Haley to the chief? A long-shot candidacy begins

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Arab governments have never been too enamored of an unfettered free press. But a combination of old fashioned intimidation and sophisticated financial pressure are turning the region into a wasteland for news and reporting.

And most often, when an animal is the main character of a popular movie, it's a saccharine, family friendly affair. But a film called EO is something different. A troubling if tender imagining of what it's like to be a donkey.

First up though, Yesterday Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and American Ambassador to the UN announced her long shot presidential candidacy for 2024.

I'm Nikki Haley and I'm running for president.

She's the second person to formally launch her bid for the Republican nomination. And she could stand alone for weeks or even months as the party's only announced challenger to former President Donald Trump.

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and my fellow citizens, America's comeback starts right now.

This morning, Haley is set to deliver her first official campaign speech at an event in Charleston. Should she win the GOP primary, Haley would make history as the first woman and first Asian American to lead the Republican ticket. But despite her early start, she has a tough road ahead. A host of other probably stronger candidates are yet to launch their campaigns. And while many in the party are ready to move beyond Donald Trump, a crowded field will only benefit him, as it did in 2016.

Yesterday morning, Nikki Haley put out a video on Twitter announcing that she's officially running for president.

Rebecca Jackson writes about America for the Economist.

She hit a lot of important Republican talking points. She talked about how she would secure the US Mexican border, took shots at Democratic leaders, and criticized the so called Washington establishment. She also drew on her international experience as ambassador to the UN Talking tough about US Opponents. China and Russia are on the march. They all think we can be bullied, kicked around. You should know this about me. I don't put up with bullies. But Nikki Haley is entering the ring battered and bruised. In fact, she's quite a lightweight candidate. And her message may fall in deaf ears within the Republican Party.

Why do you say that, Rebecca? Why do you think Nikki Haley is starting her race already behind?

So she really did used to look like the future of the Republican Party as governor. She was a moderate on race relations. When a white supremacist came in and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, she crusaded to get the Confederate flag moved from the State House. And importantly, she really wasn't Trumpian. She criticized him a lot and really stood her ground. But then things started to change. The president offered her a job as the US Ambassador to the UN and she realized that that would pad her resume nicely if she ever wanted to run for office in the future. At the UN she pushed back on the president. She didn't share the kind of fondness that he has for authoritarian leaders. But while she started out as a moderate voice, she soon realized that it was pretty politically advantageous for her not to criticize the president. When she finally decided to resign from her UN position in 2018, the President made a speech about her where he praised her adamantly. And when Trump first started saying that the 2020 election had been stolen, she was totally silent. And it wasn't until a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6 that she decided to decry the president's denialism. This lack of resolve has not landed well with voters. She can't really appeal to the MAGA base or to classic conservatives. The latest poll shows that just 5% of Republican voters are likely to vote for her. Ron DeSantis and Mr. Trump hold much more power.

So 5%, Rebecca, how does that compare to former President Trump's poll numbers right now?

Poll after poll show that Trump is definitely the frontrunner. The latest figures from YouGov put him at 37% of the vote. Even in South Carolina, Ms. Haley's home state, he's clinched a bunch of important endorsements that has some people in the GOP pretty worried. While he's certainly popular with the right wing base of the party, many think that if he were to go up against Biden in a rematch, he would lose. The midterms were sort of a test case for that. Trump endorsed candidates did particularly Badly. If Republicans want to take back the White House, they'll hope that another candidate beats him to the nomination.

So let's talk about who those other candidates might be. There's Haley, who's throwing her hat in the ring. What about other members of the Trump administration? Are we likely to see any of them jump into the race?

So there are a couple others that are definitely considering runs. The two most prominent are Mike Pence, who served as vice president, and Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director and then Secretary of State. Pence, who was once Trump's steadfast sidekick, broke with him after he refused to overturn the 2020 election when Trump asked him to, since he hasn't really wavered. And recently, he's been weaving in criticism of Trump's anti Democratic tendencies into speeches in early voting states. In fact, Pence is visiting one of those states today in Iowa. He's speaking at an event that's billed as a rally to combat the left's indoctrination of children. Mike Pompeo, who is one of Trump's most loyal cabinet members, also looks like he's going to put his hat in the ring. He recently wrote a book touting his hawkishness on foreign policy and has tried to distance himself a bit from the president. In some ways, him and Nikki Haley have a similar selling point, but to their detriment, most Americans don't really care about foreign policy.

And what about beyond the Trump White House? Now that Haley has basically fired the starting pistol, who else is going to get in the race?

So the person that we should all be looking out for is Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis. He's definitely Trump's most daunting potential rival. In some ways, he seems to share the president's ideology without his character flaws that make him dangerous for democracy. And if you look at the polls, he's only marginally behind Trump, currently at 35%. So far, DeSantis has remained coy about a White House run. Just yesterday, he brushed off a question about it.

Nikki Haley announced her presidential run today.

Do you plan on following suit? Wouldn't you like to know?

This is the show that everyone is watching.

And Rebecca, when do you think we can expect all of these potential candidates to announce?

Many of them will probably announce in the coming months, but it depends on how many do and how long they hang on. Too much splintering. The field will play to Trump's advantage, as it did in 2016. So knocking out these other candidates early may be critical for Republicans to reclaim the Oval Office. That view seems to be shared by many of the Republican megadonors. Lots of them have decided to abandon Trump. The Koch Network has pulled its support from Trump. Blackstone CEO and the Interactive Brokerage Group founder, who together are worth $60 billion, have also decided that they don't want to back him. Even the CEO of Citadel, Ken Griffin, who gave over $100 million to midterm candidates, plans to back DeSantis.

So, Rebecca, do you think Haley announced early as a plea to get donors to look her way and more broadly in this big field that you've just painted a portrait of? Where does Haley sit? Where are her ultimate prospects?

So probably not. It seems pretty clear that funders know that backing Haley is probably money poorly spent. That seems likely to make her candidacy pretty short lived. If she plays her cards right, there's a chance that she'll be able to get picked up as vice president on someone else's ticket. But truth is, that also seems unlikely. If Trump or DeSantis are the frontrunners, they're more likely to pick someone like Carrie Lake, a firebrand who narrowly lost the governor's race in Arizona in November, or Kristi Noem, South Dakota's staunchly conservative governor. Those are both cleaner choices. As for Haley, she seems pretty driven by political aspirations. She wants to go big. And in 2017, she proudly said that she wears heels not as a fashion statement, but so that if she sees something wrong, she can, as she said, kick him every single time. But much has since gone wrong in the Republican Party, and Haley and many of her Republican colleagues seem to have given up on kicking.

All right, Rebecca, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

For decades, Arab brewers put up with a somewhat independent press. They kept a tight grip on journalists but didn't dictate coverage. Some saw free media as a safety valve and a way to gauge public opinion. But this view seems increasingly unpopular. Across the Arab world, dissenting voices are being gagged. And for many journalists, life is becoming more dangerous.

Increasingly, for Arab regimes, the only permissible news is good news.

Nick Pelham is a Middle east correspondent at the Economist.

The despots who swept back the Arab Spring of 2011 have reduced journalists to mere mouthpieces. According to Reporters Without Borders, eight of the 15 worst abusers of press freedom are in the Middle east, and that's up from five, 20 years ago.

So, Nick, what does this repression look like in practice? How are these regimes cracking down on outlets?

Well, some regimes buy up advertising agencies to deprive critical outlets of revenue. And as funds dry up, governments or their friends and cronies snap them up or just let them fold. Others have brought in really severe laws which ban certain types of news. And in some cases the government simply shuts down entities and outlets entirely. Last summer, for instance, the United Arab Emirates closed a local newspaper, Aria, and and sacked its staff after it reported that petrol prices were cheaper in Oman than they were in the uae. In Algeria, for instance, there's really not much of an independent press left. They've closed outlet after outlet and one of the last was called Maghreb Emergent. It was run by a veteran journalist, Isan Al Qadi. At the end of last year, the Algerian authorities came for him. He was led away in handcuffs. His media outlet was closed down. All the journalists there are made to hand over their computers and phones. What we're seeing really in Algeria and other countries is really a smothering of what used to be a relatively thriving press.

And what about individual journalists? What's their experience?

Some reporters are being handed with software such as Pegasus, which is an Israeli made spyware program which can be used to snoop on smartphones. Others are simply being locked up. And Egypt has now the world's third largest jailer of journalists. You're seeing something similar in Morocco where the state has filmed journalists, they say, in compromising positions, either with girlfriends or they've made allegations of rape to try and prosecute journalists and again, silence them, lock them up. And this isn't just a one off. This has been happening consistently over a number of years to the point where again, Morocco used to be one of the highlights for a flourishing press and that has now pretty much been crushed across the region. The numbers in prison have declined a bit, but that's only because there are reporting has become less critical. And of course, some regimes have gone further still.

This is a story that has shaken.

The Saudi government to its core.

Saudi Arabia confirms that the journalist Jamal.

Khashoggi is dead quickly.

Want to go to see? Turkish officials say they have evidence Khashoggi was tortured, killed and dismembered.

A very different story from the Saudi version of events. In Saudi Arabia, the killing in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi has scared many into just complete silence.

And so how have journalists and media organizations responded? Have they tried to flee? As we've seen with Russia over the.

Past year, there's sort of been a pattern over a century where Arab journalists have sought refuge either in parts of the region which were more liberal, or as those became Increasingly scarce in the west. After the civil war swept Lebanon in the 1970s, London became the Arab world's media capital. But now there are signs that repressive governments are buying up what remains of independent press abroad and hauling them back home. A newspaper, Al Ghad, a satellite television channel, both of them Emirati financed. They've recently retreated from London. In August, Al Arabel Jedid, a Qatari owned satellite channel, moved its headquarters from London to Doha. So we're kind of seeing media outlets being hauled home, the better to muzzle and control them.

So it sounds like these gagging tactics are working. What is the alternative? Where are people going for their independent news?

You're absolutely right. Today, three Gulf states, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE dominate the Pan Arab news market. Foreign broadcasters used to offer an alternative, but In September, the BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation in London said it was ending 84 years of transmission by its Arabic service radio, and it's already cut many of its staff. Other Western owned outlets, such as Bloomberg and Sky News, are arranging partnerships with Gulf regimes that may also limit their reporting. And while all of this is going on, regimes are stymieing foreign reporting by expelling journalists, restricting the visas that they issue, and just blocking their news sites on the Internet altogether. It's a really bleak situation.

It sounds bleak, Nick. And if domestic outlets are being repressed and foreign ones expelled, what kind of news are people in the Arab world actually getting?

The great hope with the rise of digital media, with the rise of the Internet, was that this was going to be a free for all, that people were going to be able to have direct access to news and that they were going to break the monopoly of information ministries across the Middle east. And that just hasn't happened. Journalists and editors and anybody who's using social media is under ever greater surveillance. Standards are slipping. Morale has plummeted. It's a fair bet that current affairs ratings have slumped as programs have become more anodyne. In a survey of Arab youth in 2019, an Emirati based pollster found that 80% favored social media as a source for news rather than any other. And that was up from just 25% four years earlier. And this is something I think that kind of repressive governments are delighted about. You know, they're sort of devaluing news. They're happy that they've got a population that isn't engaged, that isn't focused on current affairs, that doesn't hold them to account. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in sports and soap operas to entertain and distract the masses. And yet there is a kind of question, ultimately, could all this backfire? Might it yet be that Arab rulers regret silencing the Fourth Estate? After all, the whole function of journalism is supposed to be that they can hold regimes to account. They can be a form of check and balance. If you don't have that check and balance, it's very hard to see how regimes are going to understand the anger and problems in society. And if they don't acknowled what's going on, it's conceivable that there might yet be another Arab Spring to surprise them again.

All right, Nick, thanks so much for joining us today.

John, always a pleasure. Thank you.

Donkeys don't usually play a prominent role in the awards season, but this year is proving something of an exception.

John Bleasdale writes about films for the Economist.

A diminutive donkey named Jenny steals many of the scenes from Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inshurin.

Oh, for God's sake, Pawrick, how many more times?

I am not putting me donkey Outside.

When I'm sad, which has been nominated for best picture. And there's also Eo, the new film by Jerzy Skolomowski, a veteran Polish writer director whose star is none other than the donkey of the title. We're used to talking animals in Hollywood, but this is not your usual talking donkey. It's a fun far cry from Eddie Murphy's donkey in Shrek, for instance, or even Winnie the Pooh's Eeyore, although his name, Eo takes on the phonetic sound of the brain donkey. It's not a family friendly animal movie in which the animals basically stand for avatars of the humans. When animals appear in films, they usually do so as human voiced, cute cartoon characters like Bambi.

He doesn't walk very good, does he?

Disney has made an entire genre out of the talking, cheeky, singing, witty animal that is more like an American teenager than anything that you'd actually find in the natural world. IO is closer to Robert Bresson's arthouse classic, oh Hazard Balthazar, the tragic tale of man's inhumanity towards animals and beasts. The film features an epic journey from the heart of Europe Poland Poland, where EO is rescued from a circus, only to find himself wandering through the forests and woods, the service stations and the urban landscape until arriving in Italy. Along the way he will meet kindness, but mostly indifference or downright cruelty. The film is fascinating from many points of view. Its real innovation is to really give us a Donkey's eye view of the world. This can be at times an immersive and exciting aural and visual experience. As we see the most confusing things happening from the point of view of the erstwhile beast, we also get to see his point of view in regard to the actions of the human beings. And so things which seem apparently normal to us are rendered strange and weird by the perspective of the film. For instance, a football game is celebrated and the fan's behavior seems to be at once hilarious, but also frightening in many ways. We go to films about animals to see the world in a different way, and EO certainly succeeds in this process. The camera is often at the height of the donkey and many shots loom in on EO's dark, melancholic eyes. This isn't the first film to take its perspective from the point of view of an animal. In fact, there have been a slew of recent films which have focused quite tightly on the animal world. Andrea Arnold's Cow, for instance, had a look at the world from the point of view of a farm animal. The ordinary bovine cow of the title, Viktor Kozkowski's Gunda, took the same approach, but this time with a pig. The director, Jerzy Skolomowski, seemed undaunted by the fact that he was breaking one of the cardinal rules of filmmaking never to work with children or animals. I must say I was expecting worse. The donkey has this reputation of being stubborn and stupid, but I learned very early on, yes, they are stubborn and usually some reason which you have to find yourself why they don't want to do something, but they are not stupid. They are extremely intelligent animals and very sensitive. In eo, Jerzy Skolomowski might well have made his masterpiece. It is a film which never Disney fies or condescends to the animal world. It always recognizes the gap between the humans and and the creature that is the heart of the film. There's a strangeness to EO and a difference which is always there. But at the same time, he manages the almost impossible task of bridging that gap and making us feel empathy and sympathy with the main character.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastconomist.com and you.

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