This week, Farai interviews Tia Mitchell, Washington Correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and chair of the National Association of Black Journalists about the U.S. midterm election results in Georgia and what they tell us about the nation’s political atmosphere. And on this week’s roundtable foreign policy expert, host of “Oh My World” on Youtube, and Our Body Politic guest host, Hagar Chemali, is joined by Ash Sarkar, contributing editor for UK-based media company Novara Media, and Bobby Ghosh, Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs, to talk about the latest political news in Brazil and the United Kingdom.
Farai Chideya:
Hi folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We'd also love you to join in financially supporting the show if you're able. You can find out more at ourbodypolitic.com/donate. We're here for you, with you, and because of you. Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. Our guest closely followed the 2022 midterm election with a special focus on Georgia. A graduate of Florida A&M University, Tia Mitchell has covered politics across multiple levels of government, providing insight into a range of topics, including money in politics and government accountability. As Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mitchell covers Congress and national politics for readers in the Peach State. She is also chair of the National Association of Black Journalists Political Task Force. Welcome to Our Body Politic, Tia.
Tia Mitchell:
Thank you so much for having me.
Farai Chideya:
So you have been on grind, I'm guessing, covering them politics.
Tia Mitchell:
Yes. It's been a busy few weeks and we've got another, what, three and a half weeks to go now.
Farai Chideya:
We're going to get to that key Senate race out of Georgia, but just let's start with a big picture. How do you think this midterm cycle differed from other ones you've covered?
Tia Mitchell:
Well, I think the fact that Democrats were able to avoid the kind of landslide that usually comes, usually the party in power loses a lot of seats in the midterms. President Trump experienced that. President Obama experienced that, and it looks like Democrats will likely lose some seats. Like even redistricting alone. Democrats lost a seat in Georgia just before any votes were even cast. So it's looking like Democrats could lose some seats, but it won't be the shellacking that like conventional wisdom in history may have predicted. And it just shows that in the age of Trump, in the age of this very conservative Supreme Court, things are so much different in the body politics, so to speak, and it's really affecting how elections play out.
Farai Chideya:
Absolutely. Well, here's a little clip of President Biden speaking during midterms week.
President Joe Biden:
While any seat lost is painful, some good Democrats didn't win there last night. Democrats had a strong night and we lost fewer seats in house of representatives than any democratic president's first midterm election in the last 40 years.
Farai Chideya:
And as you were hinting, the conventional wisdom didn't say it was so. But now among those political pundits who were predicting a red wave, some of them are coming out, one of them a columnist said, "I'm having crow for dinner with a nice glass of wine". And so people are beginning to eat crow a little bit over this. I've been both a political reporter and a political analyst where I get to be more opinionated. I did that for CNN many years ago. As a political reporter, what is your job? What do you think your job is in terms of describing what is happening, what could happen? How do you think of your mission?
Tia Mitchell:
Well, I think first and foremost, I see my mission as telling the truth and then putting the truth in context. Putting what our elected officials and candidates say in the proper context. And of course a lot of my job is reporting what's happening with these campaigns, and that might be their actual events and rallies and endorsements, but it also might be how much money they're raising and how they're responding to the news of the day, whether that news is about the candidates specifically or about perhaps abortion or other topics and trying to figure out how they would legislate on the issues.
Farai Chideya:
So I'm going to throw out a few issues. How did you see these playing out? Let's start with abortion and reproductive rights. How do you think that played out?
Tia Mitchell:
So that became a huge issue in Georgia, both in the governor's race because Georgia is among the states that passed a restrictive abortion law anticipating the overturn of Roe vs Wade. And once the Supreme Court did that, that new restrictive law went into effect. And so abortion was big in Georgia for that.
Tia Mitchell:
But then it also became an issue of course in the Senate race because incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock is pro-choice. He's among the Democrats that won't verbalize any limitations on abortion. He says that's a decision left up to the person who's pregnant and their family and their medical advisors. But on the other side, we had Herschel Walker, the Republican who not only was anti-abortion and said he didn't see any exceptions. He kind of moderated that view later, but initially said with no exceptions. But then through the course of the campaign, two women said that Herschel Walker paid for them to have an abortion. So that perception that he wanted abortion when it was convenient for him but not abortion for other people to be able to make that choice really became a very key issue, not just on the topic of abortion, but on the topic of trustworthiness and character.
Farai Chideya:
Some people are a little gobsmacked that with some of the things that came out during the campaign season that he got that many votes. What do you think is the reality of how different Georgia voters perceive these two candidates?
Tia Mitchell:
When we were covering the Herschel Walker campaign, we heard from conservative voters who said, I don't care what he does. I'm voting for him because we want a Republican in that seat because they had the bigger goal of flipping control of the US Senate. And again, we're talking about the general election. The dynamics are changing a little bit during this runoff season. But right now, Warnock, he and Ossoff became the 49th and 50th Democrat needed to give Democrats control of the Senate. Ossoff's not on the ballot. He got a full six year term Warnock was in a special election. So he is running now for a six year term.
Tia Mitchell:
So Republicans felt that if we can take the seat from Warnock, we take the majority from the Democrats. That being their motivating factor meant that the character issues, the lack of readiness, lack of experience from Herschel Walker was not necessarily an insurmountable concern for most Republicans. Now what we did see clearly on election night is there were some voters who maybe were inclined to support Walker, but the controversies, the inconsistencies, the lies turned them off. The libertarian candidate got 2% of the vote overall. There were clearly some people who just left that race blank, but by and large Republicans said We're going to stick with Herschel Walker no matter what.
Farai Chideya:
I want to go back to core issues for voters in a second, but just I'm going to sidetrack over here to the question of candidate quality because that's come up a lot in conversations. Mitch McConnell has, among many other Republicans, had some thoughts about candidate quality in these elections. There were some people who were pumped up by former President Trump who did not seem to meet the mark even with Republican voters. But what we're seeing here in the Georgia Senate race is that candidate quality is not the only factor overall, have you been keeping track of this issue of candidate quality?
Tia Mitchell:
Just to put a quick pin on it, Herschel Walker also had Georgia celebrity, so he became a different factor when it came to Trump endorsed candidates. But in general, the Trump endorsed candidates in Georgia did not do well. Most of them lost their primaries both in congressional races, a lot of the statewide races, the only Trump endorsed candidate during the primary to make it to the general election was Bert Jones, the lieutenant governor candidate. And that was seen as kind of also an indictment that Democrats didn't have a good person to run against him and he won the general election like most Republicans in Georgia did. Trump clearly was endorsing candidates for his own personal reasons without knowing the dynamics of the states where these candidates would have to run. Look at Dr. Oz.
Farai Chideya:
Who I was thinking about.
Tia Mitchell:
Yeah, he's considered a carpet bagger in Pennsylvania. He really didn't even live there, had very thin ties to the state, but Trump propped him up and that was enough to get him through a primary, but it wasn't enough for him to win the general election. Down here in Georgia, a former Democrat who became this mega Trump guy, Vernon Jones, Trump kind of made an arrangement to get him to drop out of the governor's race by promising his endorsement in this congressional district that Vernon Jones didn't even live in. And it's a super conservative rural district. They're not voting for a former Democrat and I mean former as in within the past two years, he was a Democrat who had no ties to the district. So of course he didn't win the primary.
Farai Chideya:
So Tia, before election day, there was a lot of conversation about whether or not black men were supporting Stacey Abrams to the degree that black women did. And it wasn't quite to the degree, but there have been a lot of conversations in newspapers, on TV, radio and black Twitter saying, Look, don't blame black men for Stacey Abrams not winning, blame white women and white men like overwhelmingly white men and women did not vote for Abrams. And don't cherry pick a small difference between black men and black women at the same time there is [inaudible 00:11:17] that comes at black female candidates including Abrams, not just from white people but from black people. So how do you make sense of all of that?
Tia Mitchell:
I agree with you on all accounts. Like at the end of the day, the vast majority of black people, men and women supported Stacey Abrams, we're talking about in the nineties for women maybe in the high eighties for black men. So when you're talking about the reasons why she lost exactly that it wasn't black people not voting for Stacey Abrams, it was the fact that white people, particularly white men, but I think people have honed in on white women because on the issue of abortion healthcare, things like that, they feel that white women should have saw more of themselves in Stacey Abrams platform compared to Governor Kemp. When you talk about black men, we do know that they're more likely to support Republican candidates than black women are. That's not just something that Brian Kemp experienced. Donald Trump experienced that.
Farai Chideya:
That was Tia Mitchell, Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Coming up more from Mitchell on the big picture in politics, including her closeup view of January 6th and on how voters see democracy after the midterms and later our round table sip in the political tea dives into international waters with the latest on Brazil and the UK. That's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation with Tia Mitchell, Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She gives us her read on the issues and voters would shape the midterms and on the future of democracy.
Tia Mitchell:
Stacey Abrams needed every vote she could get. Men in general are more likely to support Republicans, and so black men fit that trend of those messages you hear from Republican candidates about jobs and the economy and how especially messaging on great replacement resonates particularly with men more than women where you say that immigrants are taking our jobs and those people are taking our good paying jobs. It's a bigger issue than just Stacey Abrams.
Tia Mitchell:
So the fact that black men were more likely than black women to vote for Brian Kemp, that was yet another factor that did contribute to her loss. Was it the main factor? No. Was it something her campaign was concerned about well before the election? Yes. It's something her campaign worked really hard to address. They did a lot of outreach with black men. They tried their best to elevate voices of black men who were supporting Stacey Abrams in hopes of encouraging other black men to do the same again, because these bigger dynamics were in play. But even if all the black men voted for Stacey Abrams, she still had a time beating Brian Kemp for many other reasons.
Farai Chideya:
This is the first election after the January 6th insurrection, which of course came shortly after the last election season, but before the inauguration there were about 300 election deniers on the ballot in various roles, a little more than half seem poised to win their races. When the dawn broke on the day after election day, how has the mainstreaming of election denial impacted the political landscape and how were you keeping track of it?
Tia Mitchell:
So it's really interesting when I think about that dynamic. For example, in Georgia, we had eight Republican members of Congress, six of them voted against certifying the electoral college outcome in Arizona, for example. Two of them did vote to accept Arizona's electoral votes on January 6th. But they've made comments kind of undermining the integrity of the election in different ways. Marjorie Taylor Greene's an extreme example, but generally speaking, seven of the eight don't talk much about election integrity right now.
Tia Mitchell:
Number one, they were all on the ballot. So it's like both in 2020 and again in 2022. How can you with a straight face criticize an election when you were on the ballot and you say you won fair and square. Now we saw they did that in 2020, and I'm not saying they won't start that back up now that the election season is over, but definitely during the election season we didn't see them criticizing the election process or the election system in Georgia mainly because they saw what happened in the runoffs in 2021.
Tia Mitchell:
They lost partially because they were going around telling their voters don't trust the election system. What's the point anyway? Your vote won't be counted correctly. So I think the question will be do they start it back up? Do they, once all the dust settles after the runoffs, do they continue to uphold the integrity of Georgia's election? Which all signs, all lawsuits, all audits, all recounts have said the election system is strong and it's fair. Do they accept that this time or do they kind of for political or personal reasons start drumming up more second guessing? I think that they're probably going to move on particularly because once again, we're seeing that's not a winning message. Donald Trump wasn't able to make it a winning message in 2022.
Farai Chideya:
I understand you were at the capital on January 6th. So how has it felt to watch all of these questions of election denial, election interference, future of democracy play out over the past couple of years?
Tia Mitchell:
Yes, I was in the capital on January 6th. I was covering the certification of the electoral ballots and I was trapped in the house chamber when we couldn't evacuate once the capital was overrun. So I do have a very intimate understanding of the violence that took place on January 6th as well as the realization that it could have been much worse if the timing had been just a little bit different in certain scenarios.
So to see how our elections, our democracy have been undermined by the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, it's really just convinced me that our democracy is fragile and it's really built upon agreements, rule of law, and literally people saying, "I'm going to agree to accept the outcome of an election". And I mean people like regular people, regular voters, candidates in small town city council races all the way up to candidates for president, just literally saying, I'm going to personally decide to uphold our democracy by accepting the outcome of the election. Trusting election officials when they say every vote was counted correctly. And it only takes a few people to abandon traditional agreements to really harm our democracy. Like literally our democracy is built on people deciding to play nice when it counts.
Tia Mitchell:
There are very few safeguards that can stop something really bad happening if just a small number of people decide to blow it all up. Look what Trump did. The courts couldn't stop January 6th. The majority of Republicans down to Marjorie Taylor Greene were not asking for violence. They were not expecting violence, they were not encouraging violence at least publicly. I spoke to Marjorie Taylor Greene that day, she was scared for her life, and I understand that she has changed her tune and taken a more defensive position about January 6th in a conspiracy theorist position. But on January 6th, they were on one accord and we saw that in the video from the leaders that was shared by the January 6th house select committee. Most people were on one accord. That type of violence was not appropriate and it happened anyway.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, I'm thinking of former house speaker Paul Ryan apparently sobbing according to some reports as he watched January 6th attacks, a lot of people may have their own take after the fact. We've had several politicians on talking about what it was like that day and the level of fear and wondering if they were going to have to fight for their lives. You are, in addition to everything else you do, the chair of the National Association of Black Journalists Political Task Force, which of course I'm a big fan of and member of NABJ. Given all the other work you do, what brings you joy about mentoring political reporters and how do you hope to shape the field?
Tia Mitchell:
Oh my gosh, it brings me so much joy. Just recently I put together a dinner because as I was on the campaign trail down in Georgia, I kept coming across these amazing black women covering politics either for national outlets or for local outlets in Atlanta. And I said, Let's all just get together and network and encourage each other. And there were 15 black women at this dinner and I'm very passionate about number one, extending the hand. It took me a long time to get to Washington as a correspondent covering national politics. I didn't have the connections. I am from Louisville, Kentucky. I went to Florida A&M and then I started my career at a relatively small newspaper in Jacksonville, Florida.
Tia Mitchell:
So I want to make sure we open the doors wide open and those who are interested in political journalism, particularly if they're black reporters, that they get the mentoring they need, they get the exposure they need, they get the training they need and that they are connected with people who can get them the jobs that they dream about.
Tia Mitchell:
And I'm just also just big on just encouraging other black journalists, particularly black women journalists. People call me auntie, I embrace it like I will auntie a perfect stranger if I come across you and I'm like, What do you need? How can I support your career? So the clinical task force allows me to do that. And really I try to fling the doors wide open, remove barriers. Sometimes it's hard when you're on the outside and you feel like you're looking in and you don't know how to penetrate those circles. I want to make it so anyone who wants in knows that they can reach out to me and you are welcome.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Tia Mitchell, it's wonderful to hear that. Thank you so much for joining us.
Tia Mitchell:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
That was Tia Mitchell, Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Chair of the National Association of Black Journalist Political Task Force.
Farai Chideya:
I'm Farai Chideya and you're listening to Our Body Politic. We turn now from domestic politics to big political news on the international front. Each week on the show we bring you a round table called Sip in the political Tea, and this week I've invited foreign policy expert and host of YouTube show Oh My World, Hagar Chemali to lead the conversation. So take it away, Hagar.
Hagar Chemali:
Thanks Farai. Joining me this week is Bobby Ghosh, Bloomberg opinion columnist covering foreign affairs. Welcome back Bobby.
Bobby Ghosh:
Happy to be back, Hagar.
Hagar Chemali:
And Ash Sarkar, contributing editor for the UK based media company, Novara Media. Hi Ash, welcome.
Ash Sarkar:
Thanks so much for having me, Hagar.
Hagar Chemali:
This week we're discussing political developments in the United Kingdom and Brazil. The UK over the last few weeks has witnessed some political volatility. After former Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned after only six weeks in office becoming the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history. She resigned after the UK's currency rapidly declined and markets roiled, following her plan not to raise corporate taxes.
Hagar Chemali:
Truss's previous opponent, Rishi Sunak, has now become the UK's new prime minister. But does that mean the UK's economic troubles are over? Meanwhile, in Brazil, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the election against far right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. The election was tight. And we'll discuss why it was important, what it means for Brazilians and the similarities between their elections and those in the United States over the last few years. Let's start with the situation in the United Kingdom. Bobby, I'd like to start with you. Can you give us the latest on the markets and currency? Have things calmed down in the UK on this front and what are Rishi Sunak's plans to tackle those challenges and the pros and cons to those plans?
Bobby Ghosh:
Let me start at the top. The markets have stabilized a little bit, the pound has stabilized a little bit, but I emphasize on the little bit part of it. They stabilized mostly just on the strength of Liz Truss walking away from the office, she was seen as being a very, very poor economic manager. She and her short lived, Chancellor of the exchequer, Akwasi Kwarteng were perceived as extremely bad managers.
Bobby Ghosh:
Rishi Sunak, who had previously been a chancellor of the exchequer, is seen as somebody who at least understands the basics of how to run an economy and the market has a little more confidence in him. The bottom line is the government needs to raise more money. Energy bills in Britain as all over Europe have spiked because of the cost of gas and fuel as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And the conservative party, Liz Truss promise that consumers would be subsidized in their gas expenses. Rishi Sunak promised to keep those subsidies at least through this winter. Where is he going to find money? There's only one way around it, which is to raise taxes. Who's he going to raise those taxes on? Will it be everybody? Will it be just the rich? Will it be companies? These are questions that will be answered in the days and weeks ahead.
Hagar Chemali:
Ash, can you talk to us a little bit about the perspective from the general population? Do people have confidence in Rishi Sunak and do we have any hint of what he might want from a relationship with the United States diplomatically or any issues on the table for the US UK relationship more broadly?
Ash Sarkar:
So the view from the general public has been quite clear. Under Liz Truss, the conservatives endured some of their worst polling deficits in modern history. When Rishi Sunak entered, it was a significant recovery, but there's still a gap between them and the party of the opposition Labour. This is now our third prime minister who has come to power. The two previous administrations were beset by problems of poor judgment, recklessness while in office and in Boris Johnson's case, a lack of personal integrity. Of course, Rishi Sunak was Chancellor of the exchequer under Boris Johnson.
Ash Sarkar:
So I think that there is an overall decline in trust in our government and in this ruling party. The other part of the equation is that, as Bobby mentioned, the economic outlook is very, very bleak. So the Bank of England has said that we are then to what's forecast to be a two year long recession, which would be one of the longest in modern history.
Ash Sarkar:
And that's coming on the back of a decade of lost wage growth. We've of course had a previous recession just like the US did following the subprime mortgage crisis. And what our government did then is under Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne is they cut hard and they cut deep when it came to public spending. Of course the size of the deficit was meant to reduce, but it also meant that we had a far slower recovery. And in fact, wages never quite recovered to their pre-crisis levels.
Ash Sarkar:
So now when you see a real hit to people's purchasing power because of the impact of energy bills and all of those knock on domino effects, commercial prices and food prices, rising interest rates are having an impact on people's rents as well as their own mortgage payments. It means that there's a real lack of optimism in the UK right now. And of course Rishi Sunak has some very deep connections with the United States. What's interesting is that we haven't heard so much about the United States from Rishi Sunak so far. It's early days of course in office, his focus is almost tunnel visioned on the financial statement just shortly later this month. And then I think we'd get a bit more of a sense of what his foreign policy outlook's going to be.
Hagar Chemali:
Fascinating. And Bobby, I'd love if you could also chime in on this question.
Bobby Ghosh:
Well, I think Richard Soak will be aware that the United States is dealing with its own problems, high inflation to start, and therefore he will temper his ask from the United States. But any help he can get would be very, very welcome. On the foreign policy side, what I'd be looking out for is where he stands on Ukraine. Liz Truss wasn't in office long enough for us to get a real sense, but Boris Johnson, her predecessor, he leaned into support for Ukraine, he leaned into the strong voice against Russia's invasion of Ukraine against Putin. Will see if Rishi Sunak continues. I think he has expressed similar views, but we'll find out just how enthusiastic he is about falling in line behind American policy on Ukraine. And also getting the European countries to be much more supportive of Ukraine, both in terms of helping the Ukrainian economy, subsidizing the Ukrainian budget, but also providing more arms and material for the Ukrainian fight.
Bobby Ghosh:
So that would be a big foreign policy question mark for me. He went to Egypt to COP27, the sort of great conclave on the state of the climate. Initially was planning not to go, changed his mind. He was slightly overtaken by the controversy over Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who is a British national who has for quite some time now been held in prison in Egypt. He's an activist, pro democracy activist and calls for Sunak to demand his release kind of overtook the prime minister's visits to Egypt.
So we didn't really hear a great deal from him, but right now his hands are so full of a really severe as Ash said the prospect of a two year long recession that I think that's going to take up most of his bandwidth.
Farai Chideya:
That was Sip in the Political Tea with foreign policy expert and host of the YouTube show, Oh My World, Hagar Chemali in conversation with Bobby Ghosh, Bloomberg opinion columnist and Ash Sarkar, contributing editor for the UK based media company, Novara Media. Coming up next, more of this special sip in the political tea on the politics of the UK and Brazil. You're listening to Our Body Politic.
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just joining us, we're talking international politics on our round table, Sip in the political tea with Hagar Chemali foreign policy expert and host of YouTube show, Oh My World. She's talking to Bobby Ghosh, Bloomberg opinion columnist and Ash Sarkar contributing editor for the UK based media company, Novara Media. Let's listen.
Hagar Chemali:
I want to also talk a little bit about the state of the Conservative party in the UK right now. Ash, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have each promised economic improvement. What does this mean for the strength of the Tories and what are you seeing among the younger generation across the UK in particular?
Ash Sarkar:
There is a massive generational split in voting behavior. Young people who tend to be renters, much less likely to own their own home, much less likely to own assets which are appreciating in value, they tend to vote Labour. Some of this is to do with social cultural values, but I think it's a straightforward expression of what your economic stake is in society. If you don't have one, you vote Labour. If you've got one and you've got an asset to protect, you vote conservative. And that's kind of been the pattern from 2001 onwards in this country. And so that's not something which is going to change anytime soon. But the thing about the Conservative party that I think your audience really need to understand is that they have a phenomenal talent at burning themselves to the ground and then emerging Phoenix like reborn out of those ashes.
Ash Sarkar:
So if you just want to take the period from 2010 to now, you've got David Cameron coming in as part of a coalition with the liberal Democrats implementing very deep cuts, but generally, socially liberal, economically conservative conservatism. He gets an outright majority in 2015. But because so many conservative voters have been lending their vote to Euro skeptic parties and threatening the conservatives at local elections, he feels compelled to put an in out EU referendum on the manifesto.
Ash Sarkar:
Of course, the side that he campaigns on remain loses that referendum in 2016. So who do you get? You get Theresa May, she comes in without a general election and she's essentially bullied out of putting together a compromise soft Brexit, something which might reflect the fact that it was a 52-48 split and the conservative party backbenches then bully her out of office. And then boom, you get Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson who campaigned for Brexit and is also trying to put together electorally a kind of red Tory-ism.
Ash Sarkar:
And so this was the thing that was really striking about the 2019 election winning manifesto is that it was promising some degree of wealth redistribution shifting money away from London and out into those seats in the north of England and the Midlands, which had switched from Labour to Tories. Boris Johnson, he's got all of the self-control of a Labrador at a picnic. That's essentially the thing which shames him out of office along with the fact that he has more government ministers resign in a 48 hour period than any other prime minister in history. And then we've got of course Liz Truss. And Liz Trust again is a reflection of something which a significant portion of the Conservative party base wants that's not the same as the electorate, but the membership genuinely really want Margaret Thatcher 2.0, low tax, deregulate everything kind of conservatism. And now we've got Rishi Sunak being brought in to clean up the mess.
Ash Sarkar:
And I think the key question here is will he be able to pull off that same trick of reinventing the Conservative party's fortunes in office? I think something that's really important to point out is that he's only been in office a little while, but the balance of power has markedly shifted. So as Bobby noted, he went to the COP27 conference after having first said that he wasn't going to do it. The reason why he went is because he essentially started getting a bit bullied in the press about it. Rishi Sunak caved and ended up going to COP27.
Ash Sarkar:
Gavin Williamson, who was a minister without portfolio and a former chief whip. A whole load of allegations came out about bullying and aggressive conduct. Rashi Sunak initially indicated he was going to stand by him, then he was forced to accept his resignation. So I think that in many ways Rishi Sunak is a weak prime minister in that structurally he doesn't have the same forces shoring him up as quite a few of his predecessors. He doesn't have a mandate from the electorate. He is in charge of a party which is still deeply, deeply divided and lots of people are still glancing at Boris Johnson is the king over the water. And he was effectively imposed on the Conservative party membership he lost against Liz Truss. So that puts him in a really precarious position, I think.
Hagar Chemali:
Okay, let's travel across the ocean and talk a little bit about Brazil. Bobby, Brazil's election was very tight, unexpectedly so, and there were elements that were reminiscent of what we saw here in the United States in 2020. Things like deep political divides to the left and right, misinformation and unexpected level of support for the far right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, but also an incumbent who narrowly lost to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Tell us how the election divided the nation and what each candidate stood for.
Bobby Ghosh:
Well, as you say, God, there was plenty of drama on the one side. You had the incumbent, Bolsonaro very right wing, often compared with Donald Trump. On the other side you had Lula who'd been president before and then not only fallen out of favor but fallen into jail on charges of corruption, served his sentence came out and stood for president again under the Brazilian system, in the first round nobody got the majority. So there was a runoff between the two leading candidates. And Lula just about edged it.
Bobby Ghosh:
One important difference from the United States Bolsonaro after a brief hesitation, essentially conceded unlike Donald Trump. And as yet I cross my fingers as I say this, there has not been a strong tendency in Brazil to question the results and undermine the process of the election. That's not to say the country is now going to unite behind Lula, although he was president before and he had shown at that time an ability to reach across the political divide.
Bobby Ghosh:
The world has changed quite a bit since he was last in power. Politics in Brazil is greatly polarized. And if I may say so, the world has greatly polarized. He's going to have a hard time. Quite a number of the major governorships in Brazil are on the other side, on the Bolsonaro side, Bolsonaro has not gone away. He may have conceded the election, but he won a sizable proportion of the votes. And it'll be in Bolsonaro's interest to see Lula fail and he'll do everything he can to make that happen.
Bobby Ghosh:
So I think Brazilians in general are relieved that their post-election scenario is not as ugly as it got here in the United States, but it's a little too early to break open the champagne. I think Brazil over the next couple of years at least is going to be quite unstable politically and Lula's ability to reach across the aisle will be tested to the maximum.
Hagar Chemali:
You're listening to Sip in the Political Tea on Our Body Politic. I'm Hagar Chemali. This week we're discussing the latest in the United Kingdom and Brazil with Bobby Gosh, Bloomberg opinion Colonist and Ash Sarkar contributing editor for the UK based media company, Novara Media. Ash, we're seeing increasing far-right sentiment around the world, not just in Brazil. Why was this election in Brazil so important and what do you think it means for democracy and democracies around the world? And also what changes lie ahead for Brazil and what do you think the selection means for the indigenous people in Brazil in particular?
Ash Sarkar:
Well, let's start with the fact that there is a global phenomenon of far right authoritarian movements either becoming politically influential or indeed taking power as we've recently seen in Italy, in Israel, and as was the case with Bolsonaro's previous election victory. I think the first thing that's important to note is that there is a shared phenomenon which is being responded to in many of these instances. Not all, but many of them. Which is that the world is still generally cleaving to an economic model which isn't delivering the kinds of increases in standard of living that it used to in many countries. So you take Italy for instance, you are seeing standards of living decline. You're seeing increased numbers of young people still having to live with their parents. They can't have families of their own. And that's because there was no real recovery from the financial crisis.
Ash Sarkar:
There's a perception that the political establishment is out of touch, that it doesn't meet the needs of ordinary people. And when you tie accusations of corruption or a democratic system which lacks integrity, you can have opportunistic actors who can adopt some of the anti-establishment sentiment and sometimes even policies from the left. And wed it to deeply reactionary political projects along the lines of race, ethnonationalism, support for increasingly hard line authoritarian measures, so on and so forth.
Ash Sarkar:
There's also a level of coordination between many of these movements. Sometimes that's a coordination which takes place through individuals meeting and actually strategizing together. You had that with Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage for instance here in the UK. And sometimes you just have a kind of sympathetic signaling. So one of the things that was really interesting about Brazil is that when Michelle Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro's wife went to cast her vote, she did so wearing an Israel t-shirt.
Now that's not because the Bolsonaros are really hot on the issue of antisemitism and really good at calling out threats to the safety of Jewish people. What they see in the Israeli government is a very militarized society, a very authoritarian government and a willingness to trample over the rights of minorities. And they go, Well, we want a bit of that. And I think that the reason why Lula was even in the conversation for this election, let alone winning it after having served time in prison, is because Bolsonaro did not deliver on lifting the standards of living for most Brazilians and his catastrophic failure when it came to handling the pandemic, the fact that it led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Brazilian. So I think that's why Lula was in the picture at all. What this means for Brazilian minorities, particularly those from minority groups who were very viciously attacked during the Bolsonaro period such as the LGBT community, I mean it's huge.
Ash Sarkar:
There was a level of misinformation and scare mongering, which has being directly encouraged by Jair Bolsonaro, his political allies and his families, which put the lives of LGBT people at risk. And when it comes to indigenous people, I think the massive sea change being signaled by Lula here is the willingness to work with indigenous people and environmental defenders on protecting the Amazon. Now this isn't just being done in a kind of let's all hold hands and dance around a tree kind of way. Lula is saying, "Hang on, you're going to have to protect people's livelihoods. You're going to have to pay indigenous people to protect the Amazon forest". And he's already working with other countries like the Congo and Indonesia to form what's being already termed the OPEC of forests.
Ash Sarkar:
It's this idea that developing nations can organize together to extract money from richer nations who need the carbon capture technology of the world's rainforests. And it's a twofold benefit because it means that you've got carbon being pulled out the atmosphere, clean oxygen being pumped back into it, but to it also means that the land rights of indigenous peoples who are being threatened by logging and agricultural interests will be much more protected under Lula if he's able to stick to his campaign promises.
Hagar Chemali:
And finally, this is for both of you. If you could sum it up quickly, how do the politics in both of these key nations affect average Americans in your view? Ash, I'll kick it back to you first.
Ash Sarkar:
I think that when you don't have Bolsonaro in power in Brazil, you have that far right alliance being weakened. So the potential for Trump to do a kind of massive resurrection of his own political career is weakened a little bit by that. As for Britain, I think perhaps what I would say is that an ongoing political debate for the US is about how can you expand healthcare access? How do you deal with the fact that you've got millions of Americans who are uninsured, that you've got price gouging of drugs that people need? How do you deal with the absolutely farcical price of insurance premiums and our RNHS is held up as a gold standard that you can aim for in terms of universal healthcare provision. But RNHS has been attacked by public spending cuts for decades now. We've been left with some very expensive problems to fix.
Ash Sarkar:
We've got a staff shortage, we have a beds crisis, we've got people who are dying waiting in ambulances. And that's because success of Tories governments have not made the kinds of spending commitments that the health service really needs with an aging population. And the case for privatization is an opportunity for American pharmaceutical companies who want us to drop those awful barriers. We have to price gouging here in the UK and also American insurance companies. So that's one way in which our economy and the direction of our public services is really integrated in what's going on in America. And in terms of the American progressive left who won't, something that looks a bit more like the NHS, the survival of our healthcare system is really paramount to being able to make that case politically.
Hagar Chemali:
And Bobby, how do you think politics in both of these key nations affect average Americans or the United States more broadly?
Bobby Ghosh:
Well, I tend to look at the world through the prism of geopolitics and security. In that context for the United States, britain having a robust government, a stable economy, and a powerful security infrastructure is all very, very important. We've seen with Ukraine that mainland European countries are ambivalent about responding to that challenge and they're slow to respond, takes a very long time and a lot of diplomatic effort to create a united front even when the Russian bear is at their door.
Bobby Ghosh:
In those circumstances, the British American alliance becomes even more important than before. With Brazil, I think Ash hit the nail on the head. The Amazon rainforest is one of the lungs of the world. The health of that rainforest is a barometer of the health of the planet. And having had for the past few years, a president in Brazil who essentially was quite happy to take a hacksaw to the rainforest was a very, very frightening prospect to. So to have Lula back and to hear him make these promises of going back to the preservation of that rainforest is reassuring. It's very important to Americans and to the wider world. Lula will be going to COP27 next week, I believe it is, and we'll all be listening very closely to hear what he has to say.
Hagar Chemali:
Bobby, Ash, thank you so much for joining us for this fascinating conversation.
Bobby Ghosh:
Thanks for having me.
Ash Sarkar:
Thank You.
Farai Chideya:
And thank you, Hagar. That was sip in the political tea with foreign policy expert and host of YouTube show Oh My World, Hagar Chemali in conversation with Bobby Gosh, Bloomberg opinion columnist and Ash Sarkar, contributing editor for the UK based media company, Novara Media.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. Jonathan Blakely is our executive producer. Nina Spensley is also executive producer.Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister and Traci Caldwell are our booking producers. Steve Lack and Anoa Changa are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.
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Farai Chideya:
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