Hello! I hope you had a great week (and didn’t melt if you are in some parts of Europe). This week, we’re exploring what Russian President Vladimir Putin was doing in Tehran, Iran. But we’re also looking at the presidential elections in India and Sri Lanka (happening in totally different contexts), the intensifying race to become the United Kingdom’s next prime minister and Italian prime minister Mario Draghi dropping his towel. Let’s get started.
Let’s get started.
This day that year
2011: Terrorist attacks rocked the government quarter in the Norwegian capital Oslo and a summer camp on the Utøya island, leaving 77 people dead and more than 300 others injured. It was the deadliest attack in Norway since the end of the Second World War. Anders Behring Breivik, who identifies himself as a neo-Nazi and confessed to the attacks, sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention in prison – the highest civilian criminal penalty allowed in in the country.
1943: Allied forces captured Palermo city during their invasion of the island of Sicily, Italy during the Second World War.
Looking for an ally in Tehran
Russian President Vladimir Putin was in the Iranian capital Tehran this week, in what was his second presidential trip abroad since his country invaded Ukraine earlier this year. Since February, the West has tried to isolate Russia over the war in Ukraine and so Putin was in Tehran hoping to signal that he wasn’t alone after all.
The Russian president met his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi as well as the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran has faced crippling western sanctions for years over its nuclear programme and Russia would want to learn a thing or two about working around them. We’re likely to see growing cooperation between Russia and Iran – both countries the West has sought to isolate. We can already see some shades of the quickly deepening ties. Russian state-owned gas producer Gazprom and the National Iranian Oil Company have signed a memorandum of understanding worth around $40 billion. As part of this deal, Gazprom will help the Iranian oil company develop half a dozen oil fields as well as the Kish and North Pars gas fields. The Russian firm will also complete liquefied natural gas projects and construct gas export pipelines. Russia was also purchasing drones from Iran which could be used in Ukraine, The New York Times reported.
But what was perhaps the most important thing Putin was looking for in Tehran was support for what he calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei provided him with that.
“War is a violent and difficult endeavour, and the Islamic Republic [of Iran] is not at all happy that people are caught up in war,” Khamenei told Putin. “But in the case of Ukraine, if you had not taken the helm, the other side would have done so and initiated a war.”
Khamenei went a step further to call the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) a “dangerous entity”. “The West is totally opposed to a strong, independent Russia. If the way is opened for NATO, it will recognise no limits. If it hadn’t been stopped in Ukraine, it would have later started a similar war in Crimea,” Khamenei said in a statement published by his office.
Another statement quoted Khamenei as saying that ongoing events around the world have shown that there is a “need for Iran and Russia to increase mutual cooperation on a daily basis”.
Putin also met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and discussed the conflict in Syria in which their countries are on opposing sides, just like in the case of Libya. Turkey is a NATO member and has sold the much-talked-about Bayraktar drones to Ukraine that are being used against Russian forces. However, Ankara hasn’t joined its NATO allies in imposing sanctions against Moscow. Turkey is itself facing soaring inflation and the plummeting value of the Lira has increased its dependence on the Russian market.
Putin also discussed a United Nations-backed proposal to resume export of Ukrainian grain that would help ease the global food crisis. The Russian president said that his country was willing to allow Ukrainian grain exports if the restrictions on Russian grain exports were lifted.
Commentators are calling this Erdoğan’s “revenge” for Putin making him wait for about two minutes during their meeting in 2020.
What else?
Not reading the room
Sri Lankan lawmakers elected Ranil Wickremesinghe, the prime minister and the acting president, as the country’s new president this week. This was despite protesters calling on Wickremesinghe to quit just like former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa had last week. He defeated opposition candidate Dullas Alahapperuma by 52 votes in parliament.
Key opposition leader Sajith Premadasa was widely expected to fight for the presidency but he withdrew from the race in support of Alahapperuma — a rebel lawmaker from the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party. Wickremesinghe’s own United National Party (UNP) has just one member of parliament and managed to win with the support of a large number of lawmakers from Rajapaksas’ SLPP.
Wickremesinghe will not only have to pull the country out of the economic crisis, but also win the confidence of protesters who still want him to step aside. Restoring law and order remains another challenge for the 73-year-old. He is expected to serve out the remainder of this presidential term until November 2024.
Wickremesinghe appointed Rajapaksa loyalist and SLPP lawmaker Dinesh Gunawardena as the new prime minister on July 22.
India’s next president
Droupadi Murmu was elected India’s next (15th) president on July 21. The 64-year-old belongs to the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and will assume office on July 25. Murmu previously served as the governor of a state, and was a lawmaker and minister in another state government.
She was up against former cabinet minister Yashwant Sinha who was nominated by a section of opposition parties. The president is elected by state and federal lawmakers, not by the people.
The president is the supreme commander of the armed forces but India’s governance structure vests executive powers in the hands of the prime minister (head of government) — making the role of the head of state largely ceremonial. Yet, Murmu’s election carries significance. She will be the first from the tribal community and the second woman to be elected to the country’s highest office. Murmu will, based on my quick research, be the first to have been born after India’s independence in 1947. But behind Murmu’s candidature was a deeper political strategy on part of the ruling BJP. Electing a citizen belonging to the country’s tribal community is being seen as a key part of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led party’s tribal voter outreach strategy.
Ram Nath Kovind, the incumbent president, will leave office on July 25 at the end of his five-year term. According to India’s Constitution, a president can be re-elected. But the unwritten convention has been to elect a new person every five years.
Draghi out
Italian President Sergio Mattarella has called for a snap general election to be held within 70 days after accepting prime minister Mario Draghi’s resignation. Last week, Mattarella had rejected Draghi’s offer to resign and had instead asked the prime minister to go back to parliament and try and build consensus for the government to continue. But ‘Super Mario’ Draghi failed to save the government. This political crisis was triggered after some parties withdrew support to his unity government.
Update: UK PM race
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss have made it to the final round of the Conservative Party’s leadership race. The winner will replace Boris Johnson as the United Kingdom’s prime minister. Over the coming weeks, the two candidates will hold hustings to secure support of party members. The result of this final round will be known by September 5.
Interesting stuff
“The failure to see the Cold War for what it was has left the United States unprepared to manage the risks that great-power competition poses to democratic society today.” Michael Brenes and Van Jackson argue in Foreign Affairs that the great power rivalry with China and Russia is reinforcing the factors leading to the US’ decline. Read the full piece here.
“India’s backsliding on internet freedom also poses a test for its Quad partners, Australia, Japan and the United States, with their commitment to an international rules-based order and a ‘free and open Indo Pacific’. Openness can’t just apply to shipping lanes and markets. It must also apply to civil society and online spaces, too.” Sasha Fegan writes in The Interpreter about how India’s social media crackdown is a challenge to the rules-based international order. Read it here.
“No two heat waves are precisely the same. The current scorching temperatures that reached into England and Wales on Monday (July 18) were caused in part by a region of upper level low-pressure air that has been stalled off the coast of Portugal for days.” Henry Fountain writes in The New York Times about why Europe is becoming a heat wave hot spot. Read the story here.
We’d earlier discussed the reasons behind Sri Lanka falling into the ongoing economic crisis. But this podcast by The Wall Street Journal does an excellent job of explaining the problems in a chronological order. Listen in here.
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