The Hated and the Dead

Isaias Afwerki, usually known as Isaias, is Eritrea’s only ever President, having served in the role since 1993. After rising through the ranks of Eritrea’s liberation movement during a thirty-year war for independence against Ethiopia, Isaias has instituted a colossal centralisation of power around himself; Eritrea has no free newspapers, no constitution, no parliament; it doesn’t even have a formal budget. The country also has one of the strictest systems of conscription in the world. 

 Though this state of affairs is very unpleasant to the ordinary Eritreans wo have to live  with it every day, the international community would probably be happy leaving Isaias be if he left the world alone. But this isn’t what Isaias has done. Since 1993, Isaias has involved Eritrea in wars in Sudan, Somalia, the DRC and most significantly Ethiopia, where, since 2020, the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments have been waging war against the Tigrayans. This war is the deadliest war the world has seen this decade so far, and Isaias, who hates the Tigrayans, is largely to blame for it. Never more than Isaias has my guest and I discussed a single person so singularly to blame for so much harm. 

My guest today is Martin Plaut. Martin is a journalist specialising in the Horn of Africa region, he worked as a BBC news journalist for nearly thirty years and currently works for Chatham House. Along with Sarah Vaughan, he is the lead author on an upcoming book, Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War, due to be released in February 2023. As well as the War in Tigray, we discuss Eritrea’s colonial history, the country’s long struggle for independence, and the implications of being governed not just by one group of people for thirty years, but by a single individual. 

Hassan al-Turabi is arguably the most important figure in Sudan's independent history.  Whilst never technically leading the Northeast African country, he influenced successive Sudanese regimes, and was frequently referred to as the “power behind the throne” in the first ten years of the leadership of Omar al-Bashir.

Turabi’s role in slowly imposing Sharia Law on the Sudanese people and instigating the 1989 coup that brought Bashir to power also made him one of the most successful Islamist politicians in the Muslim world. 

Bashir’s time in power was a terrible thirty years for Sudan, with the country experiencing two brutal civil wars, and ultimately the division of the country between north and south in 2011. Even though Turabi left the stage before this, his role in the initial 1989 coup means at least some blame must be apportioned to him, making him a worthy and interesting candidate for the podcast. His own philosophy also invites questions about the role Islamism plays across North Africa and the Middle East.

My guest today is Willow Berridge, a lecturer in history at the University of Newcastle. Willow has written extensively on Sudanese history and Islamism, and her 2015 book Hassan al-Turabi: Islamist Politcs and Democracy in Sudan, documents our subject’s life and influence. We discuss the origins of Islamism in Sudan, Turabi’s desire to stay hidden from view, and whether this helped him or hindered him, his relationship with Osama bin Laden, who lived in Sudan for a period in the 1990s, and much more. 

Viktor Orban has been prime minister of Hungary since 2010, and previously served in that role from 1998 until 2002. In that first stint as Hungarian leader, Orban passed without comment in European Union circles, but his second premiership has seen him come up against the EU on issues related to the rule of law, LGBT rights, and the 2015 migrant crisis. 

Orban is now fully fledged right-wing populist, but unlike other people who fit that description, sees himself as the international poster boy for this type of politics, making him Hungary’s most divisive export. Hungary’s future looks, in many ways, very bleak- it has a flatlining economy, largely due to falling population, something likely to lead to scarcity and rising prices in the long run. It is not helped by the fact that Orban is hoping his party, which has little novel or innovative to say about Hungary’s economic situation, will stay in power until 2060. 

Could Orban happen here? Hungary, a nation only thirty years free from communism, and suffering from endemic corruption and economic stagnation, was fertile ground for the right-wing politics of Orban. What about countries like Britain, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, which have much longer traditions of democracy and the rule of law? 

My guest today is Viktoria Serdült. Viktoria is an author at Visegrad Insight, a media site that focuses on Hungary and its Central European neighbours, as well as HVG, Hungary’s leading economic and political weekly. We discuss the seeds of Orban’s rise in the fall of Hungarian communism, his manipulation of the media, his government’s family planning policy, the chasm in social attitudes that exists across the European continent, and the 2015 migrant crisis. 

Lula da Silva is a candidate for the 2022 Brazilian Presidential Election, taking place today. He previously served as President of Brazil between 2003 and 2010. On the face of it, his achievements as President are hard to criticise, whatever your political leanings. On the one hand, he oversaw a massive increase in the Brazilian median income. On the other, he slowed the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. By 2010, many saw Brazil as one of the 21st century’s foremost rising stars. 

However, the decade after Lula left office, the 2010s, was a disaster for Brazil. The commodity boom that underpinned Brazil’s economic expansion under Lula turned to bust after the 2008 financial crisis, and Lula’s chosen successor Dilma Rousseff was impeached and removed from office in 2016. The decade closed with the election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, who has accelerated the Amazon’s decline, and talks sympathetically of the country’s military dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s. How much was Lula to blame for this unravelling? The answer: it’s complicated. 

My guest today is the Brazilian journalist Adriana Carranca, who writes for various publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic and Foreign Policy. Much of Adriana’s work centres on the Middle East, but she also keeps a keen eye on the politics of her own country and has a nuanced view of this election. 

There have been demands for greater autonomy for Scotland within the UK since the country joined the Union in 1707, but it was only in 1997- 25 years ago this month- that Scotland finally got its own parliament. 

1997 was the culmination of a long struggle for self-government led by a group of people in Scotland, some left-wing, others right, many non-descript. These people, the devolutionists, are the subject of today’s episode. Whilst few can, in and of itself, criticise any group’s desire for self-government, the matter of devolution- that is to say, the giving of powers- to parliaments in Scotland and Wales, has proven highly controversial. 

Many British commentators argue that the granting of a Parliament to the Scots, far from satisfying demands for self-government, merely gave them a taste for it, leading inevitably to calls for total separation from the UK. Whether that’s true is up for debate, but there is little doubt that many people in England have grown tired of the Scots, and are now for the first time contemplating English independence. 

My guest for this conversation is a man who can truly describe himself as a devolutionist. Lord Jack McConnell served as the First Minister of Scotland- the position now held by Nicola Sturgeon- from 2001 until 2007. Jack is the first former head of government I have had on the podcast, and it was brilliant to speak to him about his own experiences running Scotland in the early days of the parliament. We discuss the flourishing of the modern Scottish, as opposed to British, identity; the government of Margaret Thatcher as a catalyst for change, the complex interplay between Brexit and Scottish independence, the future of Jack’s Labour Party in Scotland, and much more. 

Xi Jinping, the world's most powerful man, seemed like a good fit for the 50th episode of the podcast. Thank you to all of you who have stuck by the Hated and the Dead for its first half-century; there's plenty more to come. 

Xi has been President of the People's Republic of China since 2012. In a few weeks time, he is set to embark on an unprecedented third term as China's leader, which will make him China's most powerful leader since Mao- if he isn't already. 

It is Xi’s international profile, especially his relationship with the United States, that is the focus of the conversation you’re about to hear. There is an important story to be told about Xi’s misdemeanours inside China- Xinjiang, surveillance, party purges and Tibet all spring to mind- but these are issues for another episode. On the world stage, Xi’s time in power- he took over in 2012- has taken place against the backdrop of a China that has continued to grow in stature and importance. 

At the same time, however, China’s relationship with the US has noticeably soured. The symbiotic US-China relationship of the 2000s has given way to a trade war, a tech war, and escalating military tensions between the world’s two most powerful countries. It’s entirely plausible that relations between the US and China are now so frosty, that Xi himself, always forthright in his intention to make the 21st century a Chinese one, doesn’t matter very much anymore, and that America and China are now on a collision course no matter their leaders- though the exact nature of that collision is still unclear. 

My guest today is the American political scientist, Aaron Friedberg. Aaron is the Co-Director of the Center for International Security Studies at Princeton University, and recently released the book Getting China Wrong, which details missteps in US foreign policy towards China. He also worked as an advisor to former US Vice President Dick Cheney. 

We discuss Xi’s rise through the Chinese Communist Party, the nature of his beliefs about power and ideology, the nature of the US and China’s falling out, to put it euphemistically, and whether perversely, that falling out might result in the two countries becoming, not more different, but more similar. 

Jacinda Ardern has been prime minister of New Zealand since 2017. Ardern is a good example of how an affable, anodyne politician can pursue highly divisive and polarising policies. Ardern’s premiership has been defined by her response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst New Zealand’s initial response to the pandemic in 2020 was praised across the world, and saw Ardern win a landslide election victory, the two years hence have seen New Zealand slowly creep up the death rate table. 

The Ardern government has also been scolded by voters for a slow vaccine roll out and images of expatriates being unable to come home to visit dying relatives. Partly as a result, Ardern is now the least popular she has ever been, and her party, the Labour party, is now odds on to lose the next election in a year’s time.  However, Ardern is still the recipient of uncritical levels of praise in the foreign media, and a healthy democracy is predicated upon us as citizens looking beyond favourable headlines, and judging politicians on results, not on our own biases. 

I should say from the outset that I do not hate Ardern by any means, and this conversation is not designed to make you hate her, either; rather, it is supposed to be an objective look at a prime minister many New Zealanders have clearly fallen out of love with. 

My guest today is David Farrar, who is a pollster and political commentator. David is the founder of Kiwiblog, one of the largest political blogs in New Zealand. We discuss Ardern’s rise in the Labour Party, her domestic agenda, of course, her response to Covid, and what the future holds for her struggling government. 

25 years ago this week, Scotland voted for its own Parliament. This cut against the grain of centuries of British constitutional logic; traditionally, what the Monarch's government in Westminster said applied not just to England, but to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland too, and debates around whether devolution has undermined that supremacy still rage today.  
More controversially still, though, is the blurred line between self-government for Scotland within the UK and Scottish independence. Whilst most of the devolutionists discussed today advocate for Britain staying in the UK but with greater autonomy, the Parliament set up in Edinburgh has been controlled since 2007 by the pro-independence Scottish National Party, currently led by Nicola Sturgeon. The Scottish Devolutionists may therefore have opened a pandora's box over which they have little control. 

My guest for this conversation commemorating the Parliament's 25th birthday is a man who knows it better than perhaps anyone else. Lord Jack McConnell was First Minister of Scotland between 2001 and 2007, and is the first former head of government to appear on the Hated and the Dead.
 
We discuss the flourishing of the modern Scottish, as opposed to British, identity; the government of Margaret Thatcher as a catalyst for change, the complex interplay between Brexit and Scottish independence, the future of Jack’s Labour Party in Scotland, and much more. 

Tsai Ing-wen has been President of Taiwan since 2016. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party, Tsai is in effect the leader of liberal Taiwan, with her party broadly promoting the idea of Taiwanese identity. In doing so, she faces two opponents. Domestically, she faces the Kuomintang, or KMT, which seeks to reunify Taiwan with mainland China. Tsai also of course faces mainland China, known as the People’s Republic, which also seeks to reintegrate Taiwan into its authoritarian state. 

This puts Tsai in a difficult position, as was recently seen when a visit to Taiwan by Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi led to China conducting military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. Anyone interested in world politics in 2022 needs to know about events in Taiwan. 

My guest for this conversation today is Brian Hioe, editor of New Bloom magazine, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific that was founded after the pro-democracy Sunflower Movement. As well as Tsai’s career, we discuss the Taiwanese identity, the quality of democracy in Taiwan, and whether the KMT is acting as a trojan horse for Beijing. 

Alberto Fujimori fue presidente del Peru entre 1990 y 2000. Aunque casi todos los comentaristas políticos describen Fujimori como un president de la derecha, su campana de 1990 fue más ecléctico que ideológico. Sin embargo, no se puede negar que Fujimori adoptó una perspectiva derechista para solucionar los problemas económicas y sociales que sufrió Peru durante los años ochenta, y es esta perspectiva- el fujimorismo- que le ha dado a Fujimori su mala fama entre la izquierda peruana. 

Mi invitado para esta conversación es el politólogo peruano José Alejandro Godoy. José acaba de escribir un libro sobre Fujimori, Los Herederos de Fujimori. Discutimos la importancia de la herencia japonesa de Fujimori, su presidencia, y la popularidad duradera del fujimorismo.