France’s Jupiter, Trump’s Ecstasy, and Godzilla attacks Mexico City

GZERO
GZERO
Aug 25, 2017 · 6 min read

The Word

Let’s start with this… When Emmanuel Macron was elected France’s president back in May, he looked to be Europe’s new golden boy. With a parliamentary majority ready to advance his agenda, his glow extended across Europe. In June, he had a 64% approval rating. This week, he’s at 36%.

How did we get from popping cork to hangover in one sip? Given the romanticism and absurd expectations that accompanied his rise, a come-down was inevitable. The bureaucratic chaos that follows the arrival of a historic number of first-time lawmakers was also perfectly predictable, and members of his party, formed less than two years ago, have discovered they agree on less than they thought. Combine that with Macron’s decision to cut a popular housing benefit and you have a recipe for frustration.

But Macron has made matters worse by announcing his plans via set-piece speeches with imperial backdrops rather than getting out in the street to shake some hands. He has allowed a rambunctious French press to caricature him instead of engaging them to speak directly to French citizens. And just as those voters were celebrating the arrival of an anti-Trump, Macron announced he would serve as a sort of “Jupiter,” a figure hovering high above the political fray. (For those unfamiliar with Roman mythology, Jupiter was king of the gods, so his analogy sent the grandiosity detector bouncing off the table.) September will be another tough month as labor unions take to the streets to try to block President Jupiter’s plans for labor reform.

Can he recover? Yes, he can. The US offers a couple of recent examples. Bill Clinton can tell Macron all about that time in 1993 when Time declared him the “Incredible Shrinking President,” and Barack Obama can warn him of the downside of being anointed political savior before you’ve even had time to find the palace restrooms. (See the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize). Clinton and Obama recovered to become two-term presidents who left office with relatively high popularity.

And Macron has an advantage Clinton and Obama never had: A fragmented opposition on both the left and right. The center-right and center-left parties have no clear leaders and can’t agree on a strategy to block Macron’s plans. Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his Communists control just 17 of 577 parliamentary seats, while Marine Le Pen and her far-right Front National hold just eight. Macron has the votes to pass labor reform in October. In France, as elsewhere, nothing succeeds like success, and a victory will win the new president a second look from many voters.

What he does with that second look will tell us what’s truly possible in Macron’s France.

Elsewhere… Chile officially opened its 2017 presidential election campaign this week with former President Sebastian Pinera looking like the frontrunner. President Trump accepted the advice of his generals and will send a few thousand more US troops to exert “overwhelming force” in Afghanistan. The US hit Chinese and Russian companies with North Korea-related sanctions. While Americans were obsessing over a solar eclipse, Godzilla attacked Mexico City.

Finally… We learned this week that James Dresnok passed away last November. That’s how long it takes for North Korea to publicize the death of one of its best-known citizens and favorite movie bad guys. Facing US Army court-martial and a bitter family life back home in Virginia, the 21-year old Dresnok went AWOL from his unit in South Korea one evening in 1962, made his way through the DMZ without getting shot or blowing himself up, and then made a new life in the North, in part by appearing as American villains in propaganda action films. “If he had any regret, it was that he died early, missing more loving care from the party and the fatherland,” one of his Pyongyang-born sons told a North Korean interviewer.

Self Promotion Interlude: Eurasia Group’s Charles Lichfield discusses Macron’s first 100 days in office.

What we’re watching

Muhammadu Buhari — Nigeria’s president arrived home this week after more than 100 days of treatment in a London hospital (for an illness he refuses to explain) only to find that his office has been badly damaged by rats. With an economy in recession and terrorist group Boko Haram still at large, Africa’s largest economy needs stable leadership, and even if Buhari isn’t strong enough to run for re-election in 2019, he’ll have a big say in deciding whom his party will nominate to succeed him.

US-South Korean tensions — A poll in June found that more than three-quarters of South Korean respondents support dialogue with North Korea’s government, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in has no better options. The more that President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un threaten one another, the greater the odds of rising tensions between Washington and Seoul. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing to rewrite what he calls a “horrible” trade deal with South Korea.

Trump drugs — German police in the city of Osnabruck seized several thousand carrot-colored ecstasy tablets in the shape of President Trump’s head this week. We won’t be watching this story long, but it’s just too weird to completely ignore.

What we’re ignoring

Threats to scrap NAFTA President Trump threatened again this week to withdraw the US from the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, but we think this is more a hardball negotiating tactic than a likely option. Too many US industries and Republican lawmakers want to keep it, even in revised form, for the president to simply nuke it. Democrats will make the politics as ugly as possible, and talks could drag on long enough to impact next year’s presidential election in Mexico. But we think a revised NAFTA is much more likely than a dead one.

Debates about Bannon’s power — The exit of senior strategist Steve Bannon from the White House and his return to run the Breitbart media organization have sparked a debate: Was he more powerful before his exit or after? We still believe the current game is centered on Capitol Hill, where the much-maligned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan control the agenda that will matter most for people’s lives. Bannon wasn’t going to win enough in-house battles with Trump family members or the men in uniform to remain happy in his work. A compelling character? Yes. But Steve Bannon was never the “second most powerful man in Washington” or the puppet-master that some imagined. Breitbart will now further fragment the conservative media market.

A mysterious Russian radio station — In a swamp outside St Petersburg, there’s a radio station that’s been broadcasting a strange shortwave radio signal at frequency 4625 kHz continuously since 1982, perhaps on behalf of the Soviet, and later the Russian, military. According to the BBC, the station broadcasts a “dull monotonous tone” followed a few seconds later by something that sounds like a foghorn. Every few days, you can hear a human voice repeating random words. It’s possible this station can be used to broadcast encoded messages to Russian spies around the world or even to trigger some form of retaliation should Russia be invaded. But we can safely ignore this station until World War III bumps it up into the “what we’re watching” category.

Your Weekly Bremmer

Hard Numbers

250: The US-backed coalition in Syria has launched at least two hundred and fifty airstrikes on the city of Raqqa over the past week, as the battle to retake the city from ISIS militants reaches its final phase.

€26,000: French President Emmanuel Macron spent twenty-six thousand euros on makeup during his first three months in office. The kicker? That’s far less than was spent by his predecessors.

63: Sixty-three political parties have filed for official status in Brazil in hope of participating in next October’s general election. That should help solve things.

4: The use of child soldiers as “human bombs” by Boko Haram has increased four-fold so far this year as compared to all of 2016, according to UNICEF. Two-thirds of them are girls.

924: Terrorism has killed nine hundred and twenty-four people in Pakistan this year, down from one thousand eight hundred and three for all of 2016. #Progress

20: Qatar is returning its ambassador to Iran twenty months after he was recalled in protest against the country’s execution of a Sunni cleric and handling of an attack on the Saudi Arabian embassy.

Words of Wisdom

“I’m not a mathematician, but that’s almost like 100%.”

– Head of U.S. Pacific Command Admiral Harry Harris comments on the successful testing of 15 out of 15 launches of the THAAD missile defense system that’s deployed in South Korea.

Signal is written by Willis Sparks with editorial support from Gabe Lipton (@gflipton). Don’t like what you read? Feel free to yell at us on Twitter or just reply to this email.

Signal: Loud World. Clear Signal.

LOUD WORLD. CLEAR SIGNAL. Signal is a twice-weekly newsletter on international affairs. No jargon, no nonsense, no noise.

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GZERO

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In a world where the old rules no longer apply, GZERO explains the game. Subscribe to GZERO’s Signal newsletter: https://www.gzeromedia.com/subscribe/

Signal: Loud World. Clear Signal.

LOUD WORLD. CLEAR SIGNAL. Signal is a twice-weekly newsletter on international affairs. No jargon, no nonsense, no noise.

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