Comic’s relief? Ukraine’s presidential race

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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. Museums are finding themselves under uncomfortable scrutiny. Many of them house artifacts stolen in fits of colonialism or mere greed. But the calls for returning those objects are getting louder. At the same time, protests have broken out against one family known for its enormous museum donations. And there's a slow, doughy crisis playing out in France. In the past decade, bread consumption has fallen by a quarter. Inequality and the rise of processed foods play a role. But the truth is that a good baguette is just really hard to make. What does the future hold for the beleaguered baton? But first, In the hit Ukrainian comedy show Servant of the People, a history teacher's expletive strewn anti corruption rant goes viral. And this man of the people winds up being elected president. But the comedian who plays him, Volodymyr Zelensky, is trying to turn fiction into reality. Voters head to the polls on Sunday for the first round of Ukraine's presidential elections. And not only is Mr. Zelenskyy in the race, he's the frontrunner.

Five years ago, Ukrainians took to the streets and overthrew their former president, Viktor Yanukovych. Since then, they faced a simmering war in the east of their country with Russia, which also annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Noah Snyder is our Moscow correspondent. He recently visited Mr. Zelenskyy on set in Kiev.

They've seen their economy crash and come back from the brink. And they've seen many of the promises of the revolution unfulfilled, especially when it comes to fighting corruption. That's opened a huge gulf of distrust with the authorities. And that has led to a strange situation where the frontrunner in these elections is a comedian, an actor with no political experience whatsoever, riding this wave of anti establishment sentiment and frustration towards a likely victory.

And I understand that you met Mr. Zelenskyy recently.

I did. So I went and saw him on set where he was filming the latest season of his TV show, Servant of the People. And the scene that was playing out was telling. It showed Zelenskyy's character taking the oath of office. He enters a sort of historical flashback, a dialogue with a trio of important figures, Plato, Prince Vladimir of Kiev, and the Slavic philosopher Grigori Skvaroda. And what ensues is a sort of philosophical dialogue on the nature of power. And this, of course, has a double meaning, since he may be taking that oath quite soon.

And so when you met him after he was filming, how did he come across?

Mr. Zelensky is a charming man, an actor who knows how to hold the room. But at the same time, he's had a hard time being very specific at all about what he plans to do once he becomes president. In part, it's a neat campaign strategy. It allows voters to see him as an empty vessel that they can fill with their hopes.

Well, what about his own hopes? Did he speak to you about why he wants to run for office?

He talked about wanting to change things, about wanting to make the country better. He came around eventually to an answer that he summed up as I want my kids to be to say that my dad was a normal guy, a great guy. And these motivations for many voters raise questions because of his somewhat murky ties with Yegor Kolomoisky, the oligarch who owns the TV channel on which Mr. Zelenskyy's show has aired. The two maintain that they're not in cahoots and that there's nothing to their relationship beyond a business1. But Mr. Zelenskyy's vague answers have fueled the suspicions about why he actually has.

Decided to run then, without prejudice to where his platform might be coming from. What has he actually said he'll do?

First and foremost, he's promised to maintain Ukraine's course towards Western integration, integration with the European Union. He's talked about fighting corruption and somewhat vaguely about ending the war, about finding a way to negotiate with Mr. Putin. At the same time, his ideological stance is quite over the map. We talked to him about which world leaders he admired, which figures he associated himself with in global politics, and he invoked two names in particular. Jair Bolsonaro. The right wing populist president of Brazil and France is Emmanuel Macron, who's a liberal technocrat. The gulf between their policies and their positions is enormous and again, perhaps suggests that Mr. Zelenskyy is a bit unfamiliar with the territory he's wandering onto.

And I guess that's particularly worrisome in the sense that he's up against Vladimir Putin for a chunk of his country.

Absolutely. Mr. Putin has 19 years of executive experience under his belt. He's a wily operator and will not miss the opportunity to use his opponent's inexperience to his advantage.

And how did Mr. Zelenskyy end up here? How is a comedian with no political experience leading the polls?

Well, I think the main reason is frustration. Frustration amongst ordinary Ukrainians with their post revolutionary leadership. When they overthrew the previous president, viktor Yanukovych, in 2014, there was a great deal of hope that the deeply corrupt oligarchic political system that has gripped Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union would finally change. And that fundamental promise has been left unfulfilled. So although Ukraine has made some important reforms, although the country is moving closer to Europe, citizens now enjoy visa free travel to the EU for example. They don't feel like the system has fundamentally changed. 3/4 of Ukrainians say the country is headed in the wrong direction. Just 9% have faith in their national government. That's the lowest figure of any country surveyed by Gallup, a polling agency. And you see that frustration spill out onto the streets quite regularly. There are anti corruption protests in Kiev in the same place often as where the revolution in 2014 began.

And so who is Mr. Zelenskyy running against? Are there more, let's call them, standard candidates?

There's nearly 40 candidates running for president, but the frontrunners are a pair of of old faces from the old guard. There's the incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, who came to office in 2014 in the wake of the revolution, promising to root out corruption and change this old system. People largely feel that he's failed to do so. The second major challenger to Mr. Zelensky is Yulia Timoshenko. She's a former prime minister, came to prominence after the Orange Revolution in 2004, and she's reinvented herself this time around as a populist.

Okay, so you've got two establishment candidates and one wild card. Does that look like it's going to be a fair fight, at least at the polls?

That's a big question. And it's the thing that people are most worried about in Kiev these days. There are not only fears about the influence of oligarchic television, but also fears about straight up vote rigging and vote buying. And a vast majority of Ukrainians, in fact, don't believe that these will be free and fair elections. And that could the most dangerous outcome of all.

But let's suppose things are relatively clear cut and Mr. Zelenskyy gets through the first round as expected. What do you reckon happens then?

The polling shows that in most cases he would win a head to head matchup with Mr. Poroshenko and with Ms. Timoshenko. But a lot of it depends on things like voter turnout. Mr. Zelenskyy's base is younger, less reliable, so it's really hard to say.

And if he were to win in the second round and become president, he'd.

Inherit this simmering war with Russia, which has massive implications for relations between Russia and the West. He would inherit an economy that's still struggling and could benefit from further reform. And he would face a brutal fight over parliamentary elections in the fall.

The perils of politically inexperienced television personalities heading for leadership. Noah, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

To have a beautiful museum or several is a source of pride for any city from Berlin to Washington. Tourist boards tout their temples of culture with art and history told through objects from around the world. But for all the beauty and fascination of the artifacts, many of them are a long way from home and there are people who miss them.

You have an absence, a great absence that you feel every day.

Salih Rabi Khan is a designer from Senegal who has campaigned for the return of artifacts to Africa.

The idea is to make sure that the places that created this heritage can benefit from its aura, from the knowledge that is encoded inside of it. But voila, the fact of the matter is that we don't have a lot of our objects right now and we need them back.

Western museums are crowded with objects that are ethically iffy.

Well, probably the most famous example in Britain is the Benham bronzes. I mean, they're spread over museums all over Europe, but the biggest hall is in Britain.

Fiametta Rocco is the Economist's culture correspondent.

There are more than a thousand bronze sculptures, wall plaques that date back to the 13th century. And they were taken during a punitive military expedition in Nigeria in 1897 that had been launched really as a punishment for an attack on the British consul. Benin City was burnt to the ground. These treasures were looted and taken back to Britain to be sold as a way of defraying the cost of the expedition. I mean, this wasn't the only one. There were similar expeditions in Dahomey, which is present day Bena in Mali, in Ethiopia. You can travel almost anywhere in Europe, go to a museum, and there will be objects that were looted or taken by force from Africa.

And there have been calls down the years to return some of those objects. Are those calls getting louder?

They certainly are getting stronger. The first calls go back to the 1950s and peaked around the time when lots of African countries became independent. And they've been coming regularly since then, but they're really hotting up now.

And why is that?

I mean, there were always two reasons why museums in Europe pushed back against calls for restitution. The first was that museum directors would say that their collections were inalienable, which meant that they belonged to the state, or in case of the British Museum, they were held by the trustees on behalf of Parliament. They couldn't be sent back. They couldn't be given back. The second thing, and this is really said much more quietly but still quite vociferously, that if treasures were sent back to Africa, they would somehow be looted or stolen or destroyed or not looked after. That has changed because there's a huge improvement going on at the moment in museums in a number of African countries, but particularly in Senegal and in Nigeria.

And what about the sort of state ownership argument? Is that shifting as well?

The very big change came in November 2017, when the French president, Emmanuel Macron, gave a speech in Ouagadougou in West Africa, when he said for the very first time that too much African art was in Western museums pour destitutions.

Du patrimoine Africa.

In that speech, in which this point was made in just a couple of minutes, he destroyed the argument that had been made for 60 years that these collections could not be returned.

And amid that upheaval about collections, there's also something about funding sort of tickling ethical nerves around the art world. What can you tell us about that?

Absolutely. And I think the two things are not entirely unconnected. I think young people have a great sense of social justice, and they are great believers that objects that have been looted should be restituted. And at the same time, they are great believers in the notion that museums should not take what they see as dirty money. This issue has played out in a number of ways with BP and other companies, but it came to a head last month with the demonstration at the Guggenheim in New York.

Doctors arm out.

Welcome here.

Say it loud.

People were protesting the large support that the Sackler family provides to that gallery and others worldwide. The Sacklers earned their vast wealth through pharmaceuticals and in particular from a drug called oxycontin, which was very, very aggressively marketed and which has fueled the opioid crisis in America and So the suggestion.

Is that these museums simply stop taking what's being projected as dirty money. I mean, how are they responding?

Well, Tate and Guggenheim have said that they won't take any more money. The National Portrait Gallery, which was about to put on an exhibition of Nan Goldin's, which she was going to boycott, if they carried on taking Sackler money, has also said that they won't. And the Victoria Narbert Museum, where Dame Theresa Sackler is a trustee, is also thinking about it. It's tough, especially in Britain, because museums here are short of money. But as one director put it to me, museums and galleries today are far, far more than exhibition places. They are places where people go to debate. They're places where people go to exchange ideas. They are as much forums as they are treasure boxers. So their directors really shouldn't be surprised when their visitors raise ethical dilemma.

Fiumetta, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

In France, there's one thing that has, until recently anyway, always been easy to find a boulangerie, the neighborhood bakery.

They are everywhere. If you live in central Paris, I think within 10 minutes walk of my apartment, there are probably five or six different boulangeries.

Pamela Druckerman lives in Paris and has been writing about a growing bread crisis in France for 1843. Our sister publication.

Probably there are seven or eight different kinds of bread, but what there definitely is, is a. Is a baguette. I mean, because I came in with this idea of the baguette as this great national icon, I probably eat more bread than the average Parisian does. But yes, I mean, you kind of. You can't avoid bread here. It becomes your staple food just by virtue of living here.

I. I would imagine if it were me, that instead of putting on the freshman 15, I would be putting on the Frenchman 15. And so what's the role of the baguette in France? It's. It's easy to imagine that it's. It's sort of just sort of national stereotype rather than national icon.

Well, it really is built into life here. So there are expressions in France like it's not a meal unless there's bread on the table, or, you know, something that's interminably long, is supposed to be as long as a day without bread. You have one boulangerie for every 2,000 inhabitants in France, which is really quite a lot. And it's considered a municipal crisis. In a small town, when the boulangerie closes, in some cases, they put in bread vending machines. You can put in money and you get a hot baguette comes out.

I need to get one of these machines.

You will need a Boulanger to stock it. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell when you visit Paris because there seems to be bread everywhere, but there's actually a kind of bread crisis in France. In the last decade, bread consumption in France has fallen by about a quarter.

And so about this decline, how is that happening?

There are all kinds of factors. You have French people worried about the health properties of bread, people on gluten free diets. You have the introduction of lots of different substitution foods. You can now get fast food tacos in France. You can get all kinds of Asian foods. You have some young people thinking that bread is old fashioned, it's not cool. They prefer to get their bread not as baguettes, but in pizzas and as hamburger buns. There are all kinds of factors.

Surely there are some die hard baguette fans who are trying to fight this wave.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, part of the problem as well is there was a big decline in the quality of bread. You had industrial production methods coming in and a lot of very plain, tasteless white baguettes being served that nobody could really get very excited about.

Given that decline in baguette quality, we set out on this mission to find out what makes a good baguette quite so special and handily. One of our producers, Stevie Hertz, knows a professional baker.

Hey, mom, how's it going?

How are you, Trey?

Yeah. So my mum, Linda Collister, is a chef. She's written over 30 cookbooks, including one literally called Bread, and is a judge for the World Bread Awards.

So she knows her bagel from her brioche.

Oh. Oh, yeah. She can give you a whole essay about the difference between the two. And importantly for our purposes, she knows all about the art and science of baking the perfect baguette.

It's basically chemistry. You have to have the right flour in the right proportion and the correct temperatures. It is chemistry.

She showed me her method for baking a baguette that she learned in cookery school in Paris. And it's not fast. It took us eight hours of fermentation, then kneading, an hour of proving when you let the dough rise, then shaping and even more proving. But Maimon was clear, it's this time that gives baguettes their trademark taste.

It gives a very, very lively, bubbly dough. But this is what gives the depth of flavour.

So if you're running one of these boulangeries in Paris, you can't Just sort of trot these things out.

Oh no, they take a lot of time. But she said that bakers would trade off. So the late shift would start the fermentation when they're closing up at night, and then in the morning other people would and prove the dough. What I also wasn't expecting was the secret to that crisp, dry crust. It's adding water to the hot oven.

You want to create the glossy crust for this. You want it to rise, you don't want it to dry out at this point.

And incredibly, after all that rising, it only takes 15 minutes to bake.

And here you can see the rough crust shards.

You can smell it. Smells amazing.

Good and brown underneath. Would you like to taste a bit?

Oh yeah.

So good.

I think that's as good as you get.

But Pamela Druckerman says this traditional but time consuming recipe has been under threat from faster mass produced loaves.

You also have an ordinary baguette which might have been pre baked and then re baked in a supermarket. It might have been frozen. And it can have all kinds of additives that speed up fermentation, but often detract from the taste. By the 90s, you had a movement of people trying to revive old style breads and artisanal methods and sort of bring back the good baguettes. And you had the government issuing this decree saying there's going to be this official type of baguette that's only allowed to have four flour, water, yeast and salt. And you have these sort of urban hipsters moving back to the countryside to grow their own wheat and then sell their artisanal bread in farmers markets in town on the weekends, you have a kind of bread inequality. In fact, in France now, with urbanites paying more for high quality specialty breads and organic breads and gluten free breads. But then in the countryside, you have this kind of bread desert with boulangeries closing and these kind of bread machines opening up in front of the town halls. When the gilets jaune protests were breaking out, and I thought the gilets jeunes that are protesting are also eating a kind of inferior bread.

So what do you think the future of the baguette is?

Even in France, the baguette continues to feel like a national icon. I don't think it's going anywhere. I still hear people say it's not a meal unless there's bread on the table. But apparently there are more and more meals in France in which there is no basket of bread on the table. I mean, bread's not going away, but I think you're having this increasing bread inequality and these zones where there's lots of interesting, very high quality bread and others where, you know, it's very hard to get a fresh loaf.

Pamela, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me on.

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.