Election and ethics

Opinion polls suggested that
Dilma Rousse , the ruling
party’s candidate, is on track to
win Brazil’s presidential election
on October 3rd despite an
ethics scandal. Erenice Guerra,
who replaced Ms Rousse as
chief of sta to Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva, the outgoing president,
resigned over claims that
she was complicit in a scheme
of her son’s to extract kickbacks
in return for help with
public contracts and loans. Ms
Guerra denies wrongdoing.
In a front-page editorial addressed
to drug-tra cking
gangs, the main newspaper in
Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico’s
border with the United States,
asked for guidance on what it
could and could not publish
without su ering violent
reprisals. The editorial followed
the murder of an intern
at the paper. It also complained
of the lack of government
protection.
Argentina’s government
stepped up its campaign
against the country’s two main
newspapers, ling a lawsuit
accusing them of complicity in
crimes against humanity
when they bought a newsprint
business during the country’s
military dictatorship of the
1970s. The papers say the
charges are bogus.
In a continuing shake-up of his
economic team, Cuba’s president,
Raúl Castro, sacked the

Territorial talks

Territorial talks
An international summit
convened in Moscow to discuss
competing territorial
claims to the Arctic Ocean.
Russia, Canada, Denmark,
Norway and the United States
have all made claims in the
resource-rich region, which
some believe could hold up to
a quarter of the world’s oil and
gas reserves.
Sweden’s four-party centreright
alliance was returned in a
general election, but provisional
results suggested it was
short of an overall majority.
The far-right Sweden Democrats
entered parliament for
the rst time, winning 20 seats.
Ireland raised 1.5 billion ($2
billion) through a bond issue,
slightly easing fears that it may
be forced to tap EU bail-out
funds. The auction was good
news for Brian Cowen, the
prime minister, whose leadership
is under scrutiny after a
recent allegedly drunken radio
interview.
France raised its terror alert
after receiving a tip-o from a
foreign intelligence service
about an imminent threat of
attack by a female suicidebomber
on the public transport
system. The alert came a
week after the Senate, the
upper house, voted to ban full
Islamic veils.
In Germany’s biggest antinuclear
demonstrations for
decades, tens of thousands
took to the streets of Berlin to
protest against the government’s
plans to extend the
lifespan of Germany’s nuclear
reactors. More

politic

American diplomats pressed
Israel’s government to extend
a moratorium, due to expire on
September 26th, on the building
and expansion of Jewish
settlements in the West Bank.
Acompromise should allow
direct peace talks between
Israelis and Palestinians,
which resumed only this
month, to continue.
South Africa’s president,
Jacob Zuma, appeared, for
now, to have fended o critics
within his ruling African
National Congress and among
his trade union allies at a party
conference of 2,000 members.
Somalia’s prime minister,
Omar Sharmarke, who has
been criticised for failing to
defeat the Shabab jihadist
movement, resigned amid
feuds within the beleaguered
transitional government,
whose writ barely runs beyond
the capital, Mogadishu.
Thousands of civilians ed the
south Yemeni town of Hawta,
which has been besieged by
government forces trying to
ush out a jihadist rebel group
said to be linked to al-Qaeda.
At least ten people were killed
when a bomb went o during
a military parade in Mahabad,
the main town in Iran’s Kurdish
north-western region. The
Iranian branch of the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party, which
operates mainly in Turkey, fell
under suspicion.

Oh! Susana

APINK tide of left-wing election victories
may have washed over much of
Latin America in the past decade, but
Peru has been a notable exception. The
reasons are not hard to discern. The far
left was discredited by the terrorist violence
unleashed by the Maoist Shining
Path and Marxist Túpac Amaru guerrillas
in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as disastrously,
the left’s economic recipes produced
hyperin ation and slump during the
presidency of Alan García between 1985
and 1990. In contrast, the economy has
grown vigorously for most of the past 15
years under right-of-centre presidents,
currently the self-same Mr García, now
reinvented as a neoconservative.
But is Peru’s left at last poised for a
revival? If the opinion polls are correct,
Susana Villarán, a human-rights activist
who is standing for a new left-wing party
called Fuerza Social (Social Force), will be
elected mayor of Lima, the capital, on
October 3rd. It would be the rst time the
left has won the capital since 1983.
Ms Villarán’s rise in the polls has been
sudden and unexpected. A popular
conservative candidate, Alex Kouri, was
disquali ed on a technicality. That was
expected to bene t Lourdes Flores, another
conservative who twice ran for
president. But support for Ms Flores, a
lawyer, began to slip when it was revealed
that she had advised a convicted
drug tra cker. Then tapes surfaced of
phone calls in which, bizarrely, she said
she wasn’t very interested in being
mayor anyway. Such illegal telephonetapping
has besmirched Peruvian politics
since it was deployed against opponents
by Alberto Fujimori, a conservative
president who revived the economy in
the 1990s but is now in jail.
Ms Villarán is a moderate who promises
clean and e cient municipal government.
But if she wins, and if her allies do
well in other cities and regions next
month, that will cast uncertainty over the
outcome of a presidential election due in
April. In 2006 Mr García won only narrowly
against Ollanta Humala, a populist
former army o cer who sympathised
with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Since
then Mr Humala’s star has waned. Partly
because of the economy’s strong growth,
he has tried to repackage himself as a
centrist. Even so, the polls suggest that he
would be easily beaten in April by several
centrist and conservative contenders,
including Mr Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko.
Ms Villarán does not support Mr
Humala, but some in her party do. As the
presidential vote draws nearer, the left’s
support may rise. If it does, it will be
because of the aws of the right as much
as the virtues of the left. Mr García has
failed to stamp out rampant corruption in
his party, and his government has not
done as much as it might to use increased
tax revenues to make social programmes
more e ective.

The wages of negligence

The president has gained a reputation for being hostile to business. He needs to change it ...

WINSTON CHURCHILL once moaned about the long, dishonourable tradition in
politics that sees commerce as a cow to be milked or a dangerous tiger to be shot. Businesses are
the generators of the wealth on which incomes, taxation and all else depends; the strong horse that pulls the whole cart , as Churchill put it. No sane leader of a country would want businesspeople
to think that he was against them, especially at a time when con dence is essential for the recovery.
From this perspective, Barack Obama already has a lot to answer for. A president who does so little to counter the idea that he dislikes business is, self-evidently, a worryingly negligent
chief executive. No matter that other Western politicians have publicly played with populism more dangerously, from France’s laissez-faire is dead president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to Britain’s capitalism kills competition business secretary, Vince Cable (see page 68); no matter that talk on the American
right about Mr Obama being a socialist is rot; no matter that Wall Street’s woes are largely of its own making. The evidence that American business thinks the president does not understand
Main Street is mounting. A Bloomberg survey this week found that three-quarters of American investors believe he is against business. The bedrock of the tea-party movement is angry small-business owners. The Economist has lost count of the number of prominent chief executives, many of them Democrats, who complain privately that the president does not understand their trade��that
he treats them merely as adornments at photocalls and uses teleprompters to talk to them; that he shows scant interest in their views on which tax cuts would persuade them to hire people; that his team is woefully short of anyone who has had to meet a payroll (there are fewer businesspeople in this White House than in any recent administration); and that regulatory

Nuclear weapons..................Just do it

FEW people were excited by the New Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty (START) that was signed by America’s Barack
Obama and Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev in Prague in April. It
is a sensible, incremental treaty that will cut America’s and Russia’s
deployed strategic nuclear warheads by about a third,
from the current maximum of 2,200 to 1,550, and the number
of deployed missiles and bombers to 700 apiece. Compared
with Mr Obama’s rhetoric about seeking the peace and security
of a world without nuclear weapons and agonising over
how to stop a nuclear Iran, New START looks, well, a bit dull.
Yet failure to ratify it would be a serious setback.
That, sadly, is a possibility. The treaty needs to win the support
of two-thirds of the Senate, so at least eight Republicans
must vote for it. Given its support from the Foreign Relations
Committee (on a 14-4 vote), a chorus of generals and senior Republicans
from previous administrations, you might expect it
to pass easily. The only big names to have spoken against it are
John Bolton, an ultra-hawkish former UN ambassador, and
Mitt Romney, a ip- opping presidential candidate now desperately
courting the right. But the tea-partiers seem to have
got it into their heads that the treaty is a bad one, and Republicans
are stalling. Time is running out before the mid-term
elections on November 2nd. (The lame duck session before
the end of the year might well not vote on such an important
matter, and the Republicans in the next Senate will probably
be even less inclined towards bipartisanship.)
The case against New STARTis a mixture of political opportunism,
ignorance and perfectionism. Shamefully, some Republicans,
disregarding the convention that you should not
play politics with nuclear missiles, just can’t face giving Mr
Obama a win before the mid-terms. They have also done too
little to correct the myths on the right about New START. It
does not betray eastern Europe: most leaders there would
rather Russia had fewer weapons. It does not stop America deploying
anti-ballistic missile defences, developing strategicrange
non-nuclear weapons systems or updating its nuclear
weapons infrastructure (indeed, Mr Obama has promised to
spend $80 billion on this over the next decade).

What’s not to like?

It is true that New START does not include Russia’s huge stockpile
of ageing tactical nuclear weapons. It was never intended
to. But New START does explicitly open the door to further
arms cuts, including those 2,000-3,000 warheads, which represent
both a big proliferation risk and a tempting target for terrorists.
The new treaty’s rati cation could also embolden Mr
Obama to revive the long-stalled Comprehensive Test-Ban
Treaty, which would do more than anything to show that
America was holding up its end of the fraying nuclear nonproliferation
regime. And New START is a powerful symbol of
the reset of relations with Russia, not least to boost America’s
hopes of getting a helping hand in dealing with Iran.
And there is a more pressing reason. The inspection and
veri cation regime of the old START was suspended when
that treaty expired last December. On-site inspection of Russia’s
nuclear facilities, which has been at the heart of all big
arms-control agreements for over 20 years, is critical not just to
ensure compliance but to gain knowledge of Russia’s forces,
operating procedures and even, to some extent, intentions.
The longer it takes to ratify the new treaty and resume bootson-
the-ground inspections, the more that knowledge erodes,
increasing mistrust and the risk of misunderstandings.
Momentum is vital; delay potentially lethal. The Senate
should approve New START now.

The North Korean succession (part 2)

Playing the China card

If this is true, North Korea’s neighbours should brace themselves
for a rough ride. The omens for a seamless transition are
not good. Since last year the regime has imposed, then swiftly
abandoned, draconian currency reforms. The torpedoing of a
South Korean naval vessel in March, which the Seoul government
blamed on the Pyongyang regime, caused an international
outcry that led to further e orts to isolate it economically.
Earlier this month the party conference was mysteriously
postponed for a few weeks. Behind these events some detect a
power struggle between or within the party and the army that
has been going on ever since Kim senior su ered a suspected
stroke in 2008. If this ever turned into open hostilities, the consequences
could be devastating��which is why, however
much outside powers want regime change in North Korea,
they are right to fear civil war still more.
Acollapse in North Korea could leave South Korea and China,
its immediate neighbours, facing a refugee crisis. The entire
region’s economic boom could be thrown o course. There is
even a risk that China and America would nd themselves
supporting opposing sides in a con ict that could involve nuclear
weapons. Against that risk, the appointment of a clueless
dauphin as the next leader might not be so bad, if his membership
of the Kim clan enabled him to hold the country together.
He may anyway be put under the stewardship of his powerful
uncle, Chang Sung Taek, to ensure continuity. But if such a transition
is to do anything for the region’s long-term health, the
outside world needs to rethink its approach.
Awkwardly for the West, China has the greatest leverage,
thanks to its unseemly haste to invest in North Korea’s mines
and ports. But China seldom uses it. On the older Kim’s two
train trips to China this year, it pointedly refused to criticise the
regime over the sinking of the South Korean ship. The Chinese
put stability above all else, which gives Pyongyang an excuse
to maintain the repressive status quo. That could prove dangerously
short-sighted if the in exible regime ever snaps.
Other countries, including South Korea, America, Russia
and Japan, must also prepare for the worst. But they might also
consider the possibility that a young Kim would be more open
to reform. They could again promise cash in exchange for
meaningful nuclear disarmament, and make every e ort to
engage him. It would be based only on a tiny hope, because it
would take a miracle for the son to step out of the father’s shadow.
But if he does not, North Korea is ultimately doomed. And
the grandson of the Great Leader and son of the Dear Leader
would deserve nothing but a woeful sobriquet: Dear God.