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 4, 2024 | |
|
What a Female President Could Mean for Mexico |
"My mother was born in 1943 in a country where she was not allowed to vote," journalist and author Cristina Rivera Garza wrote in a New York Times guest opinion essay on Saturday. "The Mexican government did not grant women the right to vote in national elections—or the right to hold public office on a national level—until Oct. 17, 1953."
Now, Mexico will have its first female president. On Sunday, Mexicans overwhelmingly elected former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, of the Morena party led by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). Sheinbaum's chief campaign rival was also a woman, businesswoman and former senator Xóchitl Gálvez, so analysts and observers have spent weeks weighing the meaning of Mexico being led by a woman for the first time.
In her New York Times essay, Garza notes that Mexico has headed in a different direction from its neighbor to the north, decriminalizing abortion in 2023 after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Mexico features a "vocal and energized women's movement" that's part of a larger trend, Garza writes: "Across Latin America, women have been at the forefront of the fight against military dictatorships in Chile (the arpillera movement, for example) and Argentina (the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo)."
Violence against women is a problem in Mexico: Last year at the Wilson Center, Latin America historian Gema Kloppe-SantamarÃa and political sociologist Julia Zulver wrote that an overall increase in femicides over 10 years had "put Mexico in the national and international spotlight." In her New York Times essay, Garza voices some hope that a female president will improve women's safety; her younger sister was killed in 1990, and the male suspect has never been arrested despite a warrant. At CNN Opinion, journalist Alice Driver (who splits her time between Mexico and the US) wonders if a female president will presage similar political movement in the US, where voters face an "uninspiring choice between two men"—and where "pregnant people … increasingly have been traveling to Mexico for abortions." |
|
|
'Desperation' Behind Biden's Ceasefire Announcement? |
President Joe Biden made major news Friday when he endorsed a sweeping ceasefire proposal for the war in Gaza, addressing TV cameras from the White House and calling for the war to end. Israel has yet to agree to it; as CNN's Eugenia Yosef, Sophie Tanno, and Benjamin Brown write, the Israeli far right could topple Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government if Netanyahu accepts the plan.
At Le Monde, Washington correspondent Pitr Smolar reads into Biden's announcement: "As serious as it was unexpected, Joe Biden's speech … marked a shift in the American administration's position on this crisis. It also reflected a certain impatience, a form of nervousness even, given how much the war waged by Israel over the past eight months has become a trap for the White House."
The UAE newspaper The National editorializes: "Even as the finer details of the plan are being worked out, political will from Washington and the wider international community to secure a ceasefire is a source of cautious optimism. There is considerable pressure on Israel and Hamas as most western nations want an immediate ceasefire—as do key Arab powers, which have strongly supported previous attempts to secure a ceasefire." |
|
|
Did South Africa Outgrow the ANC? |
The African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela, lost its 30-year majority. It "suffered a seismic blow at the polls, final election results announced on Sunday confirmed. Support for the ANC dropped to 40.18%, a huge slump from the 57.5% it received in the last election in 2019," as CNN's Sarah Dean and David McKenzie write.
At Newsweek, former Associated Press Europe/Africa and Middle East editor Dan Perry writes that in some ways, this is what a democracy's maturation looks like. Dominant parties lost their total grip on national politics as democracy took more solid root in India, Mexico, Kenya, Israel, and Taiwan, Perry writes. "The current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, seems likely to keep his position despite the loss of the majority; the ANC is the largest party and should be able to form a coalition." The MK Party, formed by former President Jacob Zuma, took third place. The New York Times' John Eligon poses the result as Zuma "punishing an A.N.C. that he believes turned against him, and particularly … Ramaphosa, his former deputy."
It was a long slide for the ANC, writes New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen, who spent 10 days reporting in South Africa. One South African woman who waited in line at 4 a.m. to vote in 1994 now expresses dissatisfaction with politicians. "That a mighty party like the A.N.C., which delivered one of the most inspiring triumphs of the 20th century, could a few decades later be dismissed by a loyal voter as mere 'politicians,' hardly worth a trek to the polls, may seem like a dispiriting outcome," Polgreen writes. From housing to electricity to economic growth, South Africa is in shambles, Polgreen points out.
South Africa may have outgrown the ANC's longtime majority, Polgreen suggests: "There are times when the task at hand is so monumental that nothing but total unity will do the job, and a politics of ideological flexibility and ruthlessly enforced unity, the A.N.C.'s stock in trade, must prevail. Ending apartheid was one such moment. … [The election result] also reminds us that the ecstatic moment of freedom's birth in South Africa 30 years ago was a beginning, not an end." |
|
|
The Trump Verdict, the Justice System, and American Democracy |
Donald Trump is the first former US president to be convicted of a felony. In the rest of the world, that's much more common. The DC-based think tank Freedom House, which rates countries on democracy and freedom, says 43% of countries it deems "free" have prosecuted current or former leaders since 2000. The aftermath of such convictions plays out differently. In Italy, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi endured multiple lurid scandals and convictions to retain prominence on the political right. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) saw a corruption conviction annulled and made a stunning comeback from a prison cell to win the presidency a second time. In France, convictions of former Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac did not appear to shake the democratic system.
The US justice system's fate is yet to be determined. Politico Magazine asks political, legal, and historical experts what might follow the verdict. Historian Timothy Naftali suggests: "On the one hand, it is a powerful demonstration that in this country even a former head of state can be indicted and convicted by a group of his peers. There could hardly be a more dramatic barometer of the strength of the rule of law and of our judicial institutions. On the other hand, the fact that one of the two men likely to be president next year is now a convicted felon sets up the possibility that those very same judicial institutions that guarantee the rule of law will come under the most ferocious political attack in our history." The verdict is being viewed differently by some conservative analysts. At The American Conservative, Peter Van Buren sees it as a political vendetta against Trump, writing: "The verdict is not unexpected from the deep blue Democratic enclave of Manhattan; the larger question is if lawfare will defeat Trump on November 5." At the conservative National Review, Andrew McCarthy—who penned critical coverage of the Trump hush-money trial proceedings along the way—laments the death of American law enforcement's credibility. "Our system embodied the rule of law, the sturdy undercarriage of a free, prosperous, pluralistic society," McCarthy writes. "Now, on its good days, it's a clown show. On the bad days—there are far too many of those—it's a political weapon."
Others disagree. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus tells fellow columnists: "It was unfortunate that the weakest and, to some extent, the least significant of these cases [against Trump] was the first and now it appears the only one to go to trial before the election. ... If the process had been allowed to play out in a way that was fairer, Donald Trump would not be a once-convicted felon in New York state court. He would be, by the time of the election in all likelihood, a thrice-convicted felon—convicted in Florida federal court of obstructing justice and mishandling classified documents, convicted in D.C. District Court of attempting to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 election." Trump has denied wrongdoing in the other criminal cases against him.
New Yorker Editor David Remnick, a sharp Trump critic, writes of the verdict: "[V]oters will now decide to what extent they care. The question is whether any who remain undecided—particularly in the most critical precincts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona—will be convinced that a felony conviction disqualifies Trump from a second term as Commander-in-Chief, or whether this most recent badge of dishonor is, in the end, of no greater concern than his well-documented history as a bigot, a fabulist, and an authoritarian intent on pursuing a second term inflamed by a spirit of vengeance." |
|
|
| You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for Fareed's Global Briefing.
To stop receiving this newsletter, unsubscribe or sign up to manage your CNN account | |
® © 2024 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
1050 Techwood Drive NW, Atlanta, GA 30318 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
