Election results in India and South Africa show voters have faith

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Birmingham, Alabama. Today we’re gonna talk about a couple of major elections that have happened recently. I mean, we’ve already covered Mexico, but I want to do South African India now. The conventional wisdom in most places is actually correct on this one. In India, the government of the BJP, which is Prime Minister Modi, suffered a significant setback polling as recently as a week ago, or a week before the elections indicated that they were on track to get a two thirds majority, which would have allowed the Modi government to amend the Constitution without restriction. And instead, they came in at under 50%. And so they actually have to form a coalition government. So they’re still in charge, Modi still the Prime Minister, but it has been a significant hit to his prestige. And lots of people are talking about how this is a savior, Indian seizing control of their own democracy and preventing an autocracy from happening because Modi has become more and more authoritarian as he’s been Prime Minister. All of that is correct. I would argue that Modi’s reputation for being an economic Whiz has proven wrong. And he has mismanaged a lot of the government finances and a lot of economic policies turning towards populism and that was rejected to a certain degree. But rather than poopoo Modi or the BJP in general, I think what’s something that is far more important is what’s happening under the hood. This is a country that has lots of issues and infrastructure and education and quality. But they just ran an election where a billion people voted, and the government didn’t win in the way it had hoped. And it’s okay. The trust in the political system is high. The Indians may have their faults, but wow, do they know how to count votes, they ran a clean election, the government has accepted it, Modi has accepted it. That’s something that we could probably learn a little bit from. The other country, of course, is South Africa. There, you’ve got the ANC, which fought against the apartheid system back in the 70s, and 80s. That has basically run the government ever since usually with a supermajority, and they too, have now gotten the smallest share of their vote in a very long time, if not ever again, below 50%, they also will have to form a coalition. Here, the problem is a little bit more intractable, because there aren’t a lot of people to draw from. You’ve got a group called the Democratic Alliance that is basically like a pro business libertarian group that is primarily ethnically white, you’ve got the economic freedom fighters who would find Latin American socialist to be to conservatives. And then you have a new group that has formed by the former president of the country, jacob zuma, basically read his cult of personality and zoom was arguably one of the most corrupt people in human history, who’s trying to make a comeback. So whoever the ANC has to form a coalition with it’s going to be awkward. But again, here, the ANC, which is known for corruption has just run an election in which they lost, and no one has an issue with it because it was free and fair. One of the things we forget about the United States is we actually do run the most free most fair elections in the world. Don’t believe me believe a guy by the name of Chris Coons, who was Donald Trump’s appointed election integrity adviser who said the day of the election four years ago, that it was the cleanest election in American history. Now, Koons was, of course, fired within an hour for making that statement. But he hasn’t recounted and of all of the challenges we have seen to the American electoral system in the last three years. Of all the court cases, not one shred of evidence has yet to be produced indicating that anything had gone wrong. The day of running elections isn’t hard, believing in them, that’s a little bit more difficult.