Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. June 5, 2024 | |
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have dominated Indian politics since first assuming power in 2014. The results of India's multi-week elections are in, however, and things have changed. In the last two elections, Modi's BJP had secured an outright majority of legislative seats, which allowed it effectively to govern alone. In this election, the party fell short of a majority of seats and will rely on its coalition. Modi's BJP was India's top vote-getting party, and his "victory Tuesday makes him the first leader since India's founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to secure a third five-year term," writes CNN's Rhea Mogul. That said, the significantly diminished support came as a surprise. "Modi's right-wing, Hindu-nationalist alliance was expected to secure a supermajority—and with it the power to enact radical change unopposed. … 'This is in some sense a wakeup call to a leader who is still very, very popular," said Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research. 'But who many voters feel have crossed lines for what should otherwise be a very vibrant democracy.'" The Financial Times' editorial board welcomes the outcome, writing: "[I]f it encourages the hubristic, Hindu nationalist BJP to engage in more deliberative policymaking and enlivens Indian democracy, just when many feared it was flickering, it could strengthen the country's rise."
Modi's charismatic leadership and Hindu nationalism have been chronicled extensively. Now, Modi and his BJP "are much diminished," Devesh Kapur of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies writes for Foreign Policy. "Modi has never had to rely on coalition partners. The election marks not only the end of single-party control in the Indian Parliament but also the BJP's having peaked. Coalition governments—the natural order for India's democracy since the late 1980s, except for the past decade—are back to stay." To Kapur, the results show that all political ideologies, including Hindu nationalism, "have their life cycles." |
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With Immigration Action, Biden Is 'Caught Trying' |
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on immigration, asserting executive authority to ban asylum claims by people who cross the US–Mexico border illegally once a daily threshold of arrivals is met, with certain exemptions. The provisions are loosely similar to some floated in a bipartisan plan earlier this year that congressional Republicans blocked because the proposal also included extending further military aid to Ukraine.
Left-leaning observers have panned it. In a New York Times guest opinion essay Andrea R. Flores, a former immigration-policy adviser to the Obama and Biden administrations, questions the legality of the proclamation. "The president's decree echoes a 2018 Trump-era policy that invoked the same powers to deny protections to people seeking asylum between ports of entry," Flores writes. "That one was blocked by the federal courts. The American Civil Liberties Union has said it will challenge this ban as well." Predicting the executive action "won't work" and "will surely be tied up in the courts," The Economist calls it "impractical policy" but "pragmatic politics," as immigration remains a top issue for American voters who will choose between Biden and former President Donald Trump this fall.
Not everyone thinks it's a bad idea. The announcement happens to follow a recommendation Fareed made in April, writing for CNN Opinion that Biden should use executive authority to block asylum claims and clamp down on border crossings. Even if it were indeed tied up in courts, it would still help Biden at the polls by showing voters he cares about the issue. "Bill Clinton often says that the American people don't always need you to succeed, but they want to catch you trying," Fareed wrote. "Joe Biden needs to be caught trying to solve the immigration crisis."
Surveying problems with US immigration law broadly in light of Biden's proclamation, Bloomberg Opinion editor James Gibney writes: "The overburdened asylum system is itself a symptom and consequence of two existential challenges that the US has yet to meet. First, for all the lip service and myth-making about being a nation of immigrants, America has yet to achieve an enduring national consensus on immigration. Second, the world writ large still labors under a set of well-meaning rules and principles governing refugees and asylum seekers that dates back to the end of World War II, before globalization revolutionized the way we travel, communicate, work and live. In practical terms, the US failure to devise reliable legal pathways for those seeking to work in a US economy that could not thrive without them forces those workers to seek alternative pathways." |
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A Murder—and Faltering Democracy?—in Mexico |
Beyond the feminist hopes encouraged by the election on Sunday of former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico's first female president, analysts have worried about the state of Mexico's democracy—wondering if Sheinbaum will continue the populist, less-than-democratic tendencies of her patron, current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). Separately, a murder will only heighten concerns about democracy and the danger of femicide.
AMLO "has built the most influential political machine since the days when Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) monopolized politics last century," Bloomberg columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto noted before the election. After doxing a reporter, AMLO insisted his "moral and political authority are above" a Mexican privacy law. He has feuded with the country's election authority. A separate issue from AMLO's populism, Mexico is still beset by organized crime, and that has taken its toll on democracy: On Monday, just one day after Sheinbaum's victory, the female mayor of the southwestern municipality Cotija, Yolanda Sánchez Figueroa, was shot to death along with her bodyguard by people in a white van. Tony Garrastazu and Patrick Quirk of the International Republican Institute wrote in an LA Times op-ed before the election that "Mexico's electoral machinery is struggling in the face of violence and threats." Last Friday, Reuters noted a record 37 Mexican candidates for office had been assassinated ahead of Sunday's vote.
As for questions about AMLO's populist style, Sheinbaum now inherits leadership of his powerful Morena party. Perhaps she "will conclude that her mentor's approach to politics—callousness, polarizing partisanship and a growing disregard for constitutional norms—is a winning formula," Mexican journalist and Washington Post columnist León Krauze wrote before the vote. "But there is a chance she chooses a different path. She could adopt a fresh, more decent approach to politics, showing voters, especially those who voted for the opposition, that she is her own politician, independent from her predecessor. If that were to happen, I would hope the opposition would meet her halfway and start building a better future. Mexico can't afford to spend another six years paralyzed by rancor." |
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Will Trump Thrive on His Conviction? |
Right now, the biggest question in US politics is whether former President Donald Trump's conviction on 34 felony counts will help or hurt him in the closely contested November election. Initial indications are murky: A snap Reuters/Ipsos poll after last week's verdict found that 14% of Republicans and 58% of independents said they would not vote for Trump now that he has been convicted of a felony. (The survey didn't specify these felonies—Trump faces a slew of other criminal charges in other cases—but it asked shortly after Trump's Manhattan hush-money conviction had been handed down.) Polls before the verdict had produced similar findings. And yet, Ariel Edwards-Levy of the CNN Polling Unit notes: "[S]urvey questions that ask voters to explain how their choices are affected by a news event … are notoriously difficult to answer or interpret, and commonly overstate the potential for movement in public opinion." An ABC/Ipsos poll produced mixed findings, with 50% of all respondents saying the verdict was correct but more saying the charges had been politically motivated (47%) than not (38%).
Anecdotal evidence, also initial, offers a bit more. GOP pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, no fan of Trump but long known in US political circles for his focus groups and messaging advice to Republicans, writes in a Financial Times op-ed that Trump is playing the martyr, already referring to himself as a "political prisoner," and it may well work. "The verdict saw people crashing Trump websites in desperate search of campaign paraphernalia," Luntz writes, "and Trump himself enjoying his best online fundraising day—not just of his career but of every political career. Or, as the great huckster PT Barnum might have said, $53mn in campaign donations in 24 hours cannot be wrong."
Luntz describes a post-verdict focus group with 11 undecided voters in a New York Times opinion essay penned with Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy and editorial assistant Adrian J. Rivera. When asked if the verdict will sway their votes, five of the 11 participants raised their hands. As with impressions of the verdict as a reflection of America's democratic system, answers on voting ranged widely: "I am somebody who is desperate to try to honor the system," said Hilary, 55, a White social worker from California. "He's now a convicted felon. I cannot have the president be a convicted felon. Full stop. Therefore, he is disqualified for me." Jonathan, 37, a Black operations manager from Florida thought the opposite, saying: "This is the fearmongering that the left wants. They want you to be swayed." |
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