Sunday, February 25, 2024

Biden or Trump, hawkish economic approach on China to intensify

IMPERIALISM; ONLY THE MASKS CHANGE

2024/02/24

Experts say the direction of pressure in Washington is for more hawkishness on China

Washington (AFP) - In a shift from tit-for-tat tariffs and strong-arm tactics to tech restrictions and investment curbs, US policy towards China has become more targeted under President Joe Biden -- though still hardline.

Despite differences between Democrats and Republicans, analysts expect Washington's approach to Beijing will only become tougher, whether Biden or former president Donald Trump wins another White House term.

"I think the direction of pressure in Washington is absolutely in one direction, which is more hawkishness," said Joshua Meltzer, senior fellow at Brookings Institution.

Already, Biden has largely maintained Trump-era tariffs, rolled out export control restrictions to curtail Beijing's ability to buy and make certain high-end chips, and unveiled an order to curb outbound investments to China.

Officials are also seeking to boost self-reliance in key areas including clean energy supply chains, while further action on data flows is expected.

Meltzer told AFP: "There is currently congressional pressure to do more."
Policy, not partisan split

With citizen concerns over trade, business and manufacturing cutting across party lines, the preferred degree of toughness on China tends to be a policy rather than partisan divide, said Jamieson Greer, partner at law firm King & Spalding.

Greer, formerly US Trade Representative chief of staff during the Trump administration, believes there are two camps in Washington.

One views China as an existential threat to the economy, national security or both, therefore justifying strong and broad protection measures.

The other is cautious about overestimating the China threat, and concerned with imposing tough trade and economic measures.

But both groups assume risks associated with China -- a shift that became prominent nearly a decade ago.

"It became big during the 2016 presidential election cycle, when candidate Donald Trump was very, very vocal about trade issues and China in particular," Greer said.

Trump gave voice to something many people "agreed with on both sides of the aisle" but were unwilling to say aloud, he added.
Different policies

But experts agree that a second Biden or Trump administration would diverge on policies.

The Biden administration does not expect to "reach a deal with China, where they're going to make these major reforms and changes," Meltzer said.

"It's really about, how do you adjust to the reality of China? How do you bring allies along?"

There is a "notion of derisking from a security perspective as well," he added.

But the Trump administration favored using US leverage to broker a deal changing China's behavior, Meltzer said, referring to the Phase One trade agreement culminating from a truce in the escalating tariffs war.

Should Trump be elected, some expect to see higher tariffs targeting China, given his proposal of more than 60 percent levies on Chinese goods.

The move could draw Chinese retaliation, stalling trade between the world's top two economies.

"I think we'd see a lot more return to tariffs, I think we'd also see a lot less cooperation with allies," Meltzer said. "The US would be more isolated on some of these issues."

Biden has shown willingness to maintain existing measures on China while being narrow and focused in future moves, and this is unlikely to change, Greer added.

A second Biden administration could also seek cooperation with China on issues like climate and have more room to engage -- given reduced pressure to appear tough on Beijing to deflect criticism from Trump, analysts believe.
Domestic policies

Ongoing efforts to maintain a US lead in tech will probably continue, no matter who wins the election.

But a Trump administration could show less support for onshoring advanced semiconductor manufacturing via initiatives like the CHIPS Act, or for major investments in onshoring electric vehicle and other critical mineral supply chains, said Paul Triolo, associate partner for China at Albright Stonebridge Group.

But he added: "It is likely that regardless of who wins in November, the US administration would continue to implement existing technology controls, and expand controls into other technology sectors."

These include biotechnology, electric and smart vehicles.

Last month, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that Chinese-made EVs bring security risks, given the vast amounts of data collected.

Washington would also likely tighten restrictions on transfers of certain types of data to companies and organizations in China, Triolo said.

© Agence France-Presse

The crisis of Soviet Ukraine

The Maidan Revolution didn’t free my people

Volodymyr Ishchenko
FEBRUARY 24, 2024

“Whichever way this war ends,” thought Volodymyr Ishchenko on 24 February 2022, “I will no longer have a homeland.” In the preface to his new book, Towards The Abyss, the iconoclastic sociologist outlines his Soviet-Ukrainian identity as distinct from Ukraine’s Russian-speakers or the population of its south-eastern regions. Instead of ethnicity, these people were shaped by the forces of social revolution, class and modernisation. Looking back at the post-Soviet decades, Ishchenko argues that the political fragmentation of Soviet Ukrainians and the fragility of the “Eastern” (misleadingly called “pro-Russian”) camp in Ukrainian politics, as opposed to the politically stronger “Western” (“pro-European”) camp, is an underestimated cause of the ongoing war.

Below, we republish the second half of the preface, a blend of family memoir and national history:

***

For over 30 years, the Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia advanced a very specific project of Ukrainian modernity. Its two main components were a rejection of Soviet modernisation and an anti-Russian articulation of Ukrainian national identity. These intellectuals sought to draw an equivalence between everything Ukrainian (in their specific articulation) and everything modern, while on the other hand they hoped to associate everything backward with everything Soviet and Russian.

In effect, they sought to reverse the symbolic hierarchy that identified Ukrainian with backwardness, which they feared existed behind the screen of the Soviet internationalist project. “Ukrainian” was to be seen as young, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, stylish, mobile, liberal, well-educated, successful. The “Soviet” and “Russian”, on the other hand, had to become old, conservative, provincial, rigid, clinging to dying industries, poorly or inadequately educated, in bad taste, losers.

This polarisation did not require complete homogeneity. After all, modernity is also about free rational debate. The fulfilment of Ukrainian modernity required “Ukrainian feminists”, “Ukrainian liberals”, “Ukrainian Leftists” — as well as Ukrainian Rightists. Of course there should be discussion of the nationalist crimes of the Second World War (with the obligatory disclaimer that the Soviets were worse). Of course there should be concern about Right-wing violence today (with obligatory disclaimers that it benefited Putin). And so on and so on. But at the critical moments when these discussions could really matter politically, and not just appease the “enlightened” conscience, all the red lines were strictly enforced, and you had to get back in line. Or get in trouble.

I was so much like these people. We had so much in common in our biographies. We went through the same universities, the same scholarships, the same programmes, the same civil-society institutions, the same conferences. We spoke the same languages. But I had not begun to think like them. My peer group often reacted to this with hatred. In one trashing of me by nationalist intellectuals, I was portrayed as a danger to the dear cause of the “Ukrainian nation-building project”. It was not because of what I wrote: they typically did not engage in any substantive discussion. And regardless of what I could possibly write, there were so much stronger forces in the media and politics that any imaginable “threat” I posed was negligible. No, it was certainly not what I did that threatened the nationalist cause, but, I think, simply the existence of people like me. We could challenge the national-liberals as social equals in forums. We were an unwanted nuisance to their monopoly. Not really traitors to an imagined community, but traitors to a real existing social group. Class traitors, not national traitors.

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Here was the real hatred. We were Ukrainian and modern, but not like them. Soviet Ukrainians who could have become comprador intellectuals in a peripheralising country, but refused this role. We resisted their collective gaslighting. That is why there was no rational engagement, only denial, silence, rejection, cancellation. One could write thousands of words against Russian imperialism and yet still be called a “troubadour of the empire”. One could literally say “I hate Putin” and still be accused of spreading Russian propaganda. Our intellectuals were not rated as intellectuals. Our scholarship was not scholarship but “political activism”. The political repression against us was not political repression, because threats and violence allegedly never occurred. We were simply not allowed to exist, because, if we did exist, the specific articulation of modernity and backwardness in Ukraine would no longer work. Whatever we did, we could not simply be.

We were potential embryos of an alternative Ukrainian modernity, one that could build an “organic” representation for Soviet Ukrainians — for what they were, not for what they were “supposed” to become in the view of nationalist intellectuals; that is, to become like them or to disappear altogether (at least from Ukraine’s public sphere). We could offer an alternative for Ukraine that could also be more appealing globally and in line with future trends, or at least with what more and more young people around the world would prefer as their future.

Why didn’t it work out this way? Many have compared the post-Soviet conflicts with the collapse of empires of the past: new contested borders were drawn; ethnonational groups that were part of the imperial majority became minorities in the new states; groups that were formerly oppressed minorities were given opportunities for revenge. These comparisons are typically blind to social class and revolutionary dynamics, which provide a very different perspective.

For example, the political crises and conflicts that followed the collapse of the great European empires after the First World War were fundamentally different to those that followed the demise of the multinational Soviet Union. The post-Soviet crisis was the terminal crisis of a social revolution, not an ancien régime. The new nationalisms of a century ago blossomed in the context of modernisation, not de-modernisation. The Twenties and Thirties were a period of intense politicisation, when organised revolutionary workers fought against no less committed and organised fascist counter-revolutionaries. The post-Soviet years, by contrast, were a period of atomisation, of general apathy, disturbed only by short-term maidan mobilisations. In sum, the post-WW1 crisis was a stalemate of strengthening social forces, while the post-Soviet crisis was a stalemate of mutual weakness.

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Putin has enabled Ukrainian nationhood
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As noted above, the pro-Western intellectual and civic elites in post-Soviet Ukraine could offer nothing comparable to Soviet modernisation. The majority of Ukrainians did not buy their dubious promises that they too could join the global middle class. But the Russian elite’s offer was even less attractive. They typically compensated for their weakness in soft power with hard power. But even when they resorted to escalating coercion, they exposed their profound weaknesses.

There were three critical moments when the Ukrainian majority broke away from Russia, ending up further removed from its orbit on each occasion. Each of these was related to the failure or mid-course correction of military coercion initiated by the Russian elite. Ukrainians responded to the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991 by voting for independence, only eight months after having voted to preserve the Soviet Union. In response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas in 2014, support for Russia-led reintegration projects became limited to a small minority in Ukraine, whereas they had previously been able to claim a majority or at least a plurality. The full-scale invasion in 2022 provoked the strongest anti-Russian consolidation in Ukraine ’s history.

These massive reactions to Russian coercion were purely negative in nature — rejections of what Russia was doing, rather than support for the West or for Ukrainian ethnonationalism. However, it was the “Western” camp that was able to seize the opportunity of these negative shocks to advance the positive substance of its agenda. This happened because of the profound class and political asymmetries between the “Western” and “Eastern” camps. The political capitalists of the “Eastern” camp did not develop their own civil society and Soviet Ukrainians remained too atomised to build their organic representation from below. Their plebeian “anti-maidans” were never a match for the maidan protests they were responding to. If Volodymyr Zelensky’s landslide victory over Petro Poroshenko in 2019 — after the incumbent ran on an aggressive nationalist programme — offered a last hope, this was dashed by the 2022 invasion.

As a result of the failure to develop and defend a pluralist nation-building project that would “organically” grow from the Soviet Ukraine, a large group of Ukrainians is now becoming the object of assimilation policies, squeezed between the “Western” nation-building projects of Ukrainian bourgeois civil society and Putin’s nostrum of “one and the same people”. In his notorious 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, Putin articulated the Ukrainian-Russian distinction as a difference of regional-cultural variety within the same “people” as a political unit. However, there is in fact less of a cultural difference between the population of the urbanised and mostly Russian-speaking south-eastern Ukraine and the Russians, and more of a political difference.

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The urban culture of the late Soviet period, with its largely homogeneous cuisine throughout the USSR, typical references and jokes from literature and cinema, rituals and holidays, is far more relevant to them than the pre-modern ethnic traditions of Ukrainian and Russian villages. If some of the previously Russian-speaking Ukrainians switched to Ukrainian as a reaction to the invasion, it was clearly a political choice for them, not determined by their ethnic identity. The people feel more connected to the national imagined community of Ukraine, and less to Putin’s, even if they have a different vision of the nation than the speakers of the “Western” camp. In 2016, only 26% of Ukrainians agreed with the statement that Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people”, although 51% agreed that Ukrainians and Russians are different but “brotherly people”.1 Both figures are likely to have fallen dramatically after 2022.

For the “Western” camp, the weak cultural difference of some Ukrainians from Russians has always been a political threat. It was seen not only as legitimising Russian expansionism, but also as a threat to their elitist ersatz-modernisation project. Quite early after the Russian missiles hit Ukrainian soil and Russian troops crossed the border, the national-liberal intellectuals understood that this was not only a threat, but also an opportunity for “knife solutions” — a radical, uncompromising transformation of the whole country in their image and likeness on a scale that was impossible before: the war helps to silence the voices of discontent.2 The substance of “decolonisation” was not the building of a stronger sovereign state with a robust public sector — one that would contradict transnational capital, their crucial partner.

Rather, it was the eradication of anything related to Russia or the Soviet Union from the Ukrainian public sphere, including the removal of Russian-language books from libraries, the ban on teaching Russian in schools, even in predominantly Russian-speaking cities like Odessa, and even a ridiculously obscurantist attempt (which passed the first reading in the Ukrainian parliament) to ban the citation of Russian and Russian-language sources in science and education. Add to this the banning of political parties, including some of Ukraine’s oldest, such as the Socialist and Communist parties, which have represented the “Eastern” camp for decades, and further repression of popular opposition media and bloggers stigmatised as “pro-Russian”, even when they expressed no sympathy for the invasion. Ironically, the result is similar to the situation of Ukrainians in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire: not so much discriminated against as individuals, but prohibited from expressing a distinct collective identity that would be seen as treasonous and repressed.

In Ukraine, we can’t be Soviet anymore. In Russia, it does not look like we can be Ukrainians. Soviet Ukrainians were the product of a social revolution; its degradation destroyed them as a political community. First, the late Soviet and post-Soviet leadership became seen as nothing more than a corrupt, self-serving elite. The atomised masses responded with frequent but poorly organised and amorphous protests that, when successful, only reproduced and intensified the underlying crisis. Unlike social revolutions, the maidans did not bring radical transformations in favour of the popular classes; they typically only increased social inequality. The maidan revolutions did not even build a stronger state but only destabilised the existing one, allowing domestic and transnational elite rivals to seize the opportunity to advance their interests and agendas. The post-Soviet elite responded only with more coercion, which eventually escalated into war (see how it worked out with the successful repression of the 2020 uprising in Belarus). This set the stage for the flourishing not of developmental national ideologies but of regressive neo-tribalist identities. There was no strong force from below to counteract this dynamic. The processes of the escalating crisis of hegemony are universal, but their manifestations in the post-Soviet space are of a rather unique magnitude.
“In Ukraine, we can’t be Soviet anymore. In Russia, it does not look like we can be Ukrainians.”

The decomposition of a political community is the ultimate endpoint of these crisis trends. Divided by frontlines and borders, some volunteering, some being mobilised by force, some collaborating, some fleeing abroad, some trying to maintain a normal life and work in their hometowns, some simply trying to survive, taking different positions on the war (who even cares what “Ukrainian voices” who speak from Donetsk or Sevastopol think?), lacking our political and public representatives, with limited space for expression, with broken ties and suppressed discussions — is there even a common name, a claimed identity for all of us now? It is easy to pretend that we have never even existed, at most a dead-end branch from the main line of Ukrainian nation-building. But one can be sure that without a new cycle of modernising development in Ukraine, Soviet Ukrainians will not be fully assimilated. The political communication required to define our common identity, interests and collective actions in relation to Ukraine, and the states where we will end up, may start again.

The revolutionary project initiated by the Bolsheviks a century ago is no longer embedded in the national communities where it once took root. For the contemporary Left, this should mean not a break with the project of progress, rationality and universal emancipation, but rather the search for a political (and perhaps no longer national) community in which our efforts could be more effectively applied. Any new social revolution would learn from the Soviet one as much as the Bolsheviks learned from the French Revolution of 1789 — understanding its limits and acknowledging its (sometimes unjustifiable) mistakes, but also registering and building on its achievements.

Could Ukraine again be a core part of a social-revolutionary movement? The extent of the ethnonationalist and anti-communist reformatting of the country’s politics, society and ideology may leave no hope for this in the foreseeable future. But consider how dramatically the memory of the Second World War has changed over time. Who could have imagined in 1945, after the Nazi war of extermination and enslavement on the Eastern Front, which murdered between one-sixth and one-quarter of the entire civilian population of Ukraine, that the descendants of the survivors would fight using German tanks against Russians on the very same battlefields where they had fought in the Red Army against German tanks, and would do so while demolishing the remaining monuments to their heroic ancestors? It is unlikely to be the final ironic twist of Ukrainian history.

FOOTNOTES

“Konsolidatsiia ukrainskoho suspilstva: shliakhy, vyklyky, perspektyvy” (Consolidation of Ukrainian society: Paths, challenges, prospects), Razumkov Centre, 2016, p. 71.

S. Rudenko, ‘Spetsoperatsiaa “Derusyfikatsiia.” Interviu z holovnym redaktorom Istorychnoi pravdy Vakhtanhom Kipiani’ (Special operation ‘Derussification’: Interview with the editor-in-chief of Istorychna pravda Vakhtang Kipiani), Ukrainska Pravda, 25 April 2022.

Volodymyr Ishchenko taught sociology at Kyiv universities, and is now a researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His first book, TOWARDS THE ABYSS: UKRAINE FROM MAIDAN TO WAR, is out now from Verso.

Two years after Russian invasion, Ukrainians continue to arrive in Manitoba

By Daisy Woelk Global News

Posted February 23, 2024

With Saturday marking two years since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, nearly 29,000 Ukrainians have arrived at the province’s reception centre. Teagan Rasche looks at how Ukrainians are settling in Manitoba and where the challenges still lie.

Saturday marks two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, and many Ukrainians continue to seek refuge in Canada.

Manitoba alone has welcomed thousands of people forced to leave their war-torn homeland. Nearly 29,000 Ukrainians have arrived at the province’s reception centre in the Winnipeg airport, and more than 23,600 provincial health cards issued.

They include people like Mila Shykota, who decided to move to Winnipeg and call Canada ‘home’ in August 2022.

“When several fragments attacked several houses near us and destroyed people’s homes, we decided to leave Ukraine to avoid the threat to our lives,” she said.

Moving here was an easy choice because her husband used to go to the University of Manitoba almost a decade ago, she said. “I knew everything about the winters in Manitoba and we had friends here.”

The family also moved to an area with a dense Ukrainian population. “When I just came to Canada I was impressed by how big the Ukrainian community in Manitoba is, and how Canadians support Ukraine and Ukrainians,” Shykota said.

Joanne Lewandoski, President of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Manitoba Provincial Council said, per capita, Winnipeg has the most Ukrainians in Canada.

Canada to provide $2.2 bn in Ukraine aid in 2024

MBeditor

Canada said on Saturday it would provide 3.02 billion Canadian dollars ($2.2 billion) in financial and military support for Ukraine this year as the two countries signed a security agreement.

“We will stand with Ukraine with whatever it takes, for as long as it takes,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was visiting Kyiv on the second anniversary of the war, said in a statement announcing the funding.

Kyiv also signed a bilateral security deal with Italy on Saturday, Zelensky said, following similar deals struck with Britain, France, Germany and Denmark in recent weeks.

The 10-year agreement between Ottawa and Kyiv “outlines key, long-term security commitments for Canada to continue supporting Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty and territorial integrity, protects its people, and rebuilds its economy for the future,” Trudeau’s office said.

The document includes funding pledges and enhanced cooperation across political, military, security, economic and humanitarian areas, but is not a defence pact or guarantee of military protection.

Kyiv has cast the deals as an important show of the West’s long-term commitment as its resources are stretched and Russia is making its first gains on the battlefield in almost a year.

Ukraine relies on tens of billions of dollars in military support to provide its army with ammunition, artillery, tanks, rockets and other equipment.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, also in Kyiv, also said Saturday the first payment under a new 50-billion-euro ($54.2 billion) EU aid programme for Ukraine, worth some 4.5 billion euros ($4.9 billion), would be disbursed in March.

But as the war enters its third year, there is still no sign of progress on Ukraine’s most important funding stream — a $60-billion package of support from the United States.

Protests across Germany on Ukraine war anniversary

AFP

Thousands of protesters rallied across Germany Saturday in support of Ukraine on the second anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion, even as doubts grow about Kyiv’s chances of victory.

Rallies took place in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt and other cities.

In the capital, thousands gathered in front of the Brandenburg Gate waving banners that read “stand up for Ukraine” and “arm Ukraine now”.

Addressing the crowd, Berlin mayor Kai Wegner decried Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “brutal war of aggression”.

“He wants to wipe out Ukraine, he wants to wipe out the identities of Ukrainians,” he said.

“But we won’t let happen. We will stand by Ukraine’s side.”

He called on Berlin to deliver long-range Taurus missiles long sought by Kyiv, a demand that the German government has so far refused for fears they could also strike inside Russia.

Organisers said about 10,000 people took part in the rally. Police put the figure at around 5,000.

In a square in the historic heart of Frankfurt, about 1,000 people took part in a rally, according to police, where they heard calls from speakers to accelerate the delivery of weapons to Kyiv.

Ukraine’s armed forces have in recent times acknowledged facing frontline problems, pointing to a lack of Western aid, while Russian forces have been making gains.

“The West must do more to support Ukraine,” Achem Lobreuer, a 58-year-old engineer, told AFP at the rally.

This included delivering more armaments, but also “supporting negotiations”, he said.

“My message to Putin is that he must end this war.”

Maksym Godovnikov, a 38-year-old Ukrainian at the Frankfurt rally, also urged Ukraine’s allies to step up military support.

“If we have more weapons, we can protect ourselves and also win back land that was previously conquered,” he said.

Rallies were also taking place in other European capitals to mark the day Russia sent its troops into Ukraine, bringing war back to Europe for the first time in decades.

The anniversary comes as concerns grow in Europe about Ukraine’s faltering efforts to fend off Moscow.

According to a survey released last week, only 10 percent of Europeans believe Ukraine can defeat Russia on the battlefield.

The survey conducted last month across 12 EU countries showed that on average 20 percent of those asked believed Russia could win, and 37 percent thought the conflict would end in a compromise settlement.

Netanyahu’s ‘Day After’ Gaza Plan is a Non-starter

Rather than provide a pathway to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the plan aims to squash Palestinian national aspirations and ensure continued Israeli control.

BY DR. JAMES M. DORSEY
FEBRUARY 25, 2024

Image source: X @netanyahu

Rather than provide a pathway to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the plan aims to squash Palestinian national aspirations and ensure continued Israeli control.

It also assumes, against all odds, that Israel will succeed in destroying Hamas. Destroying Hamas is a goal of Israel’s war that a majority of Israelis believe is unachievable.

Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal, entitled ‘Plan for the day after Hamas,” also flies in the face of formal and/or informal red lines laid down by the United States; various Arab states, including Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestine Authority, and, yes, Hamas.

Those red lines include no Israeli reoccupation of any part of Gaza, no reduction of Gazan territory, and no rejection of Palestinian national rights to a state alongside Israel.

The red lines also mandate a credible process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a concept absent from Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestions.

Mr. Netanyahu’s plan makes reconstruction of war-devastated and traumatised Gaza conditional on Israel’s ability to demilitarise the Strip and reshape Palestinian attitudes and aspirations in Israel’s mold to ensure compliance with Israeli rather than Palestinian needs.

“Rebuilding Gaza will only be possible once the Strip has been demilitarized and once a process of deradicalization has started. The rehabilitation plan will be carried out with funding from and under the leadership of countries of which Israel approves,” the plan said.

If anything, Mr. Netanyahu’s plan highlights the yawning gap between Israel’s vision of the future and that of all other major players.

As a result, any effort that transcends ending the war and freezing the conflict will have to involve significant change not only on the Palestinian side, embodied in the phrase, ‘revitalisation of the Palestine Authority,’ but also in Israel.

Ultimately, that change will have to include a recognition by Israelis and Palestinians that their concerns and fears are mirror images of one another and need to be taken into account equally and equitably.

That notion, too, is absent from Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal. It kicks off with the proposition that “Israel will maintain operational freedom of action in the entire Gaza Strip, without a time limit, for the purpose of preventing the renewal of terrorism and thwarting threats from Gaza.”

Mr. Netanyahu ignores the fact that Palestinians are as traumatised by Israel’s Gaza war conduct as Israelis are by Hamas’ October 7 attack that sparked the latest hostilities and carnage.

In other words, Palestinians feel as much need to be shielded against Israeli violence as Israelis feel the need for protection against Palestinian violence.

Implicit in Mr. Netanyahu’s vision is the notion that Israel has a right to defend itself and ensure its security at whatever price.

His vision not only denies Palestinians the same right but also, leaving aside the nature of Palestinian resistance, the right to oppose occupation and pursue their right to self-determination, anchored in international law.

In a sign of the times, Ma Xinmin, the Chinese foreign ministry’s legal adviser, this week defended at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) the Palestinian’s right to resistance under international law “including armed struggle“, which “in this context, is distinguished from acts of terrorism.”

Mr. Ma was speaking during week-long ICJ hearings on the legality of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

Mr. Netanyahu’s plan explicitly rejects the international community’s red lines by insisting that a “security space established in the Gaza Strip in the area bordering Israel will exist as long as there is a security need for it.”

Adding fuel to the fire, Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, intends to emphasise his problematic concept of security by pushing forward in the coming days the construction of more than 3,000 new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank in response to a Palestinian attack on the Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. One person was killed and ten others wounded in the attack.

In demanding that Israel have a security presence in Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu is in effect seeking to ensure that no third country or entity would be a party to governing and rehabilitating post-war Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu appears to envision that Israel’s security presence would be along Gaza’s border with Egypt in a move that is designed to maintain the kind of control of what goes in and out of the Strip that has hampered economic and social development in Gaza for almost two decades.

“Israel will maintain a ‘southern closure’ on the Gaza-Egypt border, for the purpose of preventing the re-intensification of terrorist elements in the Gaza Strip. The ‘Southern Barrier’ will operate, as much as possible, in cooperation with Egypt and with the assistance of the US and will be based on measures to prevent smuggling from Egypt both underground and above ground, including at the Rafah crossing,” according to Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal.

Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on demilitarization “beyond what is required for maintaining public order” constitutes an effort to destroy Hamas’ military capability by other means after its military campaign failed to achieve its objectives.

Leaving aside Hamas, which insists on ending armed struggle at the end of a process to resolve the conflict rather than as a pre-condition, it’s unlikely that any Arab or Palestinian party would engage in governing Palestinian lands under Israeli tutelage and without a credible peace process.

Similarly, no Palestinian or Arab party is likely to engage in a plan that is designed to counter Palestinian national aspirations under the mum of ‘deradicalisation’ and would involve the dissolution and replacement of the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and reform of religious, educational, and welfare institutions in the Gaza Strip.

Despite recent Israeli and US claims that 12 UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Israel’s long-standing campaign against the agency is driven by the fact that its educational materials and social work allow for the promotion of Palestinian national identity.

Moreover, more than half a century of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands illustrates what Mr. Netanyahu means by ‘deradicalisation.’ Israel bans in Israel itself as well as in the occupied West Bank any expression of Palestinian national identity, including displaying a Palestinian flag.

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, this week bolstered Mr. Netanyahu’s approach by overwhelmingly rejecting “unilateral” attempts to impose on Israel a timeline for the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

The Netanyahu proposal and the Knesset vote came amid reports that the United States, Qatar, Egypt, and the Palestine Authority were working on a plan for a comprehensive peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

US President Joe Biden’s top Middle East envoy, Brett McGirk, was in Israel to discuss a temporary ceasefire in the war and a Hamas-Israel prisoner swap as Mr. Netanyahu made his plan public.

Mr. Netanyahu’s vision and the also constitute a response to the ICJ hearings that could lead the court to declare Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands illegal, a finding that would shape any future Israel-Palestinian negotiations.

The vote implicitly reinforced Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal that ends with the assertion that “Israel outright rejects international dictates regarding a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. Such a settlement will only be achieved through honest negotiations between the parties, without preconditions.”

Mr. Netanyahu is correct that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.

The problem is that in Mr. Netanyahu’s vision Palestinian negotiators would be compliant negotiators sensitive to Israeli needs rather than credible representatives of widely held Palestinian national aspirations.

In addition, Mr. Netanyahu’s call for negotiations without preconditions is deceptive. Mr. Netanyahu’s precondition is that he will only talk to Palestinians who recognise Israel as a Jewish state and renounce violence upfront.

That approach was adopted by Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat when he engaged in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

More than 30 years later, Palestinians have yet to fulfill their aspirations.

No doubt, Palestinians are often their own worst enemy. However, that does not absolve Israel from responsibility for doing and having done everything to ensure those aspirations never materialise.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and three forthcoming books, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africaas well as Creating Frankenstein: The Saudi Export of Ultra-conservatism and China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom.

SMOKERS’ CORNER: PERFORMATIVE PROVOCATEURS

Nadeem F. Paracha

DAWN

Published February 25, 2024

Illustration by Abro

Back in the late 1980s, a bunch of guys and I started to publish a ‘revolutionary’ newsletter. We were all in our early twenties and some of us had also been involved in various movements against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. The newsletter was started a year after Zia’s demise. We all fancied ourselves as ‘Marxists’.

I was considered to be the most experienced ‘revolutionary’ in the group because I had been jailed twice (1985, 1986). But most folk in the group had never been arrested. In fact, one such chap was the main financier of the newsletter. One afternoon, the mother of our financier just happened to enter the room where we used to gather and write the newsletter. We weren’t there at the time. But we had left behind dozens of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. She also managed to get hold of the newsletter. She was shocked. Concerned that her son’s ‘useless friends’ were destroying his future, she confronted him.

The next day, when we reached his house, he told us that we should stop coming to his place. Weeks later, when a friend of mine, the late journalist Irfan Malik, asked me why had I stopped publishing the newsletter, I told him the reason. The next day he handed me an article, saying that I should publish one last issue of the newsletter and put his article in it.

The article went on and on about the challenges faced by young middle class folk who wanted to bring about change. In the end, Irfan wrote: ‘Agar ammi mana na kartien, tau inquilaab zaroor aata’ [Had mom not stopped us, the revolution would have surely come].

‘Simulated subversion’ or ‘designer resistance’ may seem to be revolutionary but is largely staged and very much part of the mainstream ethos that it claims to be subverting

So why am I recalling this tragic story of a revolution that was sabotaged by a mom? Well, lately, one is coming across a lot of ‘revolutionaries’ on social, print and electronic media, who are absolutely sure that they have climbed aboard a wave that will completely drown the ‘establishment’. Not all of these hopefuls are young, mind you. Many among them are middle-aged TV anchors as well.

One such gentleman, a famous TV anchor serving a large corporate media house, posted a quote by the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose (d.1945): “Freedoms are not given. They need to be snatched.” Incidentally, this quote was also used by the Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut, who is a huge admirer of the Indian prime minister and Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi.

This tickled me. As did the surreal spectacle of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Shahbaz Sharif reciting verses from the socialist poet Habib Jalib (in 2013); and in 2012, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) using Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem Umeed-i-Sahar in a JI video. All of this can be clubbed together as examples of what is called ‘simulated subversion’, or ‘designer resistance.’ In meaning, more or less, both the terms are one and the same.

Simulated subversion is about crafting events, texts, products, etc, which may seem to be subversive, but they are largely staged and very much part of the mainstream ethos that they claim to be subverting. For example, our newsletter was a simulation of what we imagined ‘underground’ groups operated like whereas, in reality, we were entirely ‘overground’ and seeking attention from within our own class.

It made us feel subversive and revolutionary, and maybe even sexy. Had it been about anything a bit more authentic, an angry mom could never have been able to stop the revolution. Same is the case regarding the TV anchor quoting Bose. It was simulated subversion, because there is absolutely no possibility of the anchor throwing away his highly paid job, shun the lifestyle of the privileged class that he is a part of, and then — to paraphrase the Chinese communist ideologue, Mao Zedong — plunge into the sea of common people and swim in it like a fish.

Bose actually did this. But the TV anchor and Kangana Ranaut used the quote for impact alone, without getting into the details of what the act of snatching freedom actually demands. Also, in both cases, the social media site X was used, which in itself is perhaps the most apt space for demonstrating simulated subversions.

When Shahbaz Sharif of the centre-right PML-N, and a politician ‘trusted’ by the ‘establishment’, recited verses from a poem by Jalib, he was simulating the subversion of his party’s image of being conservative. JI, a party which was more than glad when Faiz was arrested during the early years of Ziaul Haq’s reactionary dictatorship, was simulating the subversion of Faiz’s words grounded in revolutionary Marxist imagery, and turning them into revolutionary imagery popular among Islamists.

JI’s simulation in this regard can also suggest that, by 2012, JI had become an entirely irrelevant political entity, searching for some revolutionary traction. Incidentally, at the time, the party’s chief was Syed Munawar Hussain, who had begun his political career as a member of a left-wing student organisation, but who had then switched sides to join the student wing of the JI. Maybe using Faiz for the video was his idea?

‘Designer resistance’ is almost similar to ‘simulated subversion’ but, in the former’s case, the simulation of subversion is allowed by the subverted. In the 2009 book Authenticity and the Cultural Politics of Work, the academic Peter Fleming wrote that, in various fields, those in control “preempt serious criticism by encouraging resistance of an expressive and aesthetic kind.” This way they can control the criticism.

For example, when the Musharraf regime was on its last legs in 2007, the military establishment ‘allowed’ the media to openly criticise the struggling general in the name of democracy. Once the general was gone, the establishment then encouraged and manoeuvred the media’s attention towards the criticism of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the PML-N in the name of freedom of speech.

However, the ‘message’ now was that Musharraf was an individual and the military was an institution that dare not be spoken about in the same breath as political parties were. What’s more, the establishment fostered the ‘rise’ of Imran Khan, who became a ubiquitous televised manifestation or simulated subversion of the ‘corruption’ of the PPP and the PML-N.

Recently, the current military establishment allowed the ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment prevailing on social media and TV channels, as a way to allow the venting out of this sentiment, after the manner in which the recent elections became controversial. Yet, this is designer resistance, which can be controlled and tuned out at will. But everyone is being allowed to feel as if they’re on the side of the ‘truth’.

Outside the media and X, though, actual subversion, which one saw in May last year, will always be handled in the most aggressive manner. At least 90 percent of the prominent men and women posing as revolutionaries on TV and X these days, will not be found among those who again feel the need to go out to ‘snatch freedom.’ Simulation alone is their strongest suit.

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 25th, 2024

Tax-free status of movie, music and games traded online is on table as WTO nations meet in Abu Dhabi

The Netflix logo is shown in this photo from the company’s website, in New York, Feb. 2, 2023. Since late last century and the early days of the web, providers of digital media like Netflix and Spotify have had a free pass when it comes to international taxes on films, video games and music that are shipped across borders through the internet. But now, a global consensus on the issue may be starting to crack.

(AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)Read More

The Spotify app is displayed on an iPad in Baltimore, March 20, 2018. Since late last century and the early days of the web, providers of digital media like Netflix and Spotify have had a free pass when it comes to international taxes on films, video games and music that are shipped across borders through the internet. But now, a global consensus on the issue may be starting to crack.

(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

BY JAMEY KEATEN
February 24, 2024

GENEVA (AP) — Since late last century and the early days of the web, providers of digital media like Netflix and Spotify have had a free pass when it comes to international taxes on films, video games and music that are shipped across borders through the internet.

But now, a global consensus on the issue may be starting to crack.

As the World Trade Organization opens its latest biannual meeting of government ministers Monday, its longtime moratorium on duties on e-commerce products — which has been renewed almost automatically since 1998 — is coming under pressure as never before.

This week in Abu Dhabi, the WTO’s 164 member countries will take up a number of key issues: Subsidies that encourage overfishing. Reforms to make agricultural markets fairer and more eco-friendly. And efforts to revive the Geneva-based trade body’s system of resolving disputes among countries.

All of those are tall orders, but the moratorium on e-commerce duties is perhaps the matter most in play. It centers on “electronic transmissions” — music, movies, video games and the like — more than on physical goods. But the rulebook isn’t clear on the entire array of products affected.

“This is so important to millions of businesses, especially small- and medium-sized businesses,” WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said. “Some members believe that this should be extended and made permanent. Others believe ... there are reasons why it should not.”

“That’s why there’s been a debate and hopefully — because it touches on lives of many people — we hope that ministers would be able to make the appropriate decision,” she told reporters recently.

Under WTO’s rules, major decisions require consensus. The e-commerce moratorium can’t just sail through automatically. Countries must actively vote in favor for the extension to take effect.

Four proposals are on the table: Two would extend the suspension of duties. Two — separately presented by South Africa and India, two countries that have been pushing their interests hard at the WTO — would not.

Proponents say the moratorium benefits consumers by helping keep costs down and promotes the wider rollout of digital services in countries both rich and poor.

Critics say it deprives debt-burdened governments in developing countries of tax revenue, though there’s debate over just how much state coffers would stand to gain.

The WTO itself says that on average, the potential loss would be less than one-third of 1% of total government revenue.

The stakes are high. A WTO report published in December said the value of “digitally delivered services” exports grew by more than 8% from 2005 to 2022 — higher than goods exports (5.6%) and other-services exports (4.2%).

Growth has been uneven, though. Most developing countries don’t have digital networks as extensive as those in the rich world. Those countries see less need to extend the moratorium — and might reap needed tax revenue if it ends.

South Africa’s proposal, which seeks to end the moratorium, calls for the creation of a fund to receive voluntary contributions to bridge the “digital divide.” It also wants to require “leading platforms” to boost the promotion of “historically disadvantaged” small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Industry, at least in the United States, is pushing hard to extend the moratorium. In a Feb. 13 letter to Biden administration officials, nearly two dozen industry groups, including the Motion Picture Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Entertainment Software Association — a video-game industry group — urged the United States to give its “full support” to a renewal.

“Accepting anything short of a multilateral extension of the moratorium that applies to all WTO members would open the door to the introduction of new customs duties and related cross-border restrictions that would hurt U.S. workers in industries across the entire economy,” the letter said.

A collapse would deal a “major blow to the credibility and durability” of the WTO and would mark the first time that its members “changed the rules to make it substantially harder to conduct trade,” wrote the groups, which said their members include companies that combined employ over 100 million workers.

Populists hope to make impact in Portuguese election

Socialist Party leader Pedro Nuno Santos, left, and Luis Montenegro, leader of the Social Democratic Party, greet each other before an election TV debate in Lisbon, Portugal

(Armando Franca/AP)

SUN, 25 FEB, 2024 -
BARRY HATTON, ASSOCIATED PRESS

The official two-week campaign period before Portugal’s early general election began on Sunday, with the country’s two moderate mainstream parties once again expected to collect the most votes but with the expected rise of a populist party potentially adding momentum to Europe’s drift to the right.

The centre-left Socialist Party and centre-right Social Democratic Party have alternated in power for decades.

But they are unsure of how much support they might need from smaller rival parties for the parliamentary votes needed to form a government after the March 10 vote.

Corruption scandals have cast a shadow over the ballot.

They have also fed public disenchantment with the country’s political class as Portugal prepares to celebrate 50 years of democracy, following the Carnation Revolution that toppled a rightist dictatorship on April 25 1974.

The election is being held after a Socialist government collapsed last November following a corruption investigation.

That case brought a police search of prime minister Antonio Costa’s official residence and the arrest of his chief of staff.

Mr Costa has not been accused of any crime.

Also in recent weeks, a Lisbon court decided that a former Socialist prime minister should stand trial for corruption.

Andre Ventura, leader of populist and nationalist party Chega!

(Armando Franca/AP)

Prosecutors allege that Jose Socrates, prime minister between 2005-2011, pocketed around 34 million euros during his time in power from corruption, fraud and money laundering.

The Social Democratic Party has also been tainted by corruption allegations.

During the recent weeks of unofficial campaigning, a corruption investigation in Portugal’s Madeira Islands triggered the resignation of two prominent Social Democrat officials.

The scandal erupted on the same day the Social Democratic Party unveiled an anti-corruption billboard in Lisbon that said: “It can’t go on like this.”

A housing crisis, persistent levels of low pay and unreliable public health services are other areas where the records of the two main parties are at issue.

Hot-button topics that have driven political debate and encouraged populist parties elsewhere in Europe, such as climate change, migration and religious differences, have largely been absent in Portugal’s campaign.

A five-year-old populist and nationalist party called Chega! (in English, Enough!) has made the fight against corruption one of its political banners.

“Portugal needs cleaning out,” one of its billboards declares.

The party’s leader, 41-year-old lawyer Andre Ventura, has been riding in third place in opinion polls and could become a kingmaker if his political influence grows.

His party got just 1.3% of votes in a 2019 election, but jumped to 7.3% in 2022.

It could collect more than double that this time, polls suggest, if a protest vote materialises.

A key question is whether the Social Democrats will end up needing the votes of Chega! to make up a parliamentary majority after eight years in opposition.

The Socialist Party could, as in the past, forge parliamentary alliances with the Portuguese Communist Party or Left Bloc party to take power.

Socialist leader Pedro Nuno Santos, his party’s candidate for prime minister, is a politician and a former minister for housing and infrastructure.

Mr Santos, 46, quit the previous government under a cloud over his handling of bailed-out flag carrier TAP Air Portugal and a dispute over the site of a new Lisbon airport.

Luís Montenegro, the 51-year-old Social Democrat leader aiming to become prime minister, has been a politician for more than 20 years.

Portugal electoral campaign begins with right looking to gain

By AFP
Published February 25, 2024

Socialist Party leader Pedro Nuno Santos (L) greets Luis Montenegro (R) before a TV debate on February 19, 2024

- Copyright AFP PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA
Thomas CABRAL

Portugal’s official election campaign begins Sunday, with the March 10 legislative vote likely to see a breakthrough by populist parties after an influence peddling scandal brought down eight years of Socialist government.

Portugal, which this April celebrates half a century since its “Carnation Revolution” put an end to an almost equally long fascist dictatorship, has avoided the right-wing and anti-establishment parties that have recently scored successes elsewhere in Europe.

That exception is expected to end.

The Chega party (“Enough” in Portuguese), formed in 2019 by a former football commentator who has become an ardent critic of the country’s political and economic elites, is credited with 15 to 20 percent of the vote.

The surprise resignation of Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa, who is not running for re-election, has helped Chega, said Antonio Costa Pinto, a political scientist at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon.

“The theme of corruption, in this European conjuncture, favours the radical right,” he said.

– Far-right coalitions –

Several European countries, including Italy, Slovakia, Hungary and Finland, are run by coalitions either headed by or including far-right parties.

The Netherlands could join this list after the victory of Geert Wilders in last November’s legislative elections.

Chega, which is anti-immigrant but not always anti-European Union, already became the country’s third largest political force in Portugal’s January 2022 elections with seven percent of the vote and 12 deputies in the 230-seat parliament.

Andre Ventura, its president, aims to displace the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) as the dominant force on Portugal’s right, which is expected to have a majority of the seats in parliament.

For the moment, the PSD is slightly ahead in the polls with about 30 percent of the vote, just in front of the incumbent Socialist Party.

PSD leader Luis Montenegro, who has formed an alliance with two small conservative parties, has for the moment ruled out any coalition with Chega.

– ‘No is no’ –

“No is no,” Montenegro repeats each time the question is asked.

Costa’s successor at the Socialist Party, Pedro Nuno Santos, has said he wouldn’t block the formation of a minority government headed by the centre-right should they finish first but without a working majority.

But according to analyst Costa Pinto, the “sanitary cordon around the extreme right hasn’t worked in other European democracies, and Portugal will be another example.”

Prime minister since the end of 2015, Costa improved the government’s finances and oversaw a largely healthy economy, but was brought down by a series of scandals.

The final blow came when a probe into influence peddling reached his own chief of staff, who was found with 75,800 euros ($82,000) in cash hidden in his office.

Costa’s name was cited in the probe and he resigned in November, saying he wouldn’t seek a new term.

Who’s who in Portugal’s elections

By AFP
February 25, 2024

Portugal's legislative elections take place on March 10

- Copyright AFP PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA

The head of the centre-right opposition, the new leader of the Socialist Party, and the founder of an extreme far-right formation are the main candidates in Portugal’s March 10 legislative elections.

The campaign officially gets under way on Sunday.

– Luis Montenegro –

President of the centre-right Social-Democratic Party (PSD) since May 2022, the 51-year-old led its parliamentary group when it was in power from 2011 to 2015 and imposed severe austerity measures.

Montenegro’s refusal to consider any alliance with the far-right led him to break with Pedro Passos Coelho, the prime minister of that period.

Born in Portugal’s second city Porto, he grew up in nearby Espinho, where he lost an election for mayor in 2005.

Trained as a lawyer, he became a deputy at 29 in 2002 and was in parliament until 2018.

He was elected as head of the PSD two years after a first failed attempt.

– Pedro Nuno Santos –

The controversial head of the Socialist Party’s left wing, the bearded 46-year-old has long been a contender to replace outgoing Prime Minister Antonio Costa as party leader.

Son of a “self-made man” from the northern d’Aveiro region who made a fortune in the shoe business, he played a key role as liaison to far-left parties that supported Costa’s government.

Promoted to infrastructure minister, Santos fell out with Costa for announcing the site of a new Lisbon airport without his consent.

He resigned in late 2022 after a scandal about an indemnity paid to a departing administrator at national airline TAP, which was in the midst of a restructuring plan.

– Andre Ventura –

Described as ambitious or opportunistic, or both, the 41-year-old with a youthful face and three-day beard had thought of becoming a priest or a writer. In the end, he made his name as a television sports commentator.

That opened the gates to a political career, initially with the PSD.

Originally from the Lisbon suburbs, he became a national figure when he denounced the Roma community when he was a mayoral candidate in a nearby town.

Armed with his charm and sharp tongue, Ventura quit the PSD to create “Chega” (“Enough”) in 2019, spreading a populist and anti-establishment message.

Elected to parliament that year as his party’s only member, he led his formation to become the country’s third largest in the 2022 legislative elections.

A supporter, center, of Andre Ventura, right, leader of populist and nationalist party Chega! (in English, Enough!) turns to journalists to utter insults at members of Portugal’s two main political parties, during a Chega campaign action in Almada, Portugal, south of Lisbon, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. Ventura has been riding in third place in opinion polls and could be cast in the role of kingmaker after Portugal’s March 10 general election, if his political influence grows. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

A girl carries a poster with the words “April 25 always, Fascism never again!” during a demonstration against racism in Lisbon, Portugal, Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. April 25 is the date of the 1974 Carnation Revolution that toppled a rightist dictatorship in Portugal. The demonstration was organized under the slogan “Vote against racism,” as an election campaign kicks off ahead of Portugal’s March 10 general election. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

Birds fly above election campaign billboards for leftist parties in Lisbon, Portugal, Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. The official two-week campaign period before Portugal’s snap general election begins Feb. 25, with the country’s two moderate mainstream parties once again expected to collect most votes but with the possible rise of a populist party potentially adding momentum to Europe’s drift to the right. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

Demonstrators attend a protest by police professional associations demanding better salaries and work conditions in Lisbon, Portugal, Jan. 24, 2024. Corruption scandals have cast a shadow over Portugal’s March 10 snap election. They have also fed public disenchantment with the country’s political class. A housing crisis, persistent levels of low pay and unreliable public health services are other areas where the records of the two main parties are at issue. (AP Photo/Armando Franca, File)

A woman holds up a red carnation, symbol of the Portuguese 1974 revolution that restored democracy in Portugal, during a protest against the country’s housing crisis, in Lisbon, Portugal, Jan. 27, 2024. Corruption scandals have cast a shadow over Portugal’s March 10 snap election. They have also fed public disenchantment with the country’s political class as Portugal prepares to celebrate in April, 50 years of democracy, following the 1974 Carnation Revolution that toppled a rightist dictatorship. (AP Photo/Armando Franca, File)

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