Better the devil they know? Sri Lanka’s election

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak was turfed out in a vast uprising in 2011, one of the more dramatic events of the Arab Spring. These days, there's a curious nostalgia for Mr. Mubarak's rule and you can see it all over Facebook and YouTube. And there's no disputing that William Shakespeare was and is influential. But he wasn't always. We take a deep dive into theater records and shifting tastes, finding that it took nearly a century for the Bard's work to be more fully appreciated. But first, Sri Lankans will head to the poles tomorrow with security as one of their biggest concerns. The country was rocked in April when suicide bombers attacked luxury hotels and Christian churches. Nearly 300 people were killed. The prime minister hinted at what became a widespread allegation that a distracted and dysfunctional government had allowed security to slip.

We must also look into why adequate.

Precautions were not taken in this respect.

The Easter bombings were the most shocking violence since a decades long civil war fought between the government and separatist members of the mostly Hindu Tamil ethnicity. In 2009, the war fizzled out. Since then, there's been a fragile peace between the island's Buddhist majority and its Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities. Those minority votes are likely to play a strong role in the election. Though there are 35 candidates vying for the presidency, only two, both members of political families, stand a real chance of winning. And it's a tight race. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa of the Buddhist Nationalist Party is a former defense minister and one of seven politician brothers, one of whom was president for a decade. He's been campaigning on a promise of both security and prosperity. The other frontrunner, Sajid Premadasa, is the Son of a previous prime minister, one who came to power from far outside the political system. Mr. Premadasa too speaks to security concerns.

We shall institute strong legislative measures to.

Ensure that we eradicate terrorism.

Sri Lankan voters are worried about sectarian violence. But amid slumping development and rising prices, they've also got kitchen table concerns. Both of the leading candidates are worrisome in different ways.

Gotabi Rajapaksa was one of the key figures at the end of the war in 2009 and it was a very bloody, brutal end where thousands of civilians are alleged to have been killed.

Namini Vijay Rasa reports for the Economist from Colombo, the capital.

He was the brother of the president at the time, Mahenda Rajapaksa, and he's known for having a very bad temper. He's a good administrator, but also quite brutal in his manner of running things. He wants total control. Under his time, the military ran a very strong intelligence system in which people were monitored closely, especially those who were critical of the government. He's seen as a strong Sinhalan, Buddhist nationalist hawk even though he's trying very hard to paint himself to be a born liberal character in this election.

And is that working? Are minority groups taking him at his word that he's a little less heavy handed?

No, the minorities are not convinced at all. The minority parties, the two main minority parties of the Tamils and Muslims have already openly pledged support to his opposing candidate, Sajid Premadasa and said that encouraged all their members and supporters to vote for him. And as former Defense Secretary, the minorities, especially the Tamils, are afraid of how he executed the war. And they haven't forgotten because nothing has happened since the end of the war to to make them convinced of a different outlook from the Rajapaksas. This time, however, he is very much more pleasing on stage than he used to be. Before, he didn't hold himself accountable to anyone in the past, but now he is trying to be more democratic, at least publicly.

And what about Mr. Premadasa? What is his platform and how is he perceived?

Mr. Premadasa is really uncharted waters. He's not attested. He's been a politician for a long time and one of his main advantages is that the minorities are behind him, if only because they fear the alternative. But he's a known figure. He's somebody that the voters know, the public knows. The issue, however, is that because the last five years under the current government of which Mr. Premadasa is a minister has been so abysmally bad in terms of the economy and in corruption. There's a lot of anger against his administration, not necessarily against him. So that might work against him because you hear more and more Sinhalese people, which is the major voter base of Mr. Rajapaksa, saying they want a disciplined leader.

There were certainly accusations of a lack of leadership, discipline leading up to the Easter bombings, that political infighting caused a failure in intelligence. Do you think Mr. Rajapaksa is in a better position than to bring that discipline, some stability to Sri Lanka?

If you look at it in terms of stability, there's a fine line between with the Rajapaksa's control, complete control, and stability. There will be certainly a higher degree of stability because they work together, they work as a family. The family will be back and they will have no room for maneuver. If I'm going by how it was in the past, and I don't see any evidence that they have really, they will really change their manner of administration, stability. The best chance would be having the Rajapaksas back in place. But how that would impact on civil liberties remains to be seen. There is a lot of anger at how this government, with their infighting had an impact on people's lives. The Prime Minister and president, although they united to defer defeat, the Rajapaksas in 2015, they have been openly sparring even in cabinet with, you know, having ugly arguments and sometimes reports of one walking out or the other shouting. It has been almost like a play school in terms of governance. And that has a lot. Sometimes when the president has an opinion, the Prime Minister overrules it. Some of the Prime Minister's actions have been overruled by the President. It has been quite a mess. And that is another thing that will be to the advantage of the Rajapaksa camp.

And so while all of these people in government are at play school, as you say, the rest of the country still has quite a lot to deal with.

Yeah, the cost of living has been a major issue. It's been rising pretty rapidly. Incomes have not kept up with expenditure. The country's public debt is really high and we now owe about 15% of external public debt to China. These basic essentials are what people are talking about. So when they go to the polls tomorrow, outside of the security concern, which still remains very valid, they will also be thinking about who will bring them more economic benefits. And it's a question of whether it'll be Sajid Premadasa, who they think is very nice but useless, and Gotabirajapaksa, who is Known to be brutal, but gets the job done.

Namini, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason. It was a pleasure to join you.

Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, has had some remarkable ups and downs. In 2011, after three decades in in power, he was kicked out when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians rose up against him. Under his rule, Egypt had been rotten with graft, rigged elections and limits on free speech.

I'm 42, I'm 42 years, so I never feel such happiness now.

Mr. Mubarak was convicted of corruption and served time in prison. But he got special treatment inside and was later acquitted. And eight difficult years on. With Egypt in the tight control of former general Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the ex president is rehabilitating his image. Last month he released a video in which he reminisced about the Arab Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973. He praised the late President Anwar Sadat and and glorified the Egyptian armed forces role in the 1973 conflict. Mr. Mubarak's YouTube channel garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on its first day. Attitudes towards him now seem to be softening.

You'll typically hear things like, you know, where are Mubarak's days when I could eat meat every day of the week? Or where are Mubarak's days when I could still post a funny meme and get away with it?

Hanna El Sisi, no relation to the current president, is a British Egyptian historian at King's College London.

It would be an understatement to say that Egyptians are very much in a pretty brutal and gruelling comedown and have been for quite some years now.

For many people, wages are stagnant and prices have risen.

And these are the people who used to be able to afford cars and cannot used to be able to go out for dinner or lunch and no longer can used to be able to write in English on their Facebook accounts and talk about this thing and that and definitely can no longer do so without ending up in a cell somewhere.

All the euphoria of 2011 eventually turned into something else.

So for that class of people, Mobarak, nostalgia is a thing. And it's funny because it was of course, this class of people that was most that agitated the most against against Mubarak's regime.

Well, it was ironic what happened over the summer in Egypt. About eight and a half years ago, Hosni Mubarak shut off the Internet as a way of discouraging protests against his rule. But it was the Internet that provided him with a source of support.

Greg Karlstrom is our Middle east correspondent.

There's a man named Karim Hussein who has a Facebook page called I'm sorry, Mr. President, where he shares Facebook photos and videos and pays tribute to the deposed president. In one post, for example, he made a tongue in cheek list of reasons why Egyptians overthrew Mubarak in 2011. Things like a stable currency, manageable foreign debt, thriving tourism. Of course, the joke is all of these things have gotten worse since Mubarak was overthrown. And he also wrote that Mubarak had allowed a free press, which wasn't really true, but there's certainly less freedom now because not long after these posts went online, Sane himself was arrested and accused of spreading false news.

And he was a popular figure. The Facebook page was popular.

It was popular by the metrics of Facebook. He had about 3 million followers. And it tapped into really a growing, broader nostalgia for the Mubarak era in Egypt. You speak to people across the country now, and they sort of miss what almost seemed like, in hindsight, the good old days for working class people. The Mubarak era was a time when subsidies on food and energy and other things kept prices low. That is not the case anymore. And so prices have skyrocketed. Inflation has been quite high. For the remnants of Egypt's civil society, they almost look back on the time before 2011 as a period of relative openness. There was some limited space for civil society under Mubarak. There is none under his successor, Abdel F. Tahassisi.

And what about Mr. Mubarak? How's he taking the growing nostalgia for his rule?

Well, he, in the one sense, seems to be enjoying a peaceful retirement. Of course, he was arrested and prosecuted for various charges for murder, for torture, corruption, and not long after the 2011 revolution, all of those cases have now been overturned and dismissed. And so the former president is enjoying a fairly peaceful life, living in a nice suburb. But he and his family have also done a bit to stoke nostalgia by returning to the public eye. So Mubarak himself sat for an interview in May, which was not terribly enlightening, but focused mostly on foreign policy. And so he was able to present an himself as sort of a distinguished elder statesman, talking about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait back in the 90s, talking about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And then his eldest son, Alaa, has really built a public profile for himself over the past few years, some of this through social media. He's photographed all the time eating in sort of popular lower class restaurants, going to football matches. And he's built a following on social media that way with some consequences for himself. He earlier this summer attended a match of the African cup of nations, which was hosted in Cairo. Got a lot of attention for doing that on social media. Seemed like sort of a man of the people thing to do. The next day, he found that his fan ID card, which was issued by the government, had been revoked, which prevented him from going to any more matches in the future. And he's also been sued by a notorious pro government lawyer who files hundreds of lawsuits against anyone who is seen as insufficiently pro Sisi. He's filed a lawsuit against Mubarak's elder son and accused him of solidarity with a terrorist group.

So with this rising nostalgia and sort of being back in the public eye, do you suppose that there's any chance Mr. Mubarak could come back to power or indeed, sort of, his sons could come to power?

I don't think there's any chance of that, and I don't think anyone really takes that possibility seriously In Egypt, m' Barak himself, he's old again, he's retired, and he seems to have no interest in a political comeback. As for his son possibly trying to make a political bid, it's worth remembering. About a year ago, a former army chief, a former head of the Egyptian army, tried to run for President against Mr. Sisi. He lasted a matter of days before he was detained, and he has not been seen since. He has not been released. If someone like that, someone who came from the military, the same establishment that Sisi did, doesn't have the ability to engage in Egyptian politics and challenge Sisi, certainly no one from the Mubarak clan does. I think the reaction, the lawsuits against the Mubarak family and the revocation of his fan id, I think it's a sign really more of Sisi's weakness than Mubarak's strength. This is a government that has not really tried to build a political party or a mass following and who has even Sisi's sort of inner circle, the people on whom he relies for political counsel and support. That inner circle seems to get smaller and smaller by the month, and he leans most of all on his own children for political support. So again, I think it's a sign of his regime's weakness rather than any strength on the part of the Mubaraks.

Greg, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

William Shakespeare is one of the most enduring, perhaps the most enduring influential writers English has ever known. Four hundred years after his death, his phrases pepper the language. His plays are read in just about every school in the English speaking world, and his plays play on. It's hard to imagine now, but during Shakespeare's lifetime, he wasn't the best known wordsmith. It took a puritanical purge of dramas, decades of shifting tastes and a certain Ladies Theater club to propel the Bard to global fame.

In Shakespeare's day, he was certainly popular, but he was by no means the outstanding playwright of his era. There were lots of other his contemporaries who were very well received.

James Tozer is a data journalist at the Economist.

And one of the reasons that we know that Shakespeare wasn't especially popular or outstandingly popular in his time relative to his peers, is that quite a lot of data survives from that period. In fact, there's an 8,000 page tomb called the London Stage, which is a record of all performances that were written down or mentioned in diaries and playbills and newspapers and so on between 1660 and 1800.

And so what does that giant book tell you about the period, say right around the time of Shakespeare or just after he died?

So the first data come from 1660. The playhouses were basically shut down by the Puritans, before then by the likes of Oliver Cornwell, because they deemed theatre bad for the moral fiber of the country. But in the period from 1660 to 1700, there are roughly 2,300 theatre events recorded. And of those, only about 5% involved some Shakespearean material. It's quite hard to work out exactly who wrote what plays because loads of people did versions of King Lear, for example. But the best estimate is about 5% of the material was by Shakespeare. And there were a couple of other writers, notably John Fletcher and John Dryden, who few people have heard of now, but back then were sort of a big deal who had higher market shares than Shakespeare did.

And so what about after that period? When did his star really start to rise?

So you really start to see it rise about 100 years after his death. So sort of 1720 ish. There are a few reasons for this. One of my favorite, and I think one of the biggest, was the formation of something called the Shakespeare Ladies club in the 1730s. Basically a group of aristocratic women who were fed up with all these Italian operas being staged in London, this sort of degenerate material coming in from the continent, and wanted a British theatrical hero who they could get behind, and that was Shakespeare. And so they petitioned theatre owners to put on Shakespeare's plays, particularly his comedies, which had sort of fallen out of fashion. The Shakespeare plays that did survive were the sort of the Long Wait. I mean, they're all long, but the sort of weighty tragedies, the Othellos and the King Lears and the Richard III and so on. So they petitioned theatre owners to put on comedies, increasingly using actresses as well. And by 1750, Shakespeare's market share had gone from 5% up to nearly 20%.

And how's he doing in more recent years?

We scraped a whole load of theatre listings. We found about 400,000 nights worth of data. So plays put on in various theatres in London. And we found that his market share today has dropped back to sort of 6%. So not far from where it was shortly after he died. But the really important thing to remember is that in Shakespeare's era, he was only competing with a handful of playwrights. Today, he's got all the world and sundry. So maintaining a 5% market share now is much more impressive than it used to be. And I think the other thing to say is that his contemporaries now account for less than 0.1% of players in London.

So let's get this straight. You've crunched the recent numbers and 1 in 20 performances in this town is still Shakespeare. Which of his plays are being shown?

London's most performed plays have changed quite a bit. There are a bunch of comedies, particularly sort of gender switching ones. So Twelfth Night, as yous like it, have both become very popular. Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream are all put on vastly more often than they were 200 years ago. Some of the heavier tragedies. So I'm thinking Macbeth and Othello particularly have fallen by the wayside a little bit. Henry VIII has gone from one of the most popular history plays to barely being performed at all. And Henry V, once more onto the breach, which was almost never performed after Shakespeare died, is now one of the most performed history plays.

I'd love to keep talking to you about this, but brevity, I'm told, is the soul of wit.

I don't know. I don't know what to do with that. Well, in which case, I will stop banging on with the words, words, words.

Nicely done, James. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here on Monday.