By Rajan Philips –

The recent elections in Brazil, Serbia and Isreal, with the mother of all elections – the US midterm elections during a Trump presidency – due next Tuesday, are symptomatic of both national choices as well as their global constraints and implications. In addition, the selection of the next UN Secretary General has taken a new turn in New York, further underscoring the shifting sands of geopolitics. In the era of Trump there is only room for cynical transactionalism and dystopic dysfunctionality. Sweeping revolutionary optimism or the mendicant grandeur of non-alignment have turned out to be 20^th century ephemerals. There is no credible champion for them in the 21^st century.

Even though Trump’s executive powers may become increasingly checked by a new Congress under Democrats’ control after the midterm elections and will be terminated by the end of his presidency in January 2029, the havocs that he has whipped up will ripple through many polities and economies for much longer. There is really nothing that any Sri Lankan government can do to influence geopolitical currents even close its territorial waters. The global context and Sri Lanka’s situation are not conducive to pulling a foreign policy diversion to escape domestic crises.       

The task for the NPP government is to navigate through a cynically transactional world and address Sri Lanka’s old and new problems. The NPP’s detractors are literally left, right and centre. All of them keep hammering it for betraying its socialist pre-history and for taking the IMF road to economic stability. They accuse the NPP for both abandoning the path of state-corporation socialism at home and non-alignment abroad. They blame it for being too pliant in foreign policy while insisting that our export and job markets overseas are protected by any and all means.

The saving grace for the government is that its main detractors and opposition parties have not been able to land a single palpable blow to hurt the government. It is the government that has been hurting itself by self-inflicted body blows. The government must save itself from its own goals and prioritize the task that it must fulfill before the next elections. A pertinent question would be which elections and when – provincial, parliamentary or even presidential? As for challenges – there is El Niño, either turning up the heat or turning on the tap; there is energy and electricity; there is education; and most of all the livelihood of with people having to live with diminishing incomes and rising prices.

Election Fallouts

Brazil: Donald Trump has been looming large over the presidential election in Brazil. Trump’s right wing pals in Latin America have been winning a string of presidential elections – seven in one year. Brazil would have been the eighth. But incumbent President Lula da Silva pulled off a stunning come-from-behind victory to keep Brazil leaning Left. Brazil and Mexico are the only large countries with non-Trump presidencies in Latin America.  The pendulum will of course swing back, but leaders of the left and centre-left parties will have redraw their roadmaps to facilitate the swing.

Lula’s opponent Flavio Bolsanaro, son of ormer President Jair Bolsonaro now serving a 27-year jail term in Brazil, secured the largest number of votes in the first round raising hopes of another right wing turn in Brazil. But in the second round runoff Lula da Silva turned the tables on his opponent with a vigorous campaign and strong voter mobilization, capturing 52% of the vote and polling four million votes than his opponent and more than what he polled in 2022. This would be da Silva’s fourth term (after two terms from 2003 to 2011, and the current term since 2023) as President and it may very well be more challenging than the previous three.

At 81, da Silva needs to find a competent successor to lead a highly divided country. The north voted mostly for Lula da Silva while the south sided with Bolsanaro. While his supporters have been uproarious in their celebrations, the markets have not been kind to da Silva’s victory. They reversed their rally after Bolsonaro’s first round victory. The attention is now on the selection of the new cabinet and the next Finance Minister in particular – to calm the markets and reassure investor confidence. The re-elected president can also expect long distance meddling from Washington that could get worse after next week’s midterm elections before it tapers off.     

Serbia: Unlike in Brazil, the Serbian elections were not under any American shadow. Yet the elections delivered a political earthquake. Serbian students who have been protesting a while longer than their counterparts in Europe and in India, contested Serbia’s parliamentary elections under the Student List banner and spectacularly defeated the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksander Vucic and ended their 14-year hold on power. The Student List candidates, largely unknown and a rather motley collection of academics, actors and famers, won 140 out 250 seats in the Serbian parliament.   

Aleksander Vucic has been a central figure in the building of post-Yugoslavian Serbia. He became the Minister of Information at age of 28, and already showed signs of a controlling disposition by restricting journalists and banning TV networks. He wielded power even before becoming Prime Minister in 2014 at 34 years of age. He was elected President in 2017. While criticized for his authoritarianism, Vucic is also credited for his economic stewardship fostering growth and diversification, based on a triangular foreign policy approach – simultaneously engaging  the EU for trade and membership; China for investment, and Russia for natural gas and political reinforcement.

As for the victorious student movement, hard work awaits them after the euphoria of victory. Their nominal leader is Ilija Srdanovic, a Cardiologist and university Professor, but it is not clear whether he or someone else will head the new government as Prime Minister.  He is from the city of Novi Sad where the protests began and has been a leading spokesperson for the student movement from the beginning. He advocates universal healthcare and considers Serbia’s “existential survival’ and not EU membership should be the priority for the Student List. The electoral agenda of the Student List has focused on eradicating graft and improving the school system.   

Israel: Trump is immanently present in Israel and formally endorsed Prime Minister Netanyahu for re-election. The results show Netanyahu has been badly bruised but not totally defeated. Netanyahu’s ultra-right coalition has been denied its majority (61 out of 120 seats) in the Knesset, but  the Likud Party is projected to hold the largest number of seats – 27 seats, five fewer than now. The final tally is 53 seats for Netanyahu’s ultra right coalition – down from 68 in the outgoing parliament,  and 48 seats for the centre-right and left opposition parties. There is no Left of consequence left in Israel. The entire country has moved to the right on national security and Palestinian statehood. A consequence of the October 2023 Hamas attack.

The surprise of the Israeli elections is the capture of 19 seats by the Israeli Palestinian parties, up from 10 seats – the larger Joint List group capturing 11 seats and the left-leaning Ra’am or the United Arab List group winning eight seats. The two Arab Parties are willing to join or support the opposition group to form the next government and prevent Netanyahu from becoming Prime Minister again. But there is fierce resistance within the opposition group to have any truck with the two Palestinian parties, which is reflective of the hostile sentiment among most of the Jews.

UNSG Politics

At the UN, the search for a new Secretary General to replace outgoing Antonio Guttress has become overtly political. First, the US publicly vetoed all the seven declared candidates, including the two leading candidates – both women and from the Latin American – Caribbean Region: former Costa Rican Vice President Rebecca Grynspan, and former Guyanese Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodriguess-Birket. Then Trump proposed three names – two outlandish: the controversial FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and former H PM Viktor Orbán; and one self-serving: Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, who is also the head of the Trump-created Board of Peace for Gaza.

Orbán was proposed as a joint American, Russian and Chinese candidate, with the apparent concurrence of both Russia and China. But Britain and France quietly demurred. That was the end of it and the start of a very public stalemate. Now the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has stepped in to break the stalemate and capture the Secretary General seat at the UN. The UAE government has nominated its veteran diplomat Lana Zaki Nusseibeh as a new candidate with the consent of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council, against the wishes of the Latin American countries.

Lana Nusseibeh’s credentials are not in question. An experienced diplomat, fluent in Arabic, English, French and Hebrew, she could be the first woman UN Secretary General. At 48, she would also be the second youngest SG in UN’s history. Ms. Nusseibeh is a Palestinian, a descendent of the notable Nusseibeh family of Jerusalem. Her father was born in 1946, in Jerusalem in the then British Mandatory Palestine.

All the Gulf States and the Palestinian government support her candidacy and that enhances her credibility as a potential bridge builder for peace in the Middle East. She has been both credited for facilitating relief operations in Gaza, as well as criticized for being closer to the Israeli government than suggested by official assertions to the contrary. Lanna Nusseibeh has now become the leading candidate with growing support.

The problem with her candidacy is the human rights record of the UAE government she represents – both at home and abroad, especially in Sudan. Sudanese diplomats and human rights activists are outraged at her candidacy, and have accused her of being the “public face of the UAE’s denials that it was arming the murderous Rapid Support Forces” – RSF in Sudan.

Yale University’s Nathaniel Raymond has described the Nusseibeh candidacy as representing “the capture of the UN by the UAE” and “a doubling down by the US and Britain in their Emirati relationship above international law.” It is not just Britain and the US, but practically every western country, all G7 members, as well as Russia and China who value their own Emirati relationship and are ready to support the UAE candidate for the highest office at the UN. Transactional politics at its cynical worst.

Postscript: Breaking UN news is that in Friday’s Security Council vote for selecting the new Secretary General, former Costa Rican Vice President Rebecca Grynspan expanded her lead with 11 ‘encourage’ and four ‘discourage’ votes, and Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, moved up to second place with nine positive and four negative votes. Former Guyanese Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodriguess-Birket is now in third place, and the UAE’s Lana Nusseibeh running fourth with seven ‘encourage votes. The new vote tallies reflect the concerted campaign by more than 30 Latin American diplomats in New York. None of the candidates can succeed without the approval of all five Permanent Members, anyone of whom can veto out a candidate. Lana Nusseibeh (UAE) is still seen as the favourite since she appears to have the concurrence of all five PM countries. At the same time, she is drawing objections from human rights organizations, including an online petition with over 60,000 signatories, and a call by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith asking British Prime Minister Andy Burnham to veto her candidacy. The winning candidate must have at least nine out of 15 SC votes, including all five PM countries, followed by majority approval at the General Assembly. In the current Security Council, besides the five permanent members (Britain, China, France, Russia and the US), the 10 non-permanent members are: Bahrain, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia.