarettes has increased about 10 percent. The price of alcohol has also surged. A single domestic tall boy purchased from a store now costs $5.

Worse, it was initially misreported that mansaf—Jordan’s national dish of lamb, rice, and yoghurt—would also be taxed, in particular by raising the price of the fermented yoghurt known as “jamid.” The allegation was so controversial it sparked a debate in parliament. To quell the rumor mongering, on February 21, the Government published an advertisement on the front page of a leading daily newspaper, describing in detail what products would be affected.

While the unprecedented media campaign may have better informed Jordanians, it clearly didn’t make them any happier. Complaining is a national pastime in the kingdom, but the ongoing griping about the price hikes this time is unusually relentless. Not surprisingly, young Jordanians are especially incensed about tax increases on mobile phone service. Tariffs included, $7 worth of cellphone talk time can now cost up to $12 to purchase. And to prevent enterprising youths from employing free web-based chat and texting alternatives such as WhatsApp and Viber, the Government has proposed charging users of these apps $5.50 per month.

Outraged, in early February, one Jordanian tried to organize a boycott campaign of the telecommunications companies. He was arrested, and released after a week. Still, product boycotts and demonstrations demanding that King Abdullah fire the Prime Minister are becoming a routine occurrence, far surpassing even the ubiquitous anti-Israel protests.

Despite the popular pushback, however, taxes in Jordan look like they are here to stay. The wars in neighboring Iraq and Syria—and hosting nearly 1.4 million Syrian refugees—have proved very costly for Jordan. To balance the budget and meet its International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic reform commitments, the kingdom needs to curtail subsidies and raise nearly $2 billion in revenues. Further price hikes on electricity are expected in the coming months as one way to raise the missing revenue.

Meanwhile, for average Jordanians already living under economic duress, the VAT is just another source of pressure. While Jordan remains reasonably stable, however, the stresses appear to be taking a toll. For example, private school enrollment—a traditional emolument for middle-class children in the kingdom—is reportedly falling, suggesting dwindling disposable income. At the same time, between 2007 and 2015, the divorce rate has more than tripled to 6.9 percent, likely, at least in part, due to financial pressures. Suicides are up as well. And all of this is occurring even though Washington gave Jordan $1.7 billion dollars in economic and military assistance last year. No wonder that the mood in the kingdom is pretty dour these days.

While tax day in the United States is no picnic, at least it’s only one day—and this year it’s now over. Lately for Jordanians, every day is tax day, so it’s never over. Now accustomed to this annual institution, generations of Americans subscribe to Mark Twain’s witticism, “The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” It’s only been a couple of months, but Jordanians, it can be assumed, agree.

Gentry Liberalism in San Francisco

Local minimum wage hikes cause restaurants to leave or shut down and deter new ones from entering, according to a new Harvard Business School study of the San Francisco Bay Area restaurant industry that contradicts the orthodox liberal view that steeply raising the cost of unskilled labor will not affect jobs or hiring.

More interesting, though, are the study’s findings about which restaurants are forced to leave by the higher wage floors. The authors compared rates of departure of restaurants across different Yelp ratings, and found that the policy hit low and mid-quality restaurants much harder than top-tier restaurants. “Our point estimates suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to an approximate 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant but the impact falls to zero for five-star restaurants.”

While a restaurant’s Yelp rating doesn’t correlate directly with its price range, this differential effect suggests that it’s easier for rich people to ignore the deleterious effects of minimum wage hikes. Virtually all of the most expensive restaurants in San Francisco have four or more stars; the city’s business and professional elite are unlikely to see many of their favorite high-end destinations pushed out of the city. Poor or middle-income workers are less likely to have the luxury of only frequenting top-rated establishments, not to mention that they are more likely to work at the restaurants that the hikes put out of business.

We’ve speculated before about the incentives for gentry liberals to support higher minimum wages that threaten to increase unemployment among the less-skilled; for example, sharpening incentives for firms to replace workers with machines will benefit Silicon Valley technologists and venture capitalists.

But this study puts the appeal of superficially progressive measures like the minimum wage hike among the wealthy into sharp relief: It will help clear out the restaurant scene of establishments they don’t want to go to while taking jobs away from people they don’t know.

South Africa Is News Again

For several years in the 1980s my attention was fixed on the great morality play of the dramatic collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa. For a while it seemed as if the promise of that event would end in the festering corruption of the presidency of Jacob Zuma. Now there are signs that the decent forces of democracy may finally come together to end the sordid Zuma era.

My involvement began with a phone call in 1985 from Johannesburg by Bobby Godsell, who was on the staff of Harry Oppenheimer, the mining tycoon and a generous supporter of the anti-apartheid movement. Godsell told me that Oppenheimer wanted to set up an “international commission” about the future of South Africa. Godsell was coming to America and wanted to talk with me about the possibility of my becoming chairman of this group. I had done some work on the issues of what was then called “Third World” development, but I asked “Why me? I have never been to South Africa, know little about it.” He replied: “That’s why we want you as chairman.” I understood what he was saying, but said that this was the first time that someone wanted me to do something on the basis of proven ignorance. We met for a long discussion at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and rather hit it off. A few weeks later I was in South Africa, assembling the group that Oppenheimer had in mind, rapidly getting an education in South African affairs. The following three years absorbed me in the most interesting project of my career as a social scientist—trying to understand a large and complicated society undergoing a rapid process of change. Also, it was morally uplifting, observing from up close the demise of a thoroughly reprehensible regime and its replacement by something much better. As I relive those days in my mind I can still feel on my skin the bracing dry warmth of the High Veldt

The project was active from 1985 to 1988. The working group consisted of about 25 individuals, most of them South Africans of every shade of color plus a few Europeans and Americans. Individuals were assigned to all the major actors in the South African political spectrum—from the radical white groups to the right of the government, to moderate groups in the center (notably the business community and the churches), to the various ethnic (“tribal”) and racial movements, to the “comrades” in the black townships (who defined themselves as “the resistance”). The members of the working group came from very different professional backgrounds—social scientists, political activists, journalists, business people, clergy, even a philosopher. To make sure that there was a common frame of reference, we assembled for three days in a remote hunting lodge in the Transvaal and hammered out a conceptual grid that everyone was willing to accept (more or less). I emphasized that each paper should be objective, representing as faithfully as possible the perceptions and the intentions of the group being studied. This led to a very interesting debate. One of the younger members was Helen Zille, an Afrikaans-language journalist who became famous for reporting that Steve Biko, the radical “black consciousness” leader, had died violently while in police custody. At the time Zille defined herself as a Marxist. She disagreed strongly with my call for objectivity: This was neither possible nor desirable—she was part of “the struggle” and everything she writes must reflect that fact. I finally said, “Okay, do what you can do.” Her assigned group was the extreme (and occasionally violent) Afrikaner right-wing movement, whom she fiercely detested. She did one of the best essays in our book—that is, she did brilliantly what she said could not be done! I have learned a lot from this incident. After the democratic transition Zille became Mayor of Cape Town, Premier of the Western Cape, then head of the Democratic Alliance, the major opposition party. She stepped down from the party leadership because she felt that the time had come for a black leader to head the opposition to the racially homogeneous African National Congress.

When I came back from my first trip to South Africa people asked me whether anything there had surprised me. Two seemingly contradictory items occurred to me. One was the oppressive reality of apartheid in the lives of black people—not the horrors of the regime such as the murder of Steve Bilko that Helen Zille had discovered. Other incidents were perhaps less brutal but also more surreal: The black philosophy professor who was a member of our working group had his home in a township broken into by some “comrades” who wanted to combine profitable free enterprise with their revolutionary activity. They made a big mistake when they tried to steal from moderately affluent blacks. The leaders of the “comrades” took a dim view of such “privatization”—they were in the habit of imposing “revolutionary justice” on the spot. Our colleague and his wife sat behind the wall with the burglars and the revolutionary tribunal, trying (apparently successfully) to convince the tribunal not to execute the burglars there and then. They had to make sure they could not be seen from the outside: A curfew was on, the police were patrolling in their armored vehicles, and they were in the habit of shooting before asking questions. A vignette of humanity under extreme pressure!

Another, quite different surprise was that I developed a certain empathy with Afrikaners—that small white tribe, speaking an antique Dutch and haunted by a dark Calvinism, clinging fiercely to their hold on the southernmost tip of a huge black continent—an empathy that had little to do with my condemnation of the political system. We were at a party in the home of a member of the English-speaking elite—most of them had been Oxbridge graduates, one of them just returned from a grouse-hunting safari in Botswana that he described in loving detail. The pictures on the wall were of horses and hunting dogs. The only non-Anglophile guests were me and a retired professor of Greek from Stellenbosch University, the Afrikaans Harvard. He had just been recruited to serve as “minister of constitutional development” and charged with the still-secret (and illegal) negotiations with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Inevitably we sat with each other. I knew that he differed from the views of President F.W. de Klerk, who hoped to save as much of apartheid as possible. I asked him if they knew each other. He smiled and said, “We knew each other from before we had shoes.” They had grown up on adjoining farms in the Free State and went barefoot until age six when they started school. These are ties deeper than most political agreements. (Which is also why members of the Afrikaans Resistance Movement were willing to be interviewed by Helen Zille.)

All of this is now decades in the past, the memories as fresh as ever. I am tempted to indulge in them. But my blog is to have some more general lessons than the sensation of dry heat evoked by memories of summer in the High Veldt. One lesson is the importance of individuals at pivotal historic moments—something that social scientists, always on the lookout for broad impersonal forces, are prone to neglect. The events in South Africa in the early 1980s are overshadowed by the powerful presence of one man, a great man if anyone can be called that: Nelson Mandela, unbroken after 27 years in prison (especially brutal in the beginning), coming out with a fluent command of Afrikaans and ready to negotiate with the enemy. His principal adversary, F.W. de Klerk, was quite remarkable too (though one would hesitate to call him great). He understood that apartheid as a political system was doomed and was prepared to lead his people to a new dispensation in which whites would no longer be in charge, but he hoped to negotiate an arrangement by which whites would not be submerged in a huge majority of black votes. (For example, there was unrealistic mention of something like a racial version of the Swiss canton system!) But every time the government came up with another complicated compromise, Mandela stood by his nonnegotiable mantra—“one person, one vote”—buttressed by a strong code of civil rights. And that is what happened in 1994, when millions of whites, standing in long lines next to their black fellow citizens, voted for Mandela for President. On other matters, he turned out to be very flexible (for example, language rights). I recall watching a scene on television as South African Air Force planes roared over the platform on which Mandela had just been sworn in: An old black man, with tears flowing down his cheeks, saying: “Now it’s my air force, too!” (Of course, this high moral tone was not sustained. The line from Mandela down through the next two black Presidents—Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma—is not an inspiring spectacle. But the constitution achieved in a remarkably bloodless transition to nonracial democracy is still in force, ready to be used for yet another transition.)

Another lesson I may mention is the unexpected fragility of what seemed like irresistibly powerful structures. I remember an interview I had with the chief of staff of the South African military. A middle-aged, self-confident, impeccably polite general, he was frankly bragging: He was in command of the most powerful military in Africa, which could be and was deployed, openly or clandestinely, almost anywhere on the continent. He spoke with mild sarcasm of the intention of the ANC to make South Africa “ungovernable.” He then mentioned two new developments: The arrival in Angola of a large unit of armored infantry from Cuba, about to be deployed under his command; and the ability of that unit to get support in the field directly from the global network of Soviet military intelligence. Actually, the sudden collapse, first of the Soviet empire and then of the Soviet Union itself, is causally related to the collapse of its South African junior ally. With the first two gone or going, the third lost its principal big power support. And I have the perfect image of this: It was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. My wife Brigitte and her brother wanted to drive across the old border and explore what, if anything, was left of some family property that had been confiscated by the Communist government in East Germany. They wanted to just drive across, but in case the so-called German Democratic Republic still existed (it had an embassy in Washington and full diplomatic relations with the United States), I thought it might be prudent to call and ask whether a visa would be required. I offered to make the call. The phone rang and rang. No one answered. The much-feared German Democratic Republic, represented by its Washington embassy, no longer existed. “How are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon.” (2 Samuel 1:20)

Islamists Score a Victory in Jakarta

Jakarta’s Christian governor was soundly beaten in his re-election bid on Wednesday, after an ugly campaign that exposed the rising influence of Islamism in Indonesia. Reuters:

Anies Baswedan won with 58 percent of the votes versus 42 percent for Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known by his Chinese nickname as “Ahok”, based on 100 percent of the votes in an unofficial “quick count” by Indikator Politik. […]

The turbulent campaign featured mass rallies led by a hardline Islamist movement, which has strengthened in recent years in a country long dominated by a moderate form of Islam. More than 80 percent of Indonesia’s population professes Islam.

“Going forward, the politics of religion is going to be a potent force,” said Keith Loveard, an analyst at Jakarta-based Concord Consulting and an author of books about Indonesian politics.

At first blush, the outcome of a Jakarta governor’s race may seem insignificant, but Baswedan’s victory points to troubling fissures within the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. The controversy started last fall, when hardline Islamist groups successfully pressured the police into investigating Purnama, the incumbent Christian governor, for blasphemy. Hardliners kept up the pressure in recent months, with protests sometimes turning violent—a symptom of the rising influence of militant Saudi-inspired Salafism in a country long known for its moderate and syncretistic form of Islam.

Baswedan himself is not an extremist, and he pledged in his victory speech to emphasize a message of “diversity and unity.” But he sailed to his larger-than-expected victory by actively courting and pandering to the conservative Islamist groups that drove the opposition to Purnama. For politicians looking to match his success, that is going to look like a playbook worth emulating.