Paranoia politics: a Tunisian lesson in demagoguery

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Oret Okonbiyi. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There's a wave of Americans seeking greener pastures in Europe. The increase in remote working opportunities is encouraging people to take the plunge. But as our correspondent discovers, for many, the main driving factors run deeper. And Ukrainian fighter pilot Andrey Pilchikov lobbied politicians in Washington and Europe to give his country access to American-made F-16 jets. We pay tribute to the young pilot who was killed during a training flight. First up, though. This summer, racial tensions have been rising in the North African nation of Tunisia.

Police keeping local Tunisians separated from migrants. Officers covering the entrance to the house where a group of sub-Saharan Africans are living.

Tunisians take part in the funeral of a man stabbed to death during a scuffle between residents and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia's coastal city of Sfax. The country's population is estimated to be 98% Arab, but recently more Black Africans have started passing through, many of them hoping to cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe.

Here in the province of Sfax, on the Gulf of Gabès, a large number of migrants and refugees are waiting for the opportunity to take to the sea.

In February, Tunisia's president, Kaïs Saïed, made a shocking claim. That Black Africans were part of a plot to change the nation's demography. We are not safe! We are not safe! We are not safe! Despite this being false, his words have had cascading effects ever since, sparking protests and fueling anti-migrant violence in the streets. They can also be seen as part of a troubling global phenomenon in which fear is weaponized to control a population.

Tunisia is interesting at the moment because it's the perfect encapsulation of a dire trend.

Robert Guest is The Economist's deputy editor.

The president's doing an awful job of running the country, and he's tried to distract everybody's attention from that by blaming all the country's problems on Black people.

Tell me a bit more about what you saw in the city that's at the center of all this.

So I went to Tunisia and I was pretty shocked by what I saw. In the city of Sfax, essentially all the Black people in the city had been driven out of their homes by mobs who were telling landlords, "We're going to burn down your houses if you don't evict your Black tenants." One of the migrants I spoke to there was a guy called Muhammad from Guinea. He had been driven from his home by thugs with petrol bombs and knives. And he showed me his injuries from having been beaten up. He was in a pretty bad way and very desperate to get out of the country. And they were sleeping rough in the middle of the city, hundreds of them sort of huddled together for safety and worried about what was going to happen next.

Robert, how did this situation get so dire?

So Tunisia used to be very hopeful during the Arab Spring. It was pretty much the only Arab country where they overthrew a dictatorship and established a proper democracy. But the current president, who's only been there for a relatively short time, has rapidly set about dismantling the checks and balances of democracy and setting himself up as another dictator. And he wanted to change the conversation. So whereas previously everyone was talking about how bad unemployment was and how bad inflation was, in February, he made this speech where he said, "The blacks are coming to get you." they seem to have swallowed a huge amount of what the president had said. So whereas, for example, most economists think that the reason Tunisia has a terrible inflation problem is largely down to the foolish policies of the president, I met a guy in Sfax called Mustafa who said that inflation was caused by Black people because they were eating up all the bread and that was why there wasn't any left. You kind of tear your hair out listening to stuff like this. It's extraordinary.

Tunisia was the birthplace of the Arab Spring, and like you mentioned, it's one of the only revolutions that actually gave rise to a proper democracy. Are you saying that this democratic progress is being reversed, that their democracy is under threat?

Absolutely. The president was trying to roll back democracy before he made this speech. And the speech was a way of taking people's minds off the fact that this is what he's doing. So it's given him cover to muzzle the press, purge the judiciary, shut down the national anti-corruption watchdog. And this has had predictable results. The country is more fearful, it's less free. It's also more corrupt according to Transparency International. So there's been a wholesale reversal of democratic reforms in Tunisia. And this is the oldest trick in the book, and unfortunately it's becoming more common. The Economist did some number crunching recently, and we discovered that not only has paranoid nationalism, the sort of blaming of other groups for your country's problems, not only has that become more common over the past decade or so, but the more nationalist regimes are, the more corrupt they're likely to be. And the more likely they are to abuse power.

Okay, and how has this then played out in other countries?

We're seeing this all over the world. You know, nationalism, it can be a force for good, you know, if people will pull together in the face of an external threat, and if that threat is real, as it is for the Ukrainians, for example, then they will team up together to fight off the invader, and they will tend to rally round their leader who says he's going to help them defend themselves against the external enemy. The problem is that A lot of leaders have discovered they can get the same rally round the flag effect by completely making up threats. So Vladimir Putin claims that Russia was threatened by Ukrainian Nazis backed by the West. It wasn't true, but it furnished him with an excuse to launch a war of territorial acquisition, and it actually made him more popular at home. You see this with all kinds of enemies. So for Nicaragua, for the dictator there, the enemy is the United States. And so he calls all his democratic opponents agents of Uncle Sam. Or in many countries, any social change that makes people feel uncomfortable, the leaders will say this is a foreign idea or a vicious plot by foreigners to undermine our national culture. If the technique didn't work, people wouldn't use it, but it does, and they do, and a lot of them are copying each other.

And is this just something we see with autocrats?

No, absolutely not. This is something that you have to worry about in Every kind of country. Whenever you hear a politician say, "There's a terrible threat coming and I'm going to protect you from it," like say in Britain, if the leaders of the campaign for Brexit tell you that if we remain in the European Union, then 90 million Turks are going to come to Britain, it's a completely made-up threat, but it worked. We're now out of the European Union and a group of not entirely reputable people ended up running the country for some considerable period of time. And I suspect we're going to see it in the American election coming up next And Robert, why is fear such a powerful tool? Well, it's a primal emotion. Fear is a survival mechanism. So it's a very attention-grabbing rhetorical device. If I say, you know, vote for me and I will make incremental improvements to the school system over the next 5 to 10 years, that's actually a pretty good platform for governing, but it's a really boring slogan. Whereas if I say the tribe next door are attacking us, vote for me and I will defend you, that's an electrifying slogan. We're an imaginative, communicative species, so we're very good at imagining dangers which don't actually exist. And throughout history, you've seen people getting very exercised about dangers which are entirely imaginary, like massive persecution of witches, which do not exist at all. And the modern manifestation of that is very often fear of the other, fear of groups of people who you can't quite see but who are coming to do you harm in some way.

Okay, and so if Mr. Saïd is, as you say, employing these same tools used by unscrupulous leaders, then what might we expect to come next? Is there any hope of a turnaround for Tunisia?

In the short run, the Tunisian president's position looks much more solid now than it did before he started whipping up hatred against Black Africans. His popularity appears to have vaulted. I mean, the polls aren't terribly reliable, but he seems to have more or less doubled his popularity. Whether he can keep that going indefinitely remains to be seen. But the fear is that if the economy keeps getting worse, which it will, then he may have to raise the temperature even more. And I shudder to think what that might look like.

Robert, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

I look very much forward to being your president, and I can only say our work is now really just beginning.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, More Americans have been saying they want to leave the country.

Matt Steinglass is The Economist's Europe correspondent.

Gallup, a polling agency, says the percentage who say they would like to leave America permanently rose from 11% under Barack Obama to 16% under Trump. It's now 17%. Not very many people actually did anything about it, but the number of Americans living in Europe has gone up over the past decade. The exact figures are hard to pin down, but they've risen by perhaps 100,000 or so. That's not a lot of emigration for a country of 330 million people, but it is a distinct trend. Two of the people who did something about it are Sylvia and Stanley Johnson.

So you've arrived at a really warm time. I think it's going up into the 80s today.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

I recently went to interview them at their bustling house in Lisbon, Portugal. Where they live with their 4 kids.

This is Samaya. She just graduated today.

Congratulations.

This is Matt.

Back in 2020, the Johnsons were living well. They both had their own practices. Sylvia is a psychiatrist. Stanley is a personal injuries lawyer. And they were living as a family in a great big house in Orlando, Florida.

A 6-bedroom, 6.5-bath, about 6,000-square-foot home that sat on a lake. And I mean, you know, quote unquote, the American Everything but the white fence.

And then in 2020, they gave it up. They moved to New Zealand and then to Lisbon. Sylvia says they left the U.S. for a lot of reasons, but the biggest two were gun violence and racism, two things that were very much present in both of their lives.

I've had a gun pulled on me three times in my life.

On my side of the family, I've had two first cousins die by gun violence. And the likelihood of these things happening, it's higher in the African American community because of the intense racism. And so I was determined to find a place where we could raise our children where they would not be subjected to that treatment.

Sylvia had wanted to try taking the family abroad for a long time. But Stanley said no.

I never had any interest of leaving the United States. She would always, like, kind of, like, bring it up. And I'm like, well, that's home. And it just wasn't desirable to me.

So what changed? Partly, Sylvia and Stanley say, it was the COVID pandemic. Everyone was working from home, and Sylvia convinced Stanley he might as well be doing that from abroad. But the key thing, Sylvia and Stanley say, was the killing of George Floyd and the protests and violence that followed. He remembers that's when he started thinking that he should get a gun to protect his family.

When I said that out loud, I was like, you know what, if I have to live in a country where I need a gun to protect my family, then this is not the country for me.

At first, Stanley said, he put a time limit on the move.

So I said, we're gonna go try this abroad thing for, I said, 3 months. I'll be back in 3 months. And that was the deal. Then when I got out there, first week, I said, okay, I'll be back maybe 6 months. And then I said, I'm not coming back. Sell it all.

When Stanley and Sylvia talk about the difference in the way it feels for an African American family to be out of America, It sounds as though a tremendous weight was lifted off their shoulders, for both them and their children.

And I told myself, I can't go back. I can't go back.

There have always been Americans who moved to Europe for enjoyment or self-improvement. There were the wealthy sophisticates of the Gilded Age, portrayed in novels by Henry James and Edith Wharton, who went to France and Italy to discover culture and never went back. But there are also Americans who left to flee something in America. African Americans have been doing this for decades. In the 1920s, Josephine Baker. In the '40s through the '60s, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Nina Simone.

I'll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

I mean, really, no fear. One thing that changes is which countries Americans go to. The statistics show a big rise over the past decade in the number of Americans living in the Netherlands, in Spain, And especially in Portugal, the population of Americans there has tripled to almost 10,000. There are many reasons why Americans are drawn to Portugal. Portugal offers foreigners very attractive tax deals, and a Portuguese government minister I spoke to credited the increase to the fact that Madonna lived in the country for a few years and talked it up. But why Americans end up staying in the country differs from case to case. For the Johnsons, They say the racial atmosphere in their new home is dramatically more relaxed.

Things are much more peaceful for us here, and we're not regarded with the same level of suspicion or fear that we can experience quite frequently back in the US.

Sylvia talks about having to unlearn some of the habitual reactions which African Americans develop around racism. One day, a police officer approached them while they were parked in their car outside a bank. And based on their American experiences, they were immediately on edge.

So we rolled down the window and we say, "Oh, do you speak English?" "Yes," he said. "Yeah, I was just looking at your car here. That tire there is really low. Matter of fact, this one here too. You might need to put some air in the tires, and there's a gas station right down the street." And he proceeds to tell us how we can get to it. And we both looked at each other afterwards and was like, "Wow, that was so bizarre." We were expecting, like, this police officer to come accost us for something, you know, some perceived fault. And rather, he was trying to look out for us.

Escaping racism obviously isn't the only reason Americans move to Europe, particularly those who aren't Black. Others move to Europe because health insurance is cheaper or because workers in Europe get longer holidays. In most countries, you get at least 4 weeks. And many, Black and white, talk about America as a country that doesn't seem to be able to solve any of its problems anymore. There aren't a lot of Americans moving to Europe. And of course, many more people still want to come to America than to leave it. But America is the ultimate immigrant country. Americans aren't used to thinking of themselves as wanting to leave and go somewhere else. The fact that more of them are, even a few tens of thousands a year, Tells you something.

I used marker for drawing and I painted it with paint.

Good job!

I wrote my name with paint and the marker with paint.

Ofton had a dream. It was that he was flying an F-16 fighter jet, a Fighter Falcon.

Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor.

He could go at more than 2,000 kilometers an hour, Mach 2. He had a combat range of more than 500 kilometers. The plane was wonderfully agile, could get out of any difficult situation. Sadly though, when he woke up, he was still the pilot of a MiG-29. This was a Russian-built plane built in the 1980s, and although it had been upgraded quite a lot since, it was still just not in the same class as the F-16. The worst part of a MiG were the rockets, the R-27s. Which were heat-seeking, and unless the pilot held them in a permanent lock on their target, they would tend to seek any source of heat on the ground, which might be a school or might be a hospital. So he dreamed of a proper contingent of F-16s with which he could fly around the Ukrainian sky. And he deluged everyone with messages about this, especially the United States, which manufactured the F-16s. They didn't want to give F-16s to Ukraine because of the fear of escalating war with Russia. But Andrey Pershnikov was not going to give up there. The other thing that gave him a mystique was his call sign, Juice. He'd acquired this in 2018 when he'd been on joint exercises with the California Air National Guard. He didn't like alcohol and was always ordering juice at parties or when he was in bars, and so the name Deuce stuck. And he was the first member of the Ukrainian Air Force actually to have an official call sign. Deuce was his. He was the natural image of Ukraine's of flying heroes. This suited him very well. His favorite film, or one of them, was Top Gun: Maverick. And he had been wanting to be a pilot since he was very small, since he was a child making model aeroplanes. When he was almost as interested in the instructions and the history of the model that would come out of the box and told you something about the story of the aeroplane, when it had been used, how it had been involved in battles. So he picked up quite a bit of military history even as a child and continued to read it voraciously. And it was as a teenager that he began to haunt airfields and eventually managed to fly in an ultralight plane. By 2011, He was in the Ukrainian Air Force, and his first real combat mission was in 2014 when he went to the east to Donetsk and Luhansk, where there was already a state of war with Russia. His mission to the east convinced him that he had to be ready at any moment for a Russian invasion. It seemed to him that with a neighbor like that, you had to be ready all the time. And of course, he was someone who was always ready all the time, whether to leap into his cockpit or he was ready to fight the Russians if they dared to invade. When he heard about the invasion, he already had petrol packed for the car. He had his own rifle. He had a pistol. He always flew with his pistol stuffed into his body armour, his survival jacket. He was a man who was determined to be able to fight his way out of any situation. But the best way he knew for Ukraine to fight itself out of its present situation was simply to get these wonderful airplanes, these F-16s. So in June of 2022, he went to Washington in the company of another pilot called Moonfish, and they found there were quite a lot of sympathetic ears in Congress. It took a while for the idea to catch on with the whole of the American government because they were still rather choosy about the use of the F-16s and extremely worried about what Russia would think of their deployment. But in the end, they announced that the Netherlands and Denmark could supply F-16s to Ukraine from their stock. But on the 25th of August, he flew off on a training mission. He was 140 kilometers west of Kyiv when the plane he was in and the training craft crashed together and he was killed. He had always known that from any of his flights, he might not come back.

You have just a few minutes to get in the cockpit.

It's a very difficult job because you're permanently ready to go 24/7 and at any time in any conditions.

What will be the next after that?

Where you will land?

It's a good question every time.

Anne Rowe on Andrey Pulishchikov, who spoke to The Intelligence in 2022 and has died aged 30. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impy and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Jon-Jo Devlin, and our sound engineer is Will Roe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alizee Jean-Baptiste, Kevin Kainas, Barkley Bram, and Sarah Larniuk, with extra production help this week from Maggie Khedifa. We'll all see you back here on Monday. The world is unpredictable, but it's also understandable. Economist Education offers a 6-week online course on international relations designed by The Economist editors and invited experts. It gives you the knowledge and insights to navigate the rapidly changing worlds of geopolitics, business, and technology. And as a listener, enjoy a 15% discount with the code POLITICS. So sign up now at economist.com/internationalrelations.