Potemkin polls: Russia’s elections

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Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Shashank Joshi, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The Gates foundation stands like a colossus over the world of public health, handing out huge sums of money to eradicate disease. But as the foundation deals with the divorce of its co founders, Bill and Melinda Gates, we look at why it has room for improvement. And perhaps you're listening to this show with a cup of tea in your hand. If so, there's more going on in there than you probably realized. We look at new research that shows how the subtle and delicate flavours of black tea rely on microorganisms hard at work on the leaves. First up, though, In Russia, the winner of this weekend's legislative elections was not a surprise. Early tallies show that United Russia, the party that supports Vladimir Putin, has come first. The party's general secretary congratulated supporters on a clean and honest victory. But according to independent observers, the election was anything but clean and honest. And More pressingly, for Mr. Putin, it was not an out and out victory. With over two thirds of the votes counted, his party won 48% of the vote. That's a smaller percentage than the last time elections were held. That result comes despite the fact that Russia has jailed the prominent dissident Alexei Navalny and banned many opposition parties from running. Yet, as ever with Russia, while the final tally is still being counted, the spin on the results has already begun.

There are several headlines, depending on whose view you take. If you look at the Kremlin's headline, it's landslide Election, Great Victory, Triumph for United Russia. If you look outside the Kremlin channels, the news is very, very different.

Arkady Ostrovsky is the Economist's Russia editor, currently reporting from Moscow.

And that is that United Russia has suffered crashing defeats. In reality, that Alexei Navalny has managed to influence the outcome of these elections, even being in jail, and that this sense of protest has managed to break the Kremlin's political monopoly. And this is all despite most extraordinary vote rigging shenanigans.

And what sort of vote fraud is that, Arkady? What kind of shenanigans are you talking about here?

Well, a PhD could be written on the subject, really, because this consisted of several levels. I mean, to start with, this election was not free and fair. Let's get back to the facts. Alexei Navalny, the main opposition force in Russia, is in jail. His organization is banned. His activists have been chased out of the country. None of the real opposition has been allowed to stand. The media has been muzzled. The Internet, which has been the main vehicle for Navalny, has been censored. And that's all before we get to the elections. And in the election, they've allowed three day voting. The excuse they've given was to protect Russian people from COVID what three day voting does. It makes it very hard for the elections to be observed. It's very hard to find enough people to cover all polling stations. And then there is a new level which is the counting procedure. And I think, as Stalin once said, what matters is not how people vote, but how their votes are counted. Basically, as soon as the Kremlin see that candidates nominated by Alexei Navalny start doing well, and most of them are, they start rigging the numbers.

Yet even in the face of these measures, Mr. Putin's party won fewer votes than the last time Russians went to the polls. So how did the opposition put up such a fight?

The reason the opposition put up such a fight, there were two forces that were driving it. One is the Communist Party. The Communist Party is really becoming a proper opposition party. It has the infrastructure, it has disciplined voters, and now it's attracting younger people. The main force, however, is Alexei Navalny, and that has been the intrigue of these elections. Alexei Navalny, from jail says if you want to get elected, you need to be nominated and endorsed by me through this thing which he came up with called smart voting. Smart voting is this system of tactical voting developed through the Internet where his team analyzes their own polling, they analyze the frequency of mentions of this or that deputy, they analyze how active their campaign is, and then they've given their recommendations, their endorsements.

So Arkady, the Kremlin machinery just wasn't able to stop that kind of smart voting on this occasion.

That's right. And to stop the smart voting or to stop the word spreading, they needed to crack down on the Internet. The Kremlin first banned the site of Alexei Navalny and all sites associated with Alexei Navalny, declaring them extremist organizations. Then they specifically blocked the smart voting website. Then they started attacking the tech giants. First, Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia. They've ordered Yandex as well as Google to remove the combination of words smart and voting from its searches. Google initially resisted, but then there was the question of this app, a very sleek app that Navalny's people have developed. And you could download it from Apple Store or from Google Play, you put in your address, it identified the candidate you should vote for. That has been the fight of the past few days. Basically, Russian prosecutors and Russian police have threatened Google's stuff. Not just with fines, they actually threatened physical people with arrests. Google and Apple took the decision to take down those apps. Google and Apple in the past resisted the Kremlin's political pressure. And now that they know they've broken Google and Apple's will, they've broken their back. What they will demand next is yours. And my guess, but it's very clear that the long term outcome of this election and what will be impacted is the freedom of the Internet. The Internet has been relatively free. It's a lot less free now.

One consequence of the election then is going to be a fight over the Internet. What about the bigger political ramifications? Does this result change anything? United Russia still has a majority, doesn't it?

I think it does, Shashanka. I think it does. Both the society at large and the Kremlin itself and the elites will know that this is not an honest result. People have become more politicized. I've seen people who've never voted before or didn't bother still coming to vote because they're fed up, because the living standards are getting worse. Real incomes have been falling for the past six years. People sense there is no future in this system and it's changed In a way that the Communists have become a real political force. It was always an obedient party, but that's changing with the numbers, with the generational shift in the Communists. They now recognize that the reason they're in Parliament is not because the Kremlin lets them, but because the voters are voting for them. People like Olga, who explained why she decided to vote for the Communist Party, Not because she likes the Communist past, possibly because she likes the leadership of the party, but because she doesn't want to live in dictatorship. You know, the interesting thing about this situation is that whether the Kremlin admits to have lost quite a few votes or whether it rigs the result to such an extent that it gains votes, the actual outcome is pretty clear to everyone that they are losing in terms of legitimacy of the ruling party, in terms of legitimacy of Putin. This, this matters quite a lot. This Duma, this parliament, will not be seen as a legitimate organ by the people.

Arkady, thank you very much for talking to us.

Thank.

You.

When Bill and Melinda Gates finalized their divorce Last month after 27 years of marriage, it sparked some questions about another joint venture, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the non profit that they founded in 2000. As the name suggests, they share the top level of the foundation's governance.

Melinda's always help me with my work, but now we're equal and get to brainstorm about what we're doing. And that's a really special opportunity.

Its mission is helping the poor to live healthy, productive lives. Better health leads to better education, which leads to better economic opportunities, which leads to broader prosperity for communities and countries. The foundation is colossal. In 2019, it handed out $4.1 billion. That's more than 11 times as much as the next biggest private American foundation of its kind. As the pandemic pinches development programs the world over, the role for the Gates foundation is only growing. But few ask the question of whether its money could be better spent.

So the Gates foundation was established at the turn of the millennium. The thing to remember is that it's a donor rather than an implementer. So its leadership chooses causes that they think they can have a lot of impact in.

Avanthika Chilcotti is the Economist International correspondent.

So they've chosen things like improving education in America, eradicating infectious diseases, and they hire legions of clever people to identify the organisations that are doing good work in these areas and support them with grants.

And so as it tackles these big, big topics, what kind of project does it actually fund?

You know, the foundation was started by Bill Gates, the co founder of Microsoft, he's a nerdy business tycoon. He got rich flogging software. So it's not much of a surprise that it tends to tackle the problems of the poor and of global health quite often with technology and market based solutions. Melinda Gates is very interested in gender issues. Mr. Gates is interested in infectious disease and linked to that sanitation.

We are in Senegal and like, as you know, not a lot of people have access to sanitation services.

A few weeks ago I actually went to Dakar in Senegal to visit one of the most techy sanitation projects that really caught my eye. It's a machine called the omniprocessor. It's a $2 million machine that the Gates foundation has helped to donate to the Senegalese government. And it converts sewage into water, electricity and ash for construction. There I met with a guy called Mansoor Fall. He works for the local company that manages the Omniprocessor on the ground.

So if you have safe system to collect the faecal sludge, safe system to transport that one, safe system to treat it, it will affect directly the quality of the community life.

So when you see a machine like this in a pretty poor context, you sort of think this foundation does a lot of good, but it could definitely do with proper outside scrutiny.

How do you mean? What is it that needs looking at?

So because they're so generous, because they are this behemoth in the philanthropic sector, it means that they're kind of shielded from criticism. The Foundation's given millions of dollars in much needed funding to media organisations. So the Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC. But it's pretty hard to bite the hand that feeds you. In the same way so many academics rely on Gates funding. Of course, they're also reluctant to criticize the foundation, to critique them, to kind of analyze what they do. I mean, there's a term for this, it's called the Bill Chill. And I'd say now is a pretty good time for everyone to put their heads together and think about the best way for the foundation to put its money to best use.

Avantika, you say it's a good time to assess things now. Do you mean to say there are ways the foundation should be doing better?

Absolutely. So the first thing that's pretty obvious when you start looking at what they do is that they could really change the skew in their grant making to focus on building institutions in the poor world. They say they are interested in doing this sort of capacity building. Our data team at the Economist, along with an academic, analyze the Gates Foundation's grant database. And it's clear that just around 5% of their financing since 1999 roughly goes into organizations that are headquartered in Africa and Asia respectively and linked to that. The root problem is the hiring. Right. So this is a massive organization when it comes to their staff. They have almost 1500 people in America, but less than 60 on the African continent. I interviewed the chief executive, Mark Suzman, and he told me about the plan to work with local intermediaries who scale in Africa.

Our Africa presence has grown significantly and I expect it to continue to grow. We are not going to be opening multiple offices in multiple places. In fact, part of the point is we want to be working through local intermediaries who can scale.

And so is that the major fix? Just getting more people, as you say, on the ground?

There's other things. So the second big thing that's pretty striking is governance. We've run through how big this organization is. It's grown a lot in the last two decades, but still the only two trustees right now are Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates. So they're these two people who have the power to set strategy and to sign off on all the biggest handouts. Change is underway after the couple announced they were going to get divorced earlier this year. The foundation has said it's going to add new trustees. They say they want to sort of.

Bring new perspectives, really looking for trustees that will help us stay as focused as possible on the mission, but bring perspectives that make us stronger. I know that may sound a little bright, but you know, it's actually the truth.

It all comes down to who they end up choosing. If you have truly independent trustees, diverse trustees that could really make sure the founder's views are challenged, a load of cronies probably won't make much difference.

And what about the divorce? How does that figure into the foundation's future?

So the third potential change we have here is basically a split. The foundation laid out a path. If Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates decide they can't work together in two years time, the plan would be for her to resign as a trustee and get a payout from him to go do her own philanthropic work. The chief executive, Mr. Suzman, he insists that was just announced as a precaution.

Both Bill and Melinda have firmly committed to me their long term intent to sit the co chairs of the foundation.

It would be a pretty big deal if they split everyone you speak to from staff, former staff grantees, ex grantees, critics, they all say that these two do have very complementary characters. If Mr. Gates is very interested in innovation and technology, she's very good at sort of stepping out, wondering about the local community, the system they're working in. You get the sense that if she stepped down, Ms. Frenchgates would probably dedicate a lot of her time and money to gender issues. She's written a book on the topic. She already has Pivotal Ventures, this $5 billion investment fund focused on women's rights. So we can't tell exactly what they're going to do, but my guess would be the Bill Gates foundation would be a very different place to the Bill Ann Melinda Gates Foundation.

Avanthika, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having.

Me.

Every day the world consumes more than 2 billion cups of tea. Yet despite being around for thousands of years, producers are still learning how tea gets its taste. The long held assumption is that black teaspoon like Earl Grey, Assam and Darjeeling find their flavor while the leaves dry and oxidize. But scientists at Anhui Agricultural University in China have tested another theory that black tea is in fact a fermented drink.

Lots of drinks are fermented, whether it be wine, cider or beer. Even a lot of teas like kombucha are fermented to get their flavor.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

It's this critical process where bacteria and yeast break things down and create chemicals that give drinks their flavor. And these researchers wondered whether or not black tea went through a fermentation process as well.

So how do you go about testing that?

Traditionally, black tea is picked, dried, rolled, and then left to oxidize. But the researchers behind this work speculated that while the leaves were sitting there oxidizing, there were bacteria on them and that these bacteria were living inside the moist environment of the leaf itself and potentially breaking things down. So they guessed, well, wait a minute, if we were to clean the leaves before we put them through the oxidation process, might that change the final product in some way? And so they took a whole bunch of black tea leaves and they sterilized them, killing off all the microorganisms on them before putting them through the drying, rolling and oxidizing process. And then they had a bunch of leaves they left alone and put through the normal process. And then they brewed a whole bunch of tea from the two sets of leaves.

And then it was presumably just an old fashioned taste test.

At the beginning it was, hey, let's make these cups of tea and see how they taste. And sure enough, the black tea that was left alone and not sterilized in any way tasted pretty good. The tea that was sterilized was missing something, but exactly what it was missing was was unclear. So for that, the researchers turned to chemistry, and they found that compounds which are known as catechins and theanine were present in the unsterilized leaves, but lacking in the tea made from the sterilized leaves. These compounds are important for giving tea its flavor, but they also have an important role to play in granting health benefits. When you drink tea, a lot of the antioxidants that you get from tea come from the catechins. So the researchers pointed out. Right. So clearly the bugs that we killed off by sterilizing leaves are very important to creating the flavor.

Mystery solved then. Black tea is flavoured in part through fermentation. So what exactly do we do with that information, Matt?

This opens the door, intriguingly to messing with black tea. If you can identify which microbes are creating which flavors, then you could start to doctor your tea by adding certain microbes. In the same way that you brew beer and make wine, you could start to spike it with certain colonies of bacteria to generate teas of different flavors. And that should be huge news for tea synops all over the world.

Matt, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.