Bye: Boris, Bennett and yes, Biden

This newsletter almost writes itself. Yesterday I touched on how western democracies increasingly became inward looking entities, absorbed by internal political strife. Well, I had barely hit the ‘send’ button on that instalment or Boris Johnson’s government started to collapse with high profile resignations of some of his key ministers. It will be very hard to see how Boris will survive in Downing Street when the chancellor, Rishi Sunak and the former chancellor, Sajid Javid, resign over matters of integrity. This on top of a confidence vote he barely survived only a few months ago. My bet is it will be over soon and Johnson will end up in the rankings of time served by a prime minster right between his predecessor Theresa May and, think about it, Neville Chamberlain.

Boris’ job was to land Brexit and that is what he has done in a more or less competent manner, now it is time to move on. He did not have the vision nor the political rigour to build on his incredible majority and really accomplish things domestically or internationally. In Israel meanwhile they are gearing up for the fifth election in three years (!) now that Naftali’s Bennett broad based coalition has fallen apart. It lived for a year only and largely accomplished what its sole mandate was: getting rid of Benjamin Netanyahu, a feat accomplished on its first day in office. There simply was not sufficient parliamentary support to continue the experiment and Netanyahu may well return later this year.

If you think about it Joe Biden had one job too and that was to defeat Donald Trump. He acquitted himself well of that mission and ever since entering the White House his popularity has been dwindling, this week hitting an all-time low. And it is not just the Americans who see it this way. In her weekly update, Julia Ioffe points out that the world’s foreign policy elites are already working towards a one-term Biden scenario and not just that: a very clear expectation that the Republicans will not only win this year’s mid-terms but also the White House in 2024. And to be clear, that would be Trump or a similar isolationist type character. Not good for the world, certainly not good for Europe and absolutely terrible for Ukraine. Hope this underlines the stated concern over a shifting world where the leaders in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai simply cannot believe their spate of good luck.

In other news

Yes, I have been following the farmer protests in The Netherlands. It is wild, both from a political and socio-economic perspective and surely un-Dutch. The police last night actually fired at some farmers, a story developing today. This is a longer piece but it fits into the narrative of western democracies losing their grip on events. Give me a day or so. And: if you like what you read, subscribe.