This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Today we're going to discus the most exciting topic ever, Canadian real estate!
I'm largely just talking about Ontario, but Vancouver has also had crazy real estate for decades.
Toronto area real estate is famous for being a bit odd. California prices without California salaries. Or California weather.
There's a post on Reddit (circa 2022) showing similarly sized homes in Niagara Falls, ON and Niagara Falls, NY. 11 minutes apart. The US home was listed at $69k. The Canadian home was listed at $1.18M. That was about 900k USD at the time. That house was a bit of an outlier, but average sale price in Niagara Falls, ON was $617,100 (445k USD) vs $215.3K in Buffalo, NY.
And Niagara Falls is outside of comfortable Toronto commuting range, where the high paying jobs are. To get to downtown Toronto for 9AM Google maps recommends leaving at 6:10AM. Median household income in the city is $74,500 (54K USD).
When you get closer to Toronto, things get worse.
So how did we get here?
First cities learned that taxes on new construction were an easy way to get money without upsetting current residents. A new detached home typically has $186,300 (135k USD) in development fees*. I've heard people argue that it's higher if you calculate interest accrued due to government delays, often caused by no hiring someone with connections to work the system.
Combine that with high immigration and there's a significant structural housing shortage. Toronto has 360 housing units per 1000 residents. The US has 427, France has 540* all 2020 numbers.
Next there's the foreign investment issue. Some of the details here aren't proven since they aren't knowable for obvious reasons.
25 years ago China was less stable but getting richer. It was difficult to move money out of the country but wealthy Chinese could buy a home in Vancouver if they were frequently there for business or a condo for their kids studying without upsetting the CCP. This turned into smuggling money into Canadian real estate as a safe nest egg, and the Canadian government told regulators to turn a blind eye.
Things escalated into serious money laundering.
Again, I'll admit this is unproven before anyone jumps on me...
But Mexican narco gangs produce fentanyl in Mexico with precursor chemicals from Chinese companies. The fentanyl is sold in the US. The US government watches for big unexplained transfers of money going back to Mexico or to the Chinese chemical companies.
So they are using Canadian real estate to close the loop. The chemical companies sell the debt to a broker. The broker finds families in China who want to pool their money and get it out of the country. Then he connects with the narco gangs to transfer the money to be used in a home purchase by one of the family's kids studying in Canada.
But back to better grounded discussion.
The constant rise in home prices made house flipping and rental properties common. Airbnb became a driving force behind tiny expensive condo construction.
Then covid hit.
Canada had some pretty extreme covid lockdowns. This drove up home prices even more. And home flippers started buying home far from Toronto. Prices in small towns exploded.
However, the rental market in cities was hurting as living in a small apartment when everything is shut down for months is not fun. However a lot of federal politicians have invested in rental properties. The previous minister in charge of affordable housing owned two rental properties with hefty mortgages.
So the feds came up with a way to turn the city rental market around fast. In 2019 they had issued 404,000 new student visas. In 2022 they loosed up restrictions on employment as a student and brought in 551,405 new students.
No thought was given to where these 150k additional new students would live. See the housing deficit since 2020 as above.
Or work, as they all (and a big chunk of the other 400k) came in with the promise of being able to work 20 hours a week and assumed they could all land a part time IT job at least.
There are mass line ups for fast food jobs and stories of rented homes with 10 students living there.
But back to real estate.
A few things happened in 2023.
Business have been phasing out work from home, and commuting from that small town where they bought a house at the peak of the market in 2022 isn't manageable long term.
Interest rates have spiked. This is worse in Canada because mortgages typically renew at the current interest rate every 5 years. With the rate spike your mortgage payment can double or more.
Airbnb income has collapsed due to economic fears. This is happening across the US as well.
The Chinese economy is in trouble. So many people want to dump their investment properties in Canada because they need the money at home.
What's the result? A total shit show.
First there's the pre-construction market. A buyer puts a 20% down (35% for non Canadian resident) and is obligated to buy the house / condo when it's complete.
People were buying these to flip before closing. It was seen as a safe and easy way to make money. They couldn't actually afford the mortgage on the new place, but figured they couldn't lose money.
The risks were significant. If they don't close the builder does an assignment sale and the original buyer owes the builder for any shortfall from the agreed purchase price.
A quick Twitter search for an example turns up an assignment sale where a 2.2 million dollar home (1.6M USD) is being sold at a 332k (240k USD) loss after agent fees.
It's not an isolated example.
The new ultra luxury condo building at 1 Bloor West, marketed as "The One", has entered receivership with $1.2 billion in loans already in default (870M USD).
The normal sale market isn't doing well either. Ontario is in a weird situation where there's a glut of luxury homes but still a severe shortage of homes people can actually afford. Everything has been renovated and flipped. I don't think they've built a two bedroom starter home in the past 30 years.
There are some good Twitter accounts tracking real estate price crashes:
https://twitter.com/jasongofficial
https://twitter.com/ShaziGoalie
Again keep in mind it's just beginning. Investors are still trying to diamond hands it, but the mortgage resets are coming and there just aren't enough people with piles of cash who actually want to live in Ontario. They can't HODL forever.
Go to https://www.realtor.ca/ and search for Toronto homes over 1.5 million. Zoom out. There just aren't that many people in the province looking to buy homes at that price. Especially look at all of the listings in the middle of no where.
People have been joking, with less exaggeration than you'd expect, that during covid speculators purchased the entire town of Bancroft, ON and are now desperately trying to flip it.
Thank you for the comprehensive comment and I'll try to reply in more detail when I get a chance, but wanted to point out there's a newer thread that might get this more visibility!
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Switzerland
The Swiss federal elections occurred last Sunday. The biggest winner was the largest nationalist/populist Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC), which rose from 53 to 62 seats out of 200 (a 17% gain). The losers were the Greens and Green Liberals, who went from a combined 44 to 33 seats (a 25% loss). The other left wing parties remained stable (the second-largest Socialist Party gained 2 seats, but the small Labour Party lost 2).
Apart from this shift to the right, in the center, the neo-liberal FDP (think: free market capitalism with gay rights and open borders) lost seats to the conservative Christian center party literally called “The Middle”. Overall, this election strikes me as a loss for liberal left and a win for the conservative right.
None of this directly affects the composition of the federal government, due to various quirks of the Swiss political system, but it's interesting to see that even in relatively conservative Switzerland, the European trend towards rightwing nationalism is clearly visible, despite the fact that Switzerland is objectively less affected by the factors that plague most other European countries, like influx of African/Middle Eastern refugees, rise in crime, and inflation.
Election results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/elections-2023--projected-results/48897354
Objective discussion of the results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/eight-takeaways-from-the-2023-federal-elections-in-switzerland/48915304
The commentary from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, arguably the most reputable newspaper of record in the country, and politically aligned with the neo-liberal center-right, strikes me as extremely salty. Archive link in German, but I'll copy/paste the Google translation (Google translate doesn't seem to work well with archive.is):
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Ireland
Not granting Palestinians the same streamlined entry as Ukrainians doesn't necessarily mean much as there are still a lot of people coming in via the normal asylum system, but the suggestion that Arab countries should take care of Arabs (and the implication that European countries should take care of Europeans) is something I would have expected to be outside the Overton window. Europe is quite a varied place, but one of the more pro-refugee countries saying this makes me think the countries which have had problems with Arab migrants won't hesitate in doing the same (Ireland's migrants are nearly all EU, Ukraine, or Brazilian so Islam is not really a domestic issue).
Notably a lot of left-wing politicians went back on their past promises (this campaign goes back at least 2 years) to vote to expell the Israeli ambassador, a motion was passed today condemning the violence etc and the Sinn Fein leadership made no effort to include this condition in their suggested amendment of the wording. Sinn Fein has been quietly dropping some of their more radical proposals as they come closer to actually winning an election so this isn't a huge surprise, but getting softer on Israel is something that will annoy a lot of the more left-wing portions of their base.
Leo Varadkar is the son of a Marathi Hindu from Mumbai. That already predisposes him to a certain view of Islam. He has stayed in India for a extended durations and his medical internship was in KEM hospital, one of India's premier govt. medical hospitals. This means he met a lot of poor & conservative Indians. This makes him even more likely to have a realistic view of 3rd world Islam and the baggage that comes with it.
Having someone well informed that close to power must make a difference.
Good point, Varadkar’s Indian heritage doesn’t really get brought up that often so it’s easy to forget.
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That's interesting to see Sinn Fein tacking a little more moderate. I know they've been pretty immigration maximalist; what with the protests against asylum seekers is they're any chance they'll adjust there as well? Is the Israel-Palestine division as inflamed in the Republic as it is in Northern Ireland, or is that mostly a reflection of the catholic-protestant divide up there? When I look at the Northern Irish subreddit you would swear they were getting bombed themselves.
Separately, is there any particular reason there's so much Brazilian immigration?
Seemingly they come here to work in the slaughterhouses/meat packing plants. At least, that's how it started. Ireland is an English-speaking country in the EU so it makes it easier to come here and then move to Europe if you want:
Now, the vast majority of our Brazilian population is living in Dublin (like pretty much everyone else, to be honest).
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I don't think the protesters will be the influence here, the people protesting asylum seekers and by and large a portion of the old working class base that the party abandoned as it became more popular. Every protest these types have (Covid protests preceded this) is politically toxic and only the small far-right parties make the attempt to win them over. Sinn Fein have gotten such a boost in recent years from appealing to the middle class voters, they want to shed as much of their radical image as possible while still presenting a left alternative to Fine Gael/Fianna Fail.
Northern Ireland is far more divided and it's very visible, Loyalists identify with the Israeli siege mentality and fly Israeli flags alongside the Union Jack and Republicans do the same with the Palestinian flag. In Ireland there's no real pro-Israeli voice, the left are strongly in favour of Palestine and the rest support them as much as they can without venturing into territory that would cost them reputation internationally or with the multinational corporations they rely so much on (for example: https://twitter.com/businessposthq/status/1715030115409924395?t=JWmdG5v7C0LGoIECrSDOBg&s=19).
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Germany:
German media are overwhelmingly one-sided on the Israel-Gaza issue: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/150352?context=8#context
Berlin has seen a series of riots by pro-Palestinian leftists and muslims. Reactions are predictable - indignation about violence, worry about antisemitism, the left ignoring and the right emphasizing the role immigrants play here.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, our head of government (no, Merkel is gone, for real), has done exactly what anyone would predict - toured the middle east in general and Israel especially, gave speeches there as well as at home, and generally took a hard line against Hamas, against antisemitism, in favor of Israel, and against Putin. And, fulfilling expectations, he announced nothing material.
Sahra Wagenknecht, hitherto leading member of the leftist Die Linke party, in the past a self-described stalinist, now an outdated socialist who failed to get with the woke times, aims to found her own party. The woman has a reputation as someone with actual ideals and principles of her own, which allowed her to stand out and earn a modicum of admiration on left and right alike. Her founding her own party is thus likely to draw at least some supporters away from Die Linke as well as from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. The current leadership of Die Linke, a party in steep decline, is outraged, calling this an ego trip. The AfD, flying high in polls, seems largely unbothered. The founding is supposed to take place on next monday.
In other news, the head of the German Union Association, Yasmin Fahimi, called the AfD - a party with strong support among unionized workers - the enemy of the workers, for its racism.
And I just heard on the Radio that two Bavarian companies will soon launch satellite-bearing rockets from a ship in the North Sea.
What do you think is the likelihood of an AfD victory in the 2024 elections? In the polls I've seen they're still only hitting around 20%, are there clear other parties that would coalition with them? If there are enough common supporters between Die Linke and AfD that a Wagenknecht's new party could draw voters from both, is there some kind of weird horseshoe theory possible alliance between the parties or are there differences just too huge?
0%. Even assuming that nothing could possibly go amiss in the electoral procedure itself, I'm nigh-certain that the members of parliament would rather invite foreign occupation, a Bundeswehr coup or four years of non-stop leftist rioting in the Bundestag than actually permit an AfD-led government to take office. It's unthinkable.
No. To many, and especially to almost everyone in media and politics outside of the AfD itself, the AfD is the second coming of the NSDAP. It's like a more grim and dead-serious variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome, in that respect. All other parties, except for on the communal level, are their sworn enemies and they can't condone their existence, much less cooperate with them or even form a coalition, without backpedaling over everything they've spent the last decade saying. And alienating most of their own voters. And most of the voters they'd ever hope to attract. Any success the AfD has in cooperating with anyone whatsoever happens away from the cameras, away from federal and state-level politics - anywhere further up or closer to the limelight and they're seen as a bunch of literally evil retards, and failing to condemn them is about on a level with going to bed with Hitler himself.
The biggest common denominator is being old-school working class with an interesting in class warfare. Other than that they can both draw from segments of the population that failed to get on board with the new paradigms, i.e., people who haven't yet buried the nation-state, from anti-establishment types who care more about sticking it to the man than about left and right, from a small pool of voters who genuinely believe that it's the moderates who are wrong and it takes extremism of whatever kind to save the country. Sorta horseshoe-ish, yeah. But in the end this idiosyncratic common pool remains fairly small and is difficult to address, so the main overlap is blue-collar workers.
So, an alliance? With Wagenknecht being a true believer in only-she-knows-what, anything is possible. But I doubt it. It would surprise me. She's too firmly rooted in the left, and if she has any political sense whatsoever she knows not to test her followers' allegiance by cozying up to what is, to many of them, their mortal political enemy. What's more, the German working class is rapidly becoming very un-german, and I doubt you can get many blue-collar immigrants to support allies of the far-right.
Furthermore, in my assessment, she won't get far. She has her fans, and I suppose novelty may be on her side for a short while, but her pool of potential supporters is drying up. Even in her unusual ways, she's old-school, a being from another time. Maybe the time for yet another new party taking over the German far-left is at hand, but I don't think it'll be hers. She gets outsized media attention because she's photogenic, politically tolerable and an unusual specimen, but her actual political punching power has never been that great and I don't see that changing just because she founds a new party.
Obviously I might have to eat my hat on those predictions; but that's a future that I just can't see coming right now.
A few years ago a bunch of antifa punks wrote "No votes for the AfD" in giant glaring letters on public infrastructure in plain view from my window. So far the authorities have not removed this slogan, and since then I have been voting for the AfD and I intend to continue to do so until it is removed.
Now, if that weren't the case, and I had to choose between those two?
Probably still the AfD, if only to nudge the Overton window away from the left. I guess I'm alright with the AfD for as long as it takes to make the other parties crack down on immigration. Sadly nothing that happened in Germany has so far been able to achieve this - everyone except the AfD is pro-immigration in some way, or at least was, until very recently. It's only with the recent waves of anti-zionism and anti-semitism that the non-left parties have begun to propose anti-immigration measures. Too little, too late, for the wrong reasons, and I don't believe that they'll go through with it or keep it up once the current outrage has passed. The bigger the AfD gets, the more pressure it puts on the other parties to oppose immigration in general, and that's worth putting up with their lack of platform, decorum, intellect and qualification.
Supporting Wagenknecht, on the other hand, at best temporarily weakens Die Linke, while not actually doing anything to pressure the other parties into shifting their positions. Alright, that's assuming it goes as I predict and her new party goes under shortly. Assuming that it's here to stay and that it magically replaces the left altogether...I guess that's a slight win, since her positions are less absurd? But I really, really don't expect that to happen.
If immigration weren't an issue and nobody had turned my home office view into political propaganda, then I'd support other parties entirely, but I guess I am a two-issue voter for the time being.
Well, if the mainstream press is to be believed, then the AfD will also ruin the country economically, which should reduce pull factors and encourage immigrants and the rootless to emigrate again. Together with whatever immigration restrictions may ever be implemented, this may serve to make the country unattractive enough for the low-fertility native Germans to keep it as theirs for a while longer.
This is nonsense, of course. In my blackpilled view Germany is doomed either way. It's too late for benign ethnonationalism, nobody's got the spine for meritocratic civic nationalism, and whatever else is coming will have little to do with the Germany of yesteryear. But I'm sentimental and spiteful and I'd rather see the ship sink in the name of the people who built it than have its fate decided by a bunch of pirates, mutineers and stowaways.
And I get to hold such pointless views because in the end, I'm just one voter among very many and nobody's listening to me anyways.
Or did you want some kind of detached, impersonal perspective? If so, please specify parameters.
No. The government in general is not respected enough to actually have that kind of impact. Some very fundamental things about politics in Germany would have to change; it requires a very different political landscape (i.e., less fragmented and with institutions less captured by the left), a different kind of politician (not the kind of spineless grifters and bumbling ideologues we presently have), and a different public attitude towards politics (i.e., seeing the government as more than a money redistribution device).
I suspect it would take either a foreign invasion of Poland or even Germany, or a gentle Bundeswehr coup followed by a velvet-gloved non-democracy, or someone very charismatic with cross-partisan appeal reaching Germans and others who dwell in Germany on an emotional level. Right now the natives are too anti-national and the migrants are too detached from Germany as a nation, and the politicans either have contrary commitments or different interests.
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My understanding is that Wagenknecht is charismatic, has ideals and is also impossible to work with.
Otherwise even a party as dysfunctional as Die Linke would have gone all in on her.
I assume that her new party will flounder for the same reasons. If she was great at setting up alliances, keeping a tight ship and knowing when to make deals with whom … she would already be running Die Linke today.
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Poland
The Law and Justice Party PiS, in power since 2015, has finally been unseated in an election with a record turnout of almost 75% of the country. Technically PiS still won the most votes and is supposed to get the first chance to make a coalition, but they just have no viable path to majority. Donald Tusk has called for President Duda to allow Civic Coalition to form their own coalition, most likely with “the centre-right Third Way on 14.4% and the leftwing Lewica on 8.6%”. It’s a bit of an odd coalition (or seems like that from a distance), and there may be a few sore points as they band together:
@Dean has a great writeup in the main thread if you’re interested in more background discussion on what specific issues might change or stay the same.
it is very likely as there is no real alternative (unless several people switch parties after being elected)
These three will try to form coalition to get majority. Negotiations will be exciting.
And there are many other more exciting flash points than standard-issue culture war. Lets see whether negotiations will eliminate dumbest ideas or whether each party will manage to introduce their preferred catastrophical ideas.
Though president can give chance to PIS to form coalition, which will fail, then sejm will nominate someone (almost definitely this mentioned three-headed coalition).
What do you think are the big policies there will have to be compromise over?
I think it would be easier to list on what they are clearly unified. I actually would need to look at their positions, especially for Lewica I have not bothered with looking their program after finding some no-go stuff for me (as expected).
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New Zealand
New Zealand held elections this Saturday that ousted the Labour Party after six years in power. This was perhaps somewhat expected after the party’s charismatic leader Jacinda Ardern resigned half a year ago. Her replacement, party creature Christopher Hipkins, immediately got hit with floods and cyclones upon taking the office. Hipkins made his main issue addressing the rising cost of living, which ended up being the highest polling issue in the election. Apparently voters didn’t think he did enough, because they gave 44.95% to the conservative National Party, 5% to the classical liberal ACT, 31.33% to Labour, 7.25% to the Green Party, 2.7% to the populist right wing party New Zealand First and 1.17% to the Maori party Te Pāti Māori.
The coalition hasn’t been finalized yet but to form a majority the National Party will need both ACT and possibly New Zealand First (you actually only need 48% support, but in terms of seats, not the overall vote, and exact seat numbers are still to be released). If that comes together it will almost certainly result in the National leader Christopher Luxon becoming the new prime minister of New Zealand. NZ under Ardern was known as a bit of a progressive icon so it’ll be interesting to see where the rightward shift takes the country. Here’s a runthrough of their short term goals:
You're quoting the electorate votes which don't typically affect the makeup of parliament, instead of the party votes which actually correspond to the proportion of the house they'll control under MMP.
Not sure where you're getting this 48% of seats figure from. You need a majority of seats to form a government. Currently, there are expected to be 122 seats in the house, but this might change slightly after special votes and the byelection is taken into account. 62 seats will probably be the number ultimately required. National/ACT currently have 61 between them, so it's on a knife-edge whether they'll need NZF or not to form a government.
NZF is an interesting case. The party leader Winston Peters has sometimes been compared with Trump, but this is a very low-resolution take. He's mostly carved out a niche of connecting with an older and lower-class section of the electorate who are generally ignored by other parties. Think: enjoy horse racing, smoking, low engagement with society, marginal living, small-c conservatives. Winston doesn't seem to hold many firm views of his own, and is happy to bluster and, for example, call for an inquiry into the 2020 covid response he was the deputy PM for. Usually he's bought out with something like Foreign Minister, a few low-profile ministerial roles for his mates, and a bunch of random capital spending in the regions.
Despite the breathless takes on twitter about how this election represents a repudiation of Ardern, most non-partisan Kiwis I've talked to agree that this was the lowest-stakes election in recent memory. The government's books were opened pre-election and revealed we've just been spending too much, and accrued too much debt post-covid for any big spending promises to be credible from either major party. Both promised to balance the books, and National's fiscal plan is to take us roughly back to Ardern's 2019 'Wellbeing Budget' levels. Putting the varying influence of the minor parties aside, and differences on the details of particular policies, there is little disagreement on the fundamental issues e.g. cogovernance with Māori, climate change, housing permit reform, the need for local government reform, etc.
Ah thanks for the clarity on the vote counts, I know pretty much nothing about New Zealand; i got the 48% from the embedded CNN article as the percentage of the popular vote that equates to 61 seats in parliament, I miswrote it above. Interesting to hear both parties have roughly similar positions on most major issues. You have any opinion on how effective the National agenda will be?
Ah right. A very misleading statement from CNN. Only parties with >5% of the party vote, or who win an electorate seat win representation in parliament. This means that there are always some votes 'wasted' voting for parties that don't get in (single-issue parties, joke parties, etc.). Seats in parliament are allocated according to the proportion of non-wasted party votes. Thus, post-election, we find that the proportion of party votes cast on the day needed to form the government might be anywhere from ~45% to 50%.
As for National's effectiveness:
Spads from the last government have told me there was a growing realisation towards the end that the civil service was out of control. All was fine when Jacinda was PM, and her general direction was well aligned with the desires of that class, but tensions rapidly boiled over under Hipkins as ministers struggled to get their agendas actioned. Accusations of ministerial bullying began to surface in the press, leading to some high-profile resignations. Unfortunately, Labour is ideologically blinded from being able to understand the issue, preferring to blame it all on Neo-Liberalism (i.e. many believed that the senior civic service were obstructionist Tories). We've talked plenty over the years about the tendencies of the PMC. Of course, there are interesting local idiosyncrasies, as well as various details relevant to the civil service in particular which I think are under-discussed on this forum. However, suffice it to say that the absurd belief that the problem was closet Tories doomed Labour from taking any meaningful action, especially given they were complicit in dramatically exacerbating the problem under Ardern who grew the size of the core civil service by some 28%, and enacted sweeping changes to recruitment, DEI practices, preferring Māori in procurement, etc. Note that Wellington Central, home of our nation's civil service, swung hard-left in the same election that the nation went 15%+ to the right.
The National Party has undergone an almost complete renewal of its senior members/former cabinet ministers since the days of the Key/English Government in 2017. Luxon himself worked as a private sector CEO, has only been an MP for three years, and by all accounts is still lacking public sector experience and understanding. My impression in watching Luxon and National Party, speaking with Tory-aligned think tanks, etc. through the campaign is that most of their attention has been on high-level policy, rather than the practicalities of governing with an essentially hostile civil service, let alone thinking about public sector reform in general, let alone even beginning to form a mandate for addressing some of the fundamental unresolved constitutional issues at the core of the problem such as the role of the Treaty of Waitangi, the rights and responsibilities of iwi, etc. Maybe after three years in government, they might start to realise the scale of the problem. We'll see how that plays out next election.
Ah, that makes perfect sense.
It's interesting to hear that aside from Jacinda's 2019 economic plan being centrist enough that it bears resamblance to the current National agenda, that the civil service was also basically functional under her and mostly only spiraled under Hipkins. From a distance she's portrayed as the more radical one and he's an uncharismatic guy who inherited a host of problems from her. I guess that's to some degree compatible with a lot of her structural changes to the size of the civil service only manifesting later under less competent / less aligned leadership.
Pretty unfortunate the National Party doesn't seem to be focused on the issue of the civil service if it was a problem even for the party that elevated it to its current status. If the fiscal situation enjoys a national consensus that some fat needs to be trimmed then hopefully their fiscal reforms won't have too much difficulty being implemented?
It's more that the ends to which Ardern was turning the civil service were neatly aligned with the zeitgeist, and she was an international megastar. Ardern had something of a reputation for sitting on a vast hoard of political capital and had enough personal popularity that practical delivery was essentially superfluous. Take Labour's 'Kiwibuild' policy to build state houses, one of the highest priorities of their 2017 platform. The goal was to build 16,000 homes over 4 years. They managed to build... 1000.
Obviously, these failures didn't affect Ardern's popularity (she won the first outright majority government under MMP in 2020), and she continued to enjoy the abbasiyah of a civil service who were being well paid to decolonise Aotearoa, etc. Once she resigned however, straight-white-man Hipkins was left holding the bag. His motivations were always more practical and union-focused rather than ideological. In any case, he obviously could not rely on personal popularity to win the next election. Hence: the eruption of tensions between ministers desperately trying to deliver meaningful results for the electorate and a civil service that had higher loyalties to their cause.
Of course, I'm speaking in generalities. Plenty of good people in Wellington, and pockets of high competence. However, since National has deliberately avoided getting involved in the culture war while out of office, they're therefore, I believe, largely ignorant of how far things have shifted in this regard.
New Zealand has a unicameral house, so I don't expect National will have any difficulty implementing its fiscal agenda - or rather, whatever fiscal agenda emerges after coalition talks with ACT and NZF are concluded. However, as Labour found with Kiwibuild: changing budgets is easy for the party in power, fixing problems is far more difficult.
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Serbia
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has called for snap elections on December 17, the third in three years (did you know the Prime Minister of Serbia was a gay women?). The Serbian Progressive Party has been in power since 2012 but has been reeling from back to back mass shootings in May, which led the government to pursue a huge crack down on guns, despite having some of the highest per capita gun ownership in the world. Mass protests against the violence coupled with opposition pressure led SNS to assent to new elections. They are hoping to emphasize their role in supporting ethnic Serbs in the ongoing conflict in Kosovo.
It’s unclear how things will actually go. In the 2022 election Vučić won the Presidency (ostensibly a ceremonial position, less so under him) with 60% of the vote but his party went from holding a supermajority to being a slight minority, though they stayed in power via coalitioning with the right wing Serbian Patriotic Alliance.
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Ecuador
Daniel Noboa, heir to the banana conglomerate Noboa Corporation, has narrowly won the election with 52% of the vote, beating out Rafeal Correa’s protege Luisa González. Note that while the left is not currently in power in Ecuador, González was still considered the establishment candidate and Noboa, with only two years in Congress, as the upstart, outsider candidate (his own father lost to Correa in one of his many ill fated attempts at the Presidency).
The main issues were the economy (“Ecuador is the only Andean nation to experience negative GDP-per-capita growth for the last five years.”) and security, especially cracking down on the cartels which have recently exploded in Ecuador (awkwardly, recent press took note of the fact that over half of searched banana exports are linked to drug trafficking, but it didn’t seem to hurt the banana candidate too much).
In the legislative elections Noboa’s party performed pretty poorly, though so did several leftist parties that would be in the opposition:
Note that combining the three parties listed above would still only make a coalition of 55 seats, still a good deal short of the 69 needed for a majority. Also, a reminder that Lasso disbanded the National Assembly so the legislative branch literally hasn’t been doing anything for a while anyway. Noboa will only hold the role for about a year and a half, because he’s finishing out prior President Guillermo’s term, though he can of course run again in the next election.
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Venezuela
In rather surprising news:
President Biden officially announced Wednesday that sanctions will be unfrozen. Unfortunately, at least this particular article doesn’t predict it will have a huge effect on global oil prices.
Mexican President AMLO has apparently confirmed that talks have resumed between the Venezuelan government and the opposition, though some members of the opposition are reportedly skeptical. Either way, the previously fractured opposition is starting to slowly unify, with several candidates dropping out to endorse Machado instead. Notably, this includes Henrique Capriles, the former opposition leader who ran against both Chavez and Maduro.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Maduro will lose an election. He has a vastly more built-up election / patronage infrastructure than any opposition, maintains a substantial support base still, and the opposition is still split between a number of candidates. Of course millions of those voters most opposed to Maduto have already fled the country. Certainly don’t imagine this represents Venezuela turning towards the western world either; they are still actively deepening ties with Russia and meeting to discuss collaboration on oil investments.
One thing about Venezuela a lot of sources (apart from Maduro-critical left-wing ones) have missed is that there's been something of a "right turn" in the recent years. For instance, see this and this. This would be a natural development in this process.
Interesting, I actually hadn't heard this at all, thanks. Kind of mirrors a similar rightward turn in the other notable socialist experiment in the area under Ortega in Nicaragua.
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Does Venezuela have much oil production left? It seems like mismanagement has turned it into ‘some in the ground, would take years to get it flowing’.
They're still a relevant producer though definitely a fraction of their former self:
At least from the above article, "several analysts" predict:
That seems surprisingly quick to me as well, though I don't really know the details of their capacity. I guess if they used to pump way more then they may still have a fair amount of drilled but un-utilized wells or DUCs.
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Colombia
Gustavo Petro is now embarking on how most ambitiously left wing project thus far, Colombia’s first-ever large scale land redistribution.
This is half the original amount but the left is in the minority so it’s still pretty impressive. The project will take up the remainder of his term basically and may come to define it. Colombia is unique in Latin America for never really having a populist period so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
Petro has also agreed to attend AMLO’s summit in Mexico about reducing migration to the US, another sign in America’s shifting position towards tightening up immigration.
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Liberia
The election in Liberia is still too close to call and will go to a runoff. The showdown features another clash between former soccer star George Weah and opposition leader Joseph Boakai. Weah handily beat Bokai in their last race in 2017 but has come under corruption accusations and generally presided over a deteriorating economy, so his popularity has waned quite a bit.
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