The Duran Podcast
Elections India, South Africa and Mexico
All right, Alexander, we had three big elections take place last week. India, South Africa and Mexico. Which one do you want to start out with? I'm going to start with India because all three are very important countries. India is the one that is perhaps one day going to be a great power. And I think we have to start with India. And the result was unexpected. I mean, most people expected that Prime Minister Modi would win a landslide. He himself believed that he would win a landslide. He was talking about this. And he expected that his own party, the BJP, would win an outright majority. And in the event it failed to do so. And we've seen that it ended up with 240 seats in the Indian Parliament, which is less than is enough even to form a majority. He has to form a majority by going into coalition with other parties, which he's managed to do. But the second biggest party, which is Congress, the Congress party, which is for decades the dominant party in India, but which has been on very steep decline for some time now. It's now suddenly revived. It went up from 52 seats to 99. In other words, it almost doubled its parliamentary representation. And the coalition, which it leads, the alliance of parties, which it leads, which is called, I believe, India, they managed to get 236 seats. So only just for behind the BJP. So this was a big blow for Modi. And it means that he no longer remains quite as overwhelmingly dominant to figure in Indian politics as he has been up to now. And I personally don't think it's particularly difficult to understand why it happened. Briefly, India, its economy is producing very high GDP growth rate figures, over 7%. The Indian economy appears to be growing very, very fast. But as is true in many other countries, the GDP figures are telling you one thing. The actual everyday experience of millions of people across India is different. There's very high unemployment, especially amongst young people. There's been high inflation, which has eroded living standards. Very difficult thing for people in India. The harvest this year has been poor. And people, therefore, have been unhappy with their own situation. And they looked at the way Prime Minister Modi conducted the election. And instead of giving the impression that he understood and was going to do something about these problems that people in India are experiencing, he succumbed to the temptation, which over mighty politicians sometimes do, which is that he ran the election. He's a election campaign around his own personality. He made it seem like he was this sort of godlike figure. He actually gave the impression that he was, in fact, some kind of messenger from God on one occasion. At least that's what some reports say. And I think that the result was that millions of people across India felt that he looked remote and out of touch and uninterested in their concerns. And that was by in the end. Many of them voted against him. He remains India's Prime Minister. He's put together a coalition. He's still governing India. He'll remain in power for many years still. And it is important to stress that the geopolitical alignments that India has made are not going to change. If we're talking about India's foreign relations, the BJP, the party that Modi leads, is the party that has been most pro-American, most critical to China. Congress, which is now the party in the ascendant, is the most strongly pro-Russian party in Indian politics. That overstates things hugely. There wasn't an election fought on foreign policy. But historically, they've been the party that built up the relationship with the Soviet Union and with Russia. And it was a congress government that led India into the bricks. So the overall foreign policy that India is following isn't going to change. But Modi himself has been taken down a big notch and he's no longer quite as dominant a figure as he was. I wonder if he got the message with this vote, Modi. I think he's a very intelligent and very skillful politician, despite what people say. And I think he probably did has actually. Having said that, he's also quite an elderly man. He's in his 70s. I don't know how much longer he'll be there. Perhaps this could be his last term. We will see. It's certainly going to be much more difficult for him to hold his government together from this point onwards. And it seems that his relationship with some of his coalition partners at a personal level is often fractious and difficult. And that might be a difficult thing for him to manage as well. So it's much too early to write him off. But perhaps we're starting to see the end, the closing point of the long reign of Modi, which is dominated and reshaped India to a remarkable degree over the period when he's been all right. Well, let's stay with bricks and go to South Africa and the elections there, where the ANC also has to form a coalition from what I understand. Absolutely. And I think in some respects, the reasons, again, are very similar. The ANC has governed South Africa for a very long time. Problems in South Africa are mounting. There is huge problems with crime. The economy recently has not been doing so well. There's been also pressures on people's living standards. And the support for the ANC has fractured. But I think there's an awful lot of misunderstanding again about the way in which it is fractured, because what has happened is that the ANC has had a massive thought. It fell from 57% of the vote to, I believe, around 42. But if you look at the people who gained, one is a party led by the former president, Zuma, who positions himself to the left of the ANC. And there's another party which also positions itself to the left of the ANC. Now, I know there's an awful lot of people who are skeptical about all of this and whether these alignments are real. But essentially, what happened is that the ANC's electorate unhappy with the ANC, feeling again that President Ramaphosa is out of touch, a roof, remote figure in some ways, doesn't seem to be particularly connected with their problems. They've shifted, some of them have shifted to more radical parties or parties that claim to be more radical. And which, in a sense, could be described as breakaways from the ANC. In Zuma's case, there's also an ethnic thing, because apparently he comes from Zulu land. And the people there, a lot of the people there, have unsurprisingly voted for his party. And that took away votes from the ANC in that particular region. So again, this poses serious problems for the ANC and for South Africa, which, as I said, has not been governed well over the last 10, 20 years, long time. But it's not going to change South Africa's major geopolitical alignments. Again, there are, in South Africa, there are openly pro-Western parties, the democratic party, which is the main opposition party, is straightforwardly pro-Western. But it got 23% of the vote, it increased its share of the vote, but it's not going to achieve power. It's not the main rival to the ANC. The ANC's foreign policy, again, is not the issue in this election. And South Africa's BRICS membership is not the issue either. If we're talking about Zuma as president of South Africa, he had a good relationship with Putin. And of course, he was a major player within BRICS. So a country that has been rumored to want to enter BRICS, every now and again, you hear rumors about Mexico wanting to enter BRICS, they had an election. And the party remained the same, but we have a new president in Claudia Seanbaum. Amlo, open a door. For the Marana party, it looks like he will have his policies passed on to Claudia Seanbaum, and many of the things will remain the same in Mexico. What is your take there? Exactly. This is a vote for continuity. And one, which has been reinforced with apparently the biggest vote for a president in any Mexican election. I mean, she just swept the board. And again, it's perhaps not difficult again to explain why. First of all, Mexico's economy has been doing reasonably well. I mean, there's been growth. Mexico has become a major trading partner for the United States. We'll come to that in a moment. It's become, it's receiving investment from China. It's, and at the same time, López Obrador, the previous president, has, who is a socialist, as he says, has been conducting redistributive policies. He's been launching various social programs, which are popular with a large number, large proportion of Mexico's poorer population. And given the combination of a relatively strong economy and the popularity of these policies, and given the demographic balance in Mexico, the result in itself is unsurprising. Now, there are problems, because again, it's a little bit like what happened about a decade ago in Brazil, in that, in Brazil, you had a very charismatic, very popular leftist president who was Lula. He there, his term then ended. He was replaced by his successor, Dilma Orusef. She lacked his charisma and his skill. And she basically failed and imploded, and eventually we got Bolsonaro, and there was a big reaction. And after there was a reaction against Bolsonaro, I'm not going to get into the details of this. We got Lula again. As I understand it, Claudia Shambam does not have the charisma and the force of personality that López Obrador does. And of course, if there's a major economic crisis, it could very well be, you know, in the world, economy, or in the United States, it could very well be that her popularity will also sink just as Orusef did, in which case it's not impossible that we could see a swing back. Now, one of the things that López Obrador absolutely failed to do, despite claims to the country, he failed to bring under control the incredible crime wave that exists in Mexico. I mean, the number of people killed is somewhere around 30,000 a year, which is astonishing. I've seen some suggestions that the true death toll might be higher still. And there's also, by the way, there's also been suggestions that at some level, perhaps unannounced level, López Obrador has not been particularly keen to clamp down on some of the cartels that are responsible for this kind of violence, because he sees them as potential. Well, I might say allies, but as part of the demographic makeup of Mexico, which he doesn't want to disrupt. Now, he's voters. He's the poorer voters who supported him and who supported Chambam in this election. They clearly prefer the social programs at the moment to a resolution of the crime wave. But what happened in Brazil, where there was a similar crime wave, though, on a much lesser scale, when things begin to go wrong, crime, violence suddenly becomes the most important issue that opens up the way for someone from the right. And it's not impossible that in an election, the future election, if the economy begins to go wrong, the Chambam is unable to cope with all of those problems, that they will be swinging back to the right with somebody coming along and saying, "I'm the person who's going to fix the crime wave that is racking Mexico." So, that is possible for the future. Now, let's talk again about Mexico's alignments. They're not going to change. I mean, Chambam is going to continue the same policies as Lopez Obrador has done. Now, Mexico has danced around the question of joining Greeks. In some ways, it's an obvious fit for Greeks. It's one of the big Latin American countries. It's led by leaders who appear to value their independence. There are some similarities in political orientation between Lopez Obrador and Chambam and St. Lula in Brazil. You would have thought that they would want to join Greeks. They haven't done so, despite the fact that every so often, they kick against the United States. I mean, Opus Obrador, for example, has talked about granting asylum to Julian Assange, just for example, just to give an example of how they sometimes kick against the US. They've taken a very similar policy to the rest of the global south over the Ukraine crisis. The reason they don't, in the end, join the Greeks is because of the extent to which Mexico is now integrated in the US economy. It's become a major industrial producer. It sells goods to the United States, and I think that in the end, this relationship is economically too valuable for Mexico for them to want to disrupt it. So that's why they dance around the idea of BRICS membership, but they never quite commit to it. Yeah, to bridge too far, to go into BRICS, that would really piss off the United States. Absolutely. They can't have that. Yeah, I agree. All right. We will enter there, the duran.locals.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, Bitchew Telegram, RockFit, and TwitterX, and go to the Duran shop. Football, 24 pickups, football, jerseys, and t-shirts. The link is in the description box down below. Take care. [Music]