Tunisia’s Election, U.S. Congress Seeks to Avert Shutdown, World Cup Ends, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Tunisia's struggling democracy holds parliamentary elections. The U.S. Congress rushes to avoid a government shutdown and Argentina and France face off in the finals of a World Cup like no other. It's December 15, 2022, in time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

LINDSAY:
And I'm Jim Lindsay. Bob, let's start in North Africa. This Saturday, Tunisians head to the polls for their parliamentary election. This is the first election since Tunisians voted to adopt a new constitution back in July. Critics claim that the election is President Kais Saied's attempt at an un-democratic coup, so what's at stake for Tunisia?

MCMAHON:
Well, Jim, as you alluded to, democracy is at stake, safe to say. President Saied heard an earful, shall we say, at his attendance with U.S. officials at the Africa Summit just this week in Washington. He heard a great deal of concern by U.S. officials who have been withholding aid to Tunisia out of concern that Saied is making a power play and sort of consolidating a power play with the holding of these elections under conditions that have pretty much de-fanged or rendered the parliament much less effective and powerful than it had been previously. Just to cite one of the things that'll be different this time, there will be fewer seats in the parliament, fewer real checks and balances built into its role, and there had been rules previously that had provided for gender parity and youth representation parliament. Those no longer apply. Saied is pointing to this as an important vote to consolidate the changes that he put in place to avoid what he said was a crisis situation.

We should note, Tunisia, until not too long ago, was considered the one country to emerge from the Arab Spring with real auspices of democratic institutions and a sense of momentum going forward, but that has foundered recently, foundered to such an extent that Saied actually had a good bit of support when he came in, moved to dissolve parliament, and redo the Constitution, although once we got around to the constitutional referendum, support had drained quite a bit. There was a great deal of concern that this was a power play and now this is further arousing concern that he is going to put himself in such an authoritative position that you will have a return to a standard North African/Middle East autocracy.

LINDSAY:
Bob, how effective are these efforts by the Biden administration to press President Saied on his democratic backsliding? My sense is, that the amount of aid the United States gives Tunisia is not that substantial. Meanwhile, Saied obviously has his own personal incentives which seem to be consolidating his control over Tunisian politics.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's a really good question, Jim. I think even more significant for the Saied government, is trying to secure an IMF loan of about $2 billion, which is desperately needed. But the IMF also considers these types of issues, governance issues and the ability of the country to set up a program that seems to be credible and that can put the country back on its feet. For a country in which the economy's shrank about 9 percent during the pandemic, about 10 percent of inflation last month, adding some sort of an austerity program to allow it to secure IMF funds feels like a non-starter. Also, as far as U.S. leverage goes, Tunisia would like to have the return of U.S. aid but it will not ... Saied has made clear in his response to the Biden administration's pressure, it's not going to be caving in.

He gave an interview with the Washington Post editorial board where he basically said, "This is necessary, I need to do this for the country's stability, that is paramount." So you have this really tough situation. Biden administration has not said, "We do not acknowledge this upcoming election and you should not take it seriously," they're trying to walk a line, I think. We should also note, Tunisia, in addition to still having a little bit of a tenuous hold on democracy, Jim, is in this crucial spot in Africa where a disproportionate amount of migrants pass through Tunisia to mount the precarious trip across the Mediterranean to European countries on the Mediterranean border and southern European countries. 

So, Tunisia needs help. It is in the U.S., in the West's interest to have a Tunisian that is a nominally democracy. We've talked many times, especially in the run-up to the Africa Summit, how there's a bit of a great game going on between the U.S. and China over influence around Africa, and China has been stepping in without any qualms about human rights or democracy and saying, "Hey, we'll build infrastructure for you. We'll get you up and running and you just have to pay us back when the time comes." That's a concern as well, although I have not seen as much action by China and Tunisia, per se.

Tunisia also has contacts with Europe, France, and others have tried to maintain ties to Tunisia as well so it's going to be a closely watched election while at the same time it's, in an odd way, an election in which not much is expected of because, at the end of the day, major opposition forces who are not taking part, just like they did not in the referendum. So you'll have kind of a tepid turnout, by most indications, and the president stepping in and saying, "Now we have a country that we can forge ahead and create rules and ways in which corruption will not intrude on our country, et cetera, et cetera." It just seems like a very dubious path right now, Jim.

LINDSAY:
I should note that the United States has some say over what the IMF does, given its role as a major stakeholder in the IMF. Other major stakeholders may be less concerned about trying to use an aid package to Tunisia to buoy democracy in the country. I will note that as you look at Tunisia it is just one of many countries right now that is struggling with having too much debt and being unable to service that debt i.e., pay back what it owes to people who lent money to it. Pakistan is another country that is going through this.

This is a reflection of the fact that inflation has gone up in many countries led by the United States where the Federal Reserve have responded to spiking inflation by raising interest rates and that creates problems for countries that have to finance or repay loans that they've taken back. I think this is going to be a big issue increasingly in 2023 as creditors will have to refinance and restructure loans they've given to a number of countries. As you might imagine, lenders are generally reluctant to restructure loans and a variety of arrangements, the Paris Club being the most famous one, that exists to try to conduct these sort of negotiations.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. I think, Jim, it's going to be one of the global economic storylines of 2023, certainly. Another one is a lingering impact, especially from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and that's an ongoing war, is food shortages Tunisia is suffering from, like a lot of North Africa, a lot of East Africa in particular, and so that raises concern. It also brings us back in an odd way to what triggered the Arab Spring. I mean, remember, in an odd coincidence the elections are taking place December 17th. That's the anniversary of the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable and fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, which kicked off the Arab Spring events.

LINDSAY:
It led to a tremendous amount of optimism that perhaps the Arab world had turned a corner and democracy would take root. As our colleague, Steven Cook, wrote in his book, False Dawn, that proved to be a hope that did not come true.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and we should say the self-immolation triggered by just utter hopelessness at the state of affairs in Tunisia and of the disenfranchised in particular, again, we're looking at a bizarre, unfortunate cycle of returning back to those set of conditions potentially, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Certainly. I think, on the street life remains really hard. You're talking about high inflation, high levels of unemployment, dim prospects for social mobility, not a good mix for any country.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's an issue around the world, Jim. Speaking of matters of spending, let's come back to Washington, DC. Tomorrow was originally the deadline for Congress to pass a spending bill to prevent a partial government shutdown. Late this past Tuesday night, U.S. lawmakers said they had bipartisan agreement on a framework that extends the deadline to the end of next week, so why is Congress having so much difficulty passing a spending bill?

LINDSAY:
Because there's no consensus in Congress on spending priorities, Bob. Both parties are playing to the galleries on these issues and because so-called regular order has broken down on Capitol Hill over the past two decades. In the old days, Congress would pass a series of appropriation bills each year, one for each of the major government agencies so you would have a Defense Appropriations Bill, a State Department and Foreign Operations Bill, a Justice Department Bill, and so forth. But for the last two decades, we've been mired world of short term, continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills. 

Continuing resolutions or CRs, in Washington parlance, are stop gap measures where Congress essentially says, "We will keep funding the government for a few weeks or months at existing levels in order to avoid a shutdown." Omnibus bills, where spending bills, several of them, could be all of them, are rolled into one mammoth bill. CRs are suboptimal because they typically don't allow federal agencies to change their spending plans in response to events and it prevents them also from making long-term spending commitments that would be financially more efficient for the government. Omnibus bills are problematic because they are so large almost no one knows what's entirely in them. That's why you have this agreement on a "framework", I'll put it in quotes, that was reached this week but we won't know until next week what exactly is in it and, by that point, Congress will feel pressure to pass whatever the negotiators have put in the bill because the holiday break will be upon us and the lame duck session is about to end.

Remember, this Congress, once it recesses, you will have a new Congress starting in January 3rd and the goal is not to push these issues over into the next Congress. I think that's for political reasons as much as for good governance reasons. Many Republicans don't want to have to make big spending decisions in January because they will control the House and they will be responsible for coming up with a package. For the same reason, many Democrats don't want these issues to go into next year because they're afraid of what will happen when the Republicans are in charge on the House side.

Now, we do have a continuing resolution that will buy us another week for this framework to come together. There's been some agreement on top line numbers. For example, it looks like we're going to spend something on the order of 860 billion on defense. That's about a 10 percent increase and it's higher than what the Biden administration requested. There's still some dispute about what's going to be done on the domestic side of the ledger. Last I knew, the two parties were apart by about $26 billion or so when it comes to funding domestic priorities. The other big question is, what other things are going to get rolled up into this omnibus bill? Now, this omnibus bill, in essence, is to fund the entire government, all of the agencies, and so it's a must pass bill and this is an opportunity to tack on a lot of other things.

One of the big questions is whether or not the Electoral Count Act, which is this bill designed to make clear that the traditional understanding of how we count electoral college votes, which was challenged by a small group of people back in 2020, is in fact the way they're supposed to be counted i.e., The Vice President's role is simply symbolic. He does not have any independent power to decide the outcome of the election. The question is, will that make it into the bill or not? We'll see.

MCMAHON:
That's a really important point to point out. It's been pointed to by scholars of democracy that this is a crucial piece of legislation that really needs to move through. The country feels like it dodged a freight train this past mid-term election but this is something that needs to move forward. There are also just countless other government initiatives. There are agencies that require funding, that require some reliability and spending. I, myself, when I used to work for U.S. funded broadcasters, there was almost an annual ritual back in the 90's about whether or not they were going to be funded. This is Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, and so forth. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the Pentagon budget you just pointed to, Jim, but still, these are vital agencies that play a role and I think they get overlooked but also it creates a great deal of confusion and dysfunction, in some cases, if you can't have a reliable budget cycle.

LINDSAY:
Right, and you would not run a private business this way because it's wildly inefficient, you waste a lot of money, but this is where our politics have taken us. There's no sign that we're reaching a point in which we're going to go back to regular order because, again, the underlying conditions don't exist. We don't have a consensus over how to operate, how much to spend, what to spend money on. We have narrowly divided political control, both across institutions and within them, and those are not the conditions that provide a recipe for good governance or a return to the old days where we had order and by the beginning of the fiscal year Congress would have passed most, if not all, of its major spending bills.

Everything right now, again, end of the year continuing resolutions, rolling things up into one giant bill that, quite honestly, no lawmakers ever really read through, and that creates all kinds of opportunities for mischief either intentional or unintentional. I mean, imagine being a congressional staffer who's been tasked by the leadership, "Hey, we've just got this 'framework,' again in air quotes. Now, write it into law and you have five days to do it." That's a pretty tall task for anybody.

MCMAHON:
No, and amid all the intense politicking there are legitimate inflation questions that have to be considered. We just had some, what seemed to be, encouraging inflation numbers, inflation going down in the last monthly numbers but also the Feds saying, "Okay, well, we're still going to increase rates so we're going to maybe try to taper this." It's not clear and markets are just trying to figure that out as we speak, Jim, but it is a legitimate issue, certainly, and you talk to any American and inflation is a foremost issue for them, there's a lot of concern there.

LINDSAY:
Well certainly, and I think that the most recent inflation news can be described as inflation has dropped but it's still well above where the Federal Reserve wants it to be. Again, you can take inflation numbers and break them down, the overall number, core numbers, and a variety of things like that and there is this challenge for the Fed, which was rather late to ending the party. We had a period of very easy money coupled with very expansionist fiscal policy, that is, the government spending a lot of money to avoid an economic collapse during the pandemic. The Fed sort of waited until it was clear that inflation had taken root and, at that point, it becomes a lot harder to break the inflationary mindset. They're really trying to find this goldilocks solution to turn, in essence, the dial-up so that interest rates go high enough to bring inflation back down to their target, which would be in the 2 to 3 precent range, but to do it in a way that we don't relive what happened in the late 70s, early 1980s when the Federal Reserve, under Paul Volcker, broke the back of a very high inflationary spiral by raising up interest rates to the point that plunged the country into a very deep, very harsh recession.

That's, again, part of the problem is you don't like inflation because no one wants to go into the store and see the price of milk is up, the price of gas is up, the price of clothes are up, but also people don't want to be in a situation which the cure means they lose their jobs, so the Fed is really trying to walk a very fine balance there.

MCMAHON:
And so, we have another year-end brinksmanship going on, Jim, hoping for the best.

LINDSAY:
We hope so, Bob. Bob, let's hopefully shift to what might be a bit more cheery subject than congressional dysfunction and the rather unsettled state of the economy, and that's the World Cup.

This coming Sunday we're going to have the World Cup final. It is going to match up two of the elite teams in international football, France and Argentina. France is the defending World Cup champion. It has the opportunity to win consecutive titles, which hasn't been done in some time. As you predicted on the podcast a few weeks ago, the matches have overshadowed Qatar's hosting controversies. The internet is flooded with reactions to unexpected upsets and viral worthy goals, so what should we pay attention to, Bob, as Argentina and France head to the pitch?

MCMAHON:
Jim, there are far more informed close observers of global soccer who will be weighing in on this but I do think it's worth mentioning that it's been an extraordinary cup on the pitch and we have to mention Morocco's run, which just ended against France losing 2-nil this week. But what a run it was. Farthest any African or Arab countries ever reached in the first ever World Cup based in an Arab country.

LINDSAY:
They beat some pretty good teams beat along the way.

MCMAHON:
They beat some very good teams, played superior ball. Fascinating story in and of themselves, a polyglot team. Some of their best players have played in the premier leagues in the world but have come from all over. They beat teams that represented countries that were colonial powers over Morocco in the past, Spain, Portugal. Went against the French for a trifecta. Couldn't pull it off but France, relying on its own, let's say, African diaspora players to decide the fate of that game. But still it created an incredible amount of pride, not only in Morocco but across the Arab world and just showed, again, the power of sport. Obviously goes without saying in Argentina and Paris, tremendous throngs turning out into central squares to toast their teams. Every country that had been making it through to what was known as a knockout round had their hearts in their throats.

I think about the Dutch team that masterfully took apart the U.S. and the Dutch team went up against Argentina and just, it was a very physical game and went down to a shootout and those are truly heart stopping moments and a real shame, by the way, I think that any game has to be decided that way but I digress. But be that as it may, these are teams that nobody, I think, disputes the fact that these represent two of the greatest teams in the world. Both countries have won the World Cup twice so they have the pedigree of national champions going back years. French are the defending champions, as you say, and two of the more transcendent players in the league, Kylian Mbappé for France, Lionel Messi, probably his last World Cup for Argentina.

Eyes are going to be fixed on them and they truly deserve the applaud. It's just amazing just to watch them as it has been to watch a lot of the stars during this World Cup, Jim. On the sport aspect just itself, just amazing and, yeah, it really did crowd out some of the darker issues. I mean, I think as we came up to the World Cup in the opening days, people became aware of terms like kafala, which is the term for migrant labor in which many South Asians had worked to create this incredible set of venues for these games, but at great cost. Even the organizers on the Qatari side admitted they upped their estimate of people who died creating these stadiums. I think seven stadiums built from scratch and the multiple hundreds of deaths. Some estimates, though from watchdog groups, say in total more than 6,000 people died in the course of creating this World Cup set of venues in Qatar, so there's that.

There's the country's rules that outlaw homosexuality and their forbidding of any sort of signs of solidarity. It was pointed out that while they were virulent in keeping control on any sort of expression of solidarity for LGBTQ rights, they did allow Palestinian flags to flourish after the Morocco victories and so forth, so a little bit of politics entering in as sometimes expected. Then, there's the question of how the games came to Qatar in the first place. I mean, Americans got a chance to view these games for one, Jim, because they're all shown at night because you cannot play during the day in Qatar in those types of ...

LINDSAY:
Well, you could but you wouldn't be able to play the next game.

MCMAHON:
You would be leaving it all on the field even more so than they already were so we were in the United States, able to see these games taking place late at night and really enjoying it in the process but that's the trade off that had to take place and it had to happen this time of year, which by the way, FIFA, the organizing organization for these World Cup games, basically imposed the schedule on the very powerful European leagues. This is the middle of their season usually. They had to suspend it all and cede their players to play for their national teams to make this happen. Again, because of what happens on the field, it tends to transcend that. I do think Qatar will not be able to claim totally successful sportwashing, to point to a recently coined phrase, in part because there's some lingering distaste about how these cups came about.

Then, we should also point out there's a brewing corruption scandal involving Qatar that are not related to the games, as far as we know, but that are going into the heart of European Parliament affairs and are playing out. It's being called, "Qatargate." There's an investigation into at least, I believe, four members of the European Parliament who are suspected of taking millions in cash and gifts from Qatar to influence policy debates, including things like opening up EU airspace to Qatar airlines. One of the suspects is one of the vice presidents in the parliament, Eva Kaili, of Greece so it's only getting more intense, the investigation. By all accounts and by latest reports, they've actually found some suspicious money that was squirreled away.

LINDSAY:
Apparently, this wasn't done with cryptocurrency,

MCMAHON:
It was not done with crypto as far as we can see.

LINDSAY:
Good, old fashioned bags of money.

MCMAHON:
Bags of money, whenever they turn up, think the plot thickens so we'll watch that and see how much it reverberates back on Qatar's own image and whatever soft power it has gained from hosting these games, but let's go back to the games. Sunday morning, France, Argentina. Also, we should see ... Morocco's playing Croatia in the game for third place, which also should be interesting as well this weekend.

LINDSAY:
So, Bob, everything I know about soccer, football, comes from watching the first season of Ted Lasso so I defer to you. What do you expect to happen on Sunday? Who do you think is going, at the end of the day, be crowned world champion?

MCMAHON:
I'll first mention, everybody always has the team they root for and then what their head says versus what their heart says. I have good friends from Argentina who will be just laying it all out for their team on Sunday morning, but I do think there's a sense of inevitability about this French team. It's been a very tough tournament, they had a particularly tough game against England that they proceeded to win.

LINDSAY:
They got out played by the English.

MCMAHON:
And English played very well and there was a lot of grumbling from the way some of the calls went in the game.

LINDSAY:
And missing a penalty shot ...

MCMAHON:
And they missed a penalty shot.

LINDSAY:
... By the star English player.

MCMAHON:
There was also ... By the way, Jim, there was also an astounding attempt the last seconds of what they call extra time in which an English player almost curved the ball into the net on a free kick I should say, so I think the French will take it but it's going to be a tough affair. If you saw the game, the Netherlands/Argentina game, I think we're in for a physical contest but we're talking about just unbelievable athletes and I'm looking forward to that part of it.

LINDSAY:
I defer to your call, Bob.

MCMAHON:
Well, Jim, we've talked our way into the audience figure of the week portion of our podcast. Remember, listeners can vote on these every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. Jim, our audience rather handily selected, "Nuclear Fusion Creates 150 Percent Energy Gain," as the figure of the week so why is this significant?

LINDSAY:
It's significant, Bob, because if what was done on a small scale in a highly specialized laboratory could ever be commercialized and replicated on a large scale, we would have the holy grail of energy, a source that produces boundless amounts of energy without generating either pollution or heat trapping gases. It would do so without producing radioactive waste. We're obviously talking about the process known as fusion, it's what drives the suns and all stars. It's remarkable because it produces more energy than it takes to start the process. It differs from nuclear energy as we currently have it because it doesn't split atoms, what's known as fission, but it fuses them. Specifically, it combines hydrogen atoms into helium. Now, the breakthrough was produced by scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. That's a U.S. government funded laboratory. On December 5th, they used 192 giant lasers to blast a small amount of hydrogen that was encased in a diamond and was the size of an eraser.

I won't try to explain what happened at that point because I don't understand it. All I will say is that for less than 100 trillionths of a second the reaction produced more energy than it consumed. For scientists, this was an epic accomplishment. They call it the ignition goal. Think of as proof of concept, that you can replicate fusion that drives stars here on earth but the brevity of the reaction points to the challenge. We are a long, long, long way away from turning this success into usable everyday technology. Just getting to this point took 25 years and billions of dollars in investment.

The director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory said this week when the success was announced that she imagined it would take, and I quote her here, "a few decades" of additional research before building a commercial fusion power plant would be thinkable. So fusion will not be a short term solution to the climate crisis that humans have created, the question is how much damage we will have inflicted on the world before this technology can be perfected, if it ever can be.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, Jim, that's a good rundown on that. I think it's ... For someone I know who hasn't studied nuclear science too long but it's still a really good rundown. I recall when fusion was first mentioned in passing in classrooms, it was held up as the holy grail like, "Well, here's what we currently use but look what we could possibly do." And even then, several decades ago there were efforts to try to make that happen. I saw somewhere reference to the amount of extra energy generated in this experiment would maybe cause a brief flicker of a flame in a fireplace and then subside, so a long way away from powering cities and countries and so forth. It is interesting to note though, I think, beyond the U.S., multiple countries are working hard at this so you could have potentially some sort of competition that yields, especially with the U.S. breakthrough, potential breakthrough, that a competition that yields further gains, which we've seen before in other areas of technology.

LINDSAY:
Well, that's an excellent point, Bob. The fact that the United States had the first laboratory to achieve this ignition goal doesn't guarantee that the United States will be the country that succeeds in commercializing this technology. There are lots of examples of technologies that were developed in one country and perfected or commercialized elsewhere, and it's clearly going to take substantial amounts of investment by the federal government in this technology to bring us closer to commercializing it. Commercial companies will look at it and say, "This is interesting but the payoff is so far in the future that it wouldn't make sense for us to invest lots of money in it now," which is why you really depend on the federal government investing heavily in basic research, whether in the physical sciences or in the biological sciences, to sort of create a sufficient body of knowledge that all of a sudden it makes sense for market-driven entities to say, "We can actually turn this into a money-making product."

Again, here it's going to be quite some time but it reminds us that scientists are operating on the edges of what we know is possible and turning what is impossible today into something that is ordinary tomorrow.

MCMAHON:
I think, given what's taken place this past year as we've talked about, this little bit of light about harnessing the sun and the way the sun's power works has caught people up in a great deal of interest. I do think you will see, almost immediately, a bumper crop of science fiction shows and movies trying to take advantage of this.

LINDSAY:
Oh, certainly. As a devoted connoisseur and consumer of science fiction, whether as podcasts, movies, books, I'm eager to see it.

MCMAHON:
Any podcasts you want to share with us, Jim, that you like on the science fiction front?

LINDSAY:
I only talk about our podcast, Bob.

MCMAHON:
Okay. All right, fair enough. That's our look at The World Next Week and beyond. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Leo Varadkar replaces Micheál Martin as Taoiseach, Ireland's head of government. Jewish people around the world celebrate Hanukkah and the Arab Economic Forum takes place in Beirut.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, and leave us your review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. The articles and books mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed in The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts or our guests, none of CFR which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program is produced by Ester Fang, with Senior Podcast Producer, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Sinet Adous and Elia Ching for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Jim Lindsay saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.