Still the one that I want: Greece’s prime minister wins again

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Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes. If network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Ora Ogunbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A whopping $800 billion in American public funding is set to go to clean energy projects over the next decade, while lawmakers figure out which payouts go where. The green lobbyists are getting to work. And nets have been used in wars for centuries to protect against torpedoes and battleships. But how can they be used as a defense against today's more advanced weapons? But first, Celebrations could be heard all over the streets of Greece. The country's ruling conservatives secured a resounding victory in this weekend's election. The margin of victory for the centre right New Democracy Party was unexpected and impressive. It wasn't quite enough to secure an outright majority in Parliament. But Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the party leader, is still expected to take charge after a second election next month. The result is decisive, he said. The voters have asked us to move faster on the road to bold reforms. A lot has already changed in Greece in recent years. It's been well over a decade since the country plunged into a financial crisis. Greece is a country in economic crisis.

Tonight, the government was supposed to make.

A repayment to the International Monetary Fund, but there's been tough language on both Sides back then out of control. Levels of debt threatened to destabilise the entire Eurozone. But now the likely re election of Mr. Mitsotakis party shows that some normality and stability have returned.

Greece has just held a really quite extraordinary election. The polls had suggested it might be quite tight. Now that isn't what's happened.

Chris Lockwood is the Economist's Europe editor.

The incumbent Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis scored a really very convincing victory. He's just a few seats short of an overall majority, so he's almost certainly going to go for a second election. He said he doesn't want to form a coalition government and because of the way the electoral system is changing, he'll get a very big majority in that one unless something very radically changes over the next few weeks.

So tell us a bit more about these results. How did everyone fare?

Well, the incumbent Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mits Takh is the leader of New Democracy, has been running the country pretty successfully in my view, for the last four years and he did really remarkably well. He got nearly 41% of the vote, which when you think about it, is an extraordinary number. Well up on what he got previously and during that time. What we've seen of course, is the COVID 19 pandemic, which was devastating to Greece because it's so dependent on tourism, followed by the invasion of Ukraine, triggering very high energy prices. And again, Greece is very dependent on imported energy. So it had a very serious case of inflation. And nonetheless the he's managed to keep the ship of state fairly steady. He's got inflation down, he's got growth up. Last year growth in Greece was about twice what it was in the Eurozone on average. And it's looking to have another good year. This year his opponents, the radical left party Syriza, did terribly badly. They only got 20% of the vote, much less than everyone was expecting, about 10% less than everyone was expecting. And it's very questionable whether the party can actually survive a humiliation as bad as this.

Okay, take us back a bit. You mentioned that Mr. Mitsotakis steered Greece through some difficult times. What has his leadership looked like?

Well, he's a technocrat, you know, he's worked in finance. He's a very polished, very smart guy. The downside of him is that he can come across as, you know, a little bit too privileged, a little bit too slick. His father was Prime Minister before him. His older sister was the mayor of Athens. Greece is a very cliquey sort of place. I'M sorry to say, I think that's something that does need to change. But despite all of that, he is good. He's run a pretty competent, technocratic, sensible government. They've done lots of reform to things like digital government. The economy was steered through Covid quite well. They were very early in adopting vaccine passports. I mean other countries of course did that, but Greece was one of the first. And all in all, I think he's seen to have handled these last four years pretty competently.

And just to take things back a bit further, how far has Greece come since that debt crisis about a decade ago?

Well, Greece had a really very bumpy time after the great financial Crisis globally of 2008. 9. We headed into a period where Greece was particularly badly affected from about 2011 onwards. And that's because it swiftly became clear that the country had been living wildly beyond its means. Greece required three massive bailouts in the end. That in turn forced Greece to adopt some pretty harsh austerity programs. And on the back of that, Syriza, which name literally means the Radical Socialist Party, came into power promising that it wouldn't take any more bailouts from Europe and that it would just default if necessary. And of course it said we need debt forgiveness, not more bailouts and we're just not going to pay. So it's a very chaotic and difficult time. But it's really been in the last four years under Mr. Mr. Takis that a semblance of normality has been restored. So much so now that Greek only borrows for about one and a half percentage points above what Germany borrows, which is astonishing. At one point it was 10, 11% more. That was how bad things got. So I think he's done a pretty good job and certainly deserves four more years. And that's what the Greek electorate have plainly concluded too.

But Chris, some people would have considered Greece, the crisis ridden country within the Eurozone, a bit of a black sheep perhaps. Do you think they've redeemed their reputation in the Eurozone?

Well, I really think they have and it might have been very different if Mr. Mitsotakis hadn't won a solid victory. Because then you would have had the specter of unstable government, possibly even of Syriza coming back. That would have been extremely alarming to investors. They simply wouldn't have invested in Greece at all. And without doubt the cost of Greek government borrowing would have gone up very sharply. But Greece is now seen by the international community as a normal country, a responsible, more or less decently run country that you can invest in. In fact, there's been a whole stream of quite lucrative foreign investments made into Greece and I think that's the achievement of Mr. Mitsotakis and that's why I think he has deserved these four years that he's about to get. It's not to say there are plenty of problems still, but it's just to explain why people are feeling quite a bit more bullish about the future in Greece.

You said plenty of problems. Why might someone have voted against Mr. Mitsotakis?

This is a very good question. I've given the sort of rosy scenario, if you like, but there are quite a number of strikes against him too. Not, I think, you know, on balance, enough by any means to overturn the good things that he's done. But let me just sort of mention a couple of them. One thing that's harmed him very badly is a terrible scandal involving government phone tapping. Now, it's all very shady and no one exactly knows what went on, but a whole list of people, including some senior politicians, journalists, business people, government people even, have apparently had spyware either planted on their phone or attempts made to plant the spyware on their phone. And it's of a type that normally really any states could have access to. This is Mitsutagas fault. He was the Prime Minister at the time and more importantly, his own son in law, who he appointed as the chief of Staff in the Prime Ministerial office, had oversight of some of this intelligence work. And in fact that son in law resigned at the same time as the head of the intelligence agency. It's a very regrettable incident. Mitsuztakis has apologised for it, but it undoubtedly has done him some damage and he needs to make really, really sure that nothing like that happens again. That's one thing. And then there's a failure to really get to the bottom of inefficiencies in the Greek state. Not a very impressive civil service. They don't have a proper competitive exam for recruitment. Sort of riddled with placemen and nepotism and all kinds of bad things. And he hasn't really got to grips with any of that. You know, he would actually be the first to admit that there's lots of things he's failed to do because he's had such a tough time fighting the really big things like Covid and inflation. But in his second term, he really must address some of those things if he wants to go down as a real success.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

America is betting Big on clean energy right now, between the introduction of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction act, more than $800 billion in clean energy handouts are being promised over the.

Next decade to take the most aggressive.

Action ever, ever, ever, ever in confronting the climate crisis.

But there are still a lot of questions about how exactly that money will be doled out. And this has all of the so called swamp creatures buzzing.

The swamp is what Washington lobbyists and insiders call the game of lobbying.

Vijay Vaitiswaran is the global energy and climate innovation editor for the Economist.

The swamp is ever present. It has been for a couple of centuries, but it's very adaptive, depending on the administration, depending on the bill, and depending on the industry that sees dollar signs. Now it's getting new creatures to adapt to a funnel of cash from the legislation related to energy, climate and infrastructure.

So how are the lobbyists making hay with all of this new funding?

So the energy industry as a whole spent nearly $300 million last year on lobbying. It's the most in a decade or more. Big oil, electric utilities and renewables, these are the different components they'd historically been. Not as free spending as Big Pharma is the biggest of the swamp creatures, but they've ramped it up in line with the trajectory of Big Pharma. We're now seeing just renewables, the smallest piece of that lobbying puzzle, raise their average annual spending from around $24 million, which was an average between 2013 and 2020, to about $47 million last year. What interesting dimension of the lobbying and a sign of how swamp creatures morph. Historically, oil and gas lobbyists used to merely obstruct any kind of action on climate change. But with so much money, subsidies, tax credits for decarbonization, which includes areas where they could profit, for example, in carbon capture and sequestration technologies. So suddenly, with the dollar signs dangling in front of them, you're now finding interesting behavior by fossil fuel lobbyists that are supportive of a lot of this, and they're trying to position themselves for the decarbonization of American energy in the same scrum on the same side as the renewables advocates, rather than opposed. And we see this equally with some of the behavior by the nuclear industry, which also stands to benefit.

So how does lobbying work? How do you actually go about it?

So a lot depends on the rules that the Treasury Department and some of the geeky tax code writers at the Internal Revenue Service, how exactly they make decisions can affect billions and billions of dollars. And so you can still, lobby your congressmen, your senators, who may write a letter to the administration or to the treasury, for example, on your behalf if they perceive some outrage or insult to an industry that's based in their state. Equally, people can lobby the White House directly, especially. The point man for President Biden is John Podesta, who's an ultimate Washington insider. He's heading up the coordination of all climate and energy topics in the White House and supervising what the agencies do. So the political heat can be applied to somebody like that and his team. And it is, by the way, on a daily basis.

And.

And those issues that seem the most politically salient, they do stick their nose into the bureaucratic processes and let the boffins over at the Department of Energy or the Treasury Department who are most directly involved, know what they think about that, too.

Okay, so I understand how you might lobby a politician, but do you think these kind of lobbying efforts are going to work on agencies as well?

So that's where the swamp ecosystem is so interesting. It's morphed in such a way that as to influence these agencies, and it's not that easy. For example, the Internal Revenue Service or IRS is not meant to be lobbied at all. One source told me that it is immune to direct lobbying. But there are subtle ways to sneak through the cracks here. For example, I spoke with a law firm renowned for its tax expertise, and the firm had secured a coveted meeting with IRS officials. And the way they did it was they submitted really good expert comments, and they wrote clever technical papers on a relevant topic where the IRS experts, who are not knowledgeable about energy, by the way, they're tax experts, and they're entrusted by Congress to write the details on, for example, how exactly clean hydrogen energy has to be to get a very lavish subsidy. So they seek advice from other departments and they read expert papers. And so they took this meeting with a lobbying firm, in effect, a tax lawyer that was representing a client that had an interest. And so they say you have to have credibility for them to see you and you have to bring them solutions. So I think that's how some of the lobbying is being done. The Department of Energy, which is actually the vehicle through which a lot of the money is going from the new law, is more welcoming. And their mandate is to work closely with industry so that you can actually get meetings with them, explain to them what you're doing, and make your case for why your kind of nuclear technology or your flavor of geothermal should be included in various forms of subsidies.

And what are the industry Insiders saying about all this activity on the Hill?

Well, of course, very few of them want to speak on the record. This is a game with a lot of intellectual property, trade secrets and trade craft, as it were. But one thing I ferreted out, for example, one of America's biggest utilities has enough projects across America that are now bidding for these subsidies that it would give her company a staggering $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies if it won its projects that it's bidding for. And so there's a huge amount of money at play here. One renewable energy firm who's going to benefit both from some of the special subsidies for hydrogen energy or some of the newer types of energy, but also just from installing green energies like solar that they've already been doing. He said, there's so much money coming, we stop counting. We just have a big smile on our face all the time.

So clearly spending is up. And that suggests that companies feel that lobbyists have something to offer. But how much influence do you think that they really wield in Washington?

So this is a subject of intense debate, right? It's easy to loathe the swamp, right? This seems like the worst forms of corruption and influence peddling, something that, for example, the ordinary citizen can't afford a fancy law firm or lobbyist. And obviously smaller businesses have difficulty affording the kinds of consultants. However, these companies do perform a service and they're perfectly legal as long as you register your interest and so on. And these corporate clients clearly think they're doing some good. Some of the that are involved here, for example, help companies bid for grants. And oftentimes these grants are written in very obtuse bureaucratic language that is very hard for companies, especially smaller companies, to understand. 30, 40 page applications with all forms of jargon and requirements. And if you're up for, say, $10 million in potential subsidies, is it worth spending $100,000 to get a consultant who can help you write those grants? Was a question one of these lobbyists asked minute perhaps it is reasonable. And so they do perform a service. Just to judge by the fees they charge, their clients think it's worthwhile. One lobbyist put it to me this way, who is a longtime veteran. He said, look, it's easy to despise the swamp, but its creatures are really part of a vital ecosystem.

Vijay, thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's been my pleasure.

We're always trying to improve our podcasts and we'd like your help. Whether you're a loyal fan or a new listener, we Want to hear from you. Please do us a favor and tell us what you think by filling out our listener survey. It'll only take you a few minutes. Just head to economist.com intelligencesurvey foreign. Drones have been one of the most effective weapons in the war in Ukraine. They are cheap, nimble and can be produced pretty rapidly. Defenders can try to jam the signals of these incoming enemy craft. They can shoot them down or knock them from the skies with other drones. But sometimes the best defence is the simplest.

The first time we saw defensive nets used was actually a kind of happy accident.

David Hambling writes about technology for the Economist.

In December 2022, a Ukrainian T72 tank was sheltering under some camouflage netting and the Russians attacked it with a couple of Lancet loitering munitions. These are kamikaze drones. They're like very slow cruise missiles that wander around looking for targets. And the camouflage netting failed in the sense that the Lancet operator spotted the tanks. However, when they dived into attack, they actually got caught by the camouflage net and didn't go off, so the crew were saved. And since then, we've seen nets of many sorts used extensively by both sides as protection against this sort of loitering munition. But in fact, the history of nets goes back centuries.

And take us back there. When did we first see nets used in battle?

Well, this is a technology that gets rediscovered time and time again. So as far as we know, it goes back into ancient times and it was used in naval warfare to stop opponents from boarding ships. And some of the best archaeological evidence we have is from the English warship the Mary rose from the 1500s. And the boarding nets from that were recovered intact. And that actually turned out to be a serious problem, because when the ship sank, these boarding nets, which covered the entire deck, prevented the crew on board from getting off. And that's why so many of them drowned. After that, though, the nets were reinvented in the 1800s as a defence against torpedoes, because torpedoes were a big threat to even big battleships. So they started carrying metal nets which were hung on booms around the ship to prevent torpedoes from getting close. And then they were invented again in the First World War as a protection against aircraft, because the biplanes of the time were very frail. So this idea was that you could string in metal wire nets between hydrogen balloons as a protection against them, which would force the aircraft to fly too high to attack effectively. And then in Second World War, barrage balloons came back. This time it was the cable from the balloon that was the main hazard. To aircraft. So they have proved quite effective in different ways against different weapons over the course of history.

But technology has moved on quite a bit since the Second World War. How do the nets work today?

Nets are doing much what they've always done, which is a way of softly catching a projectile moving towards something. The drones. Today, many of the attack drones are very small. Some of them only weigh a few hundred grams and they're moving at speeds of tens of kilometers an hour. So it's certainly quite possible for that to be caught in a net. Even the biggest ones are only about 15 kilos. The idea is that the net forms a barrier so that the drone gets caught in that, and because it's got an impact fuse, it probably won't go off. So ideally it just catches the drone softly some distance from you. The worst case is that it makes it explode, but it's exploding at a distance rather than actually hitting you, and that's a lot less dangerous.

And David, how widespread is the use of nets in Ukraine?

It's very difficult to get concrete information on how widespread they are. Mainly we have to go by social media reports and images from the war zone. We've seen a lot of advice shared on social media by both Ukrainian and Russian forces about the best ways to rig up nets to defend their positions. And we have seen quite a lot of pictures of all sorts of things, from chicken wire fences to these quite heavy duty industrial fencing that's clearly been erected around positions for defensive purposes.

And tell us, are there any drawbacks to using these nets?

They're fine as far as they go, but obviously it's much easier to protect a static defensive position than than it is to protect a moving vehicle. And they can only scale up to a certain size. If you're trying to protect a large position or a building or a village or a town, it's not really very practical. The other thing is, it's likely over time that we're going to see countermeasures to defeat them. In the past, when anti torpedo nets were introduced, new torpedoes started having wire cutters fitted to them with drones. It's likely they're still going to be fairly small, but the makers may fit them with warheads that don't actually need to impact the target to have an effect. But until that happens, nets are still a simple, easy way of defending yourself against something that's proliferating extremely fast. So they're not foolproof, but they're better than nothing.

David, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and if you're not a subscriber to the Economist, you'll really miss out. Dive in. Get a FREE 30 day digital subscription by heading to economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the Show Notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.