Senegal and Slovakia Elections, Pakistan and Afghan Taliban Clash, Nuclear Energy Gains Favor, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Slovakia and Senegal each hold presidential votes, tensions rise between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and more countries are considering energy alternatives at the first Nuclear Energy Summit. It's March 21st, 2024 in time for The World Next Week.

I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

Bob, the year of elections rolls on, and next week, citizens in Senegal and Slovakia get to choose their presidents. So is this the "S" week for elections?

Back in October, Slovaks voted in pro-Russia Prime Minister Robert Fico, who promptly cut off all aid to Ukraine, and progressive incumbent Zuzana Čaputová, I think I got that right, managed to counterbalance Fico in some important areas, but she's decided not to run again. Is Fico actually going to be the big winner in this election?

MCMAHON:
You have seized on the central issue, I think, Carla. First of all, the polling that we're seeing at this point is showing very close numbers for Peter Pellegrini, who is expected to be aligned with Fico. He is the current speaker of the parliament, and he's a former prime minister, he was a short-time prime minister, and the better-known figure of all the presidential candidates. But running fairly close with him is Ivan Korčok, who's a former foreign minister, and he's a career diplomat, and seen as more sort of aligned with a broader diplomacy and a Western-oriented diplomacy.

And so they are very, very close in polling, between 35 and 40 percent of the vote in most recent polls. Likely to go to a runoff, and then the conventional wisdom is that Pellegrini probably has more juice to carry through and win in a runoff, and then it's a question of whether it will be a sort of Polish model, where you start seeing this consolidation of power structures in Slovakia, a move to take over control of media, to sideline, or take control, or defang, as the case may be, the courts, and then kind of go from there. So much has been said about comparing Slovakia to Hungary and the illiberal government of Viktor Orbán, and while there are some parallels there, there are some differences.

It's also interesting that, as we've talked many times about the rise of the populist right in Europe, Fico is the populist left, although from his perspective...he's still doing things that have been more aligned with the right, such as opening up discussion about the Western support for Ukraine, and as you said, he is trying to move away from joining this Western movement to arm and continually support Ukraine and using things like he is the peace candidate. This is Fico, but this is also his aligned political parties as well, that they stand for peace. There's a bit of an Ostpolitik-type approach that they're trying to project, I think, to use an old Cold War term, in that they don't want to antagonize fully Russia but try to discuss and be a broker, perhaps, Russia as Ukraine War enters its third year. But Slovakia is a part of the EU, it's a part of NATO, so it's all to say this is going to be a very important election to watch and whether or not we see a Slovak move into a illiberal direction or whether there's going to be some sort of a hedge on that.

ROBBINS:
So when Fico was running, we saw a considerable amount of disinformation racing around in their media space and attributed to the Russians. Are we seeing this again?

MCMAHON:
I'm not seeing that. I think it's safe to say that it is occurring. I think there's also been the guard is up on the opposition forces in Slovakia to counter any such misinformation. But I do also think that, you mentioned Zuzana Čaputová not running, I think her decision not to run is in part because of the really difficult landscape it is to be a candidate in a country like Slovakia right now. And so she was certainly dealing with a lot of things like hate speech and so forth, and she had been standing up to the Fico government on areas like she had tried to delay legislation for constitutional review in the constitutional court, for example, and so just decided not to seek reelection. She probably would've won it, but she also could have been facing another sort of round of whether it's disinformation, whether it's slander or whatever.

I think that's out there in Slovak politics right now, and it's an ugly side of that, so I think you might see something crop up if we do go to the expected runoff round. You could see an intensification of what we saw in the Fico election period. So it's another sort of tense time for a European election. We just recently talked about Portugal. I think there are efforts underway to build a right of center coalition government there that could include far-right populist elements. And the Netherlands is another place we talked about. Geert Wilders has not been able to form a coalition. So we are looking at another country, another polarized country that's entering into an election period that is happening at a time when Europe is trying to consolidate, reform behind support for Ukraine and so forth, and that's becoming more and more difficult, it looks like.

ROBBINS:
So moving to another problematic election, in West Africa, in Senegal, this country, which used to be really quite a stable place and it's been struggling ever since, President Macky Sall postponed elections back in February, which sparked pretty violent protests. So he is, my understanding, this was a guy who limited his own term length and seemed to be really committed to democracy, and then he's like those people who embrace term limits and then suddenly decided they didn't like them, so he postponed things, and there were a lot of protests, and then the court said, "No way. You got to go ahead with it." So these elections are finally going ahead this Sunday under court order. Sall isn't running, but it's not clear that the vote is going to calm things down. So what are you watching for there?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, as you indicate, it's a big deal, first and foremost, because Senegal has been this pole of stability. It's never had a military coup in its post-colonial period. That's significant, especially in a time period in which there have been multiple military coups in West Africa. Senegal and Macky Sall himself have tried to be a leader in the region as well and a leader in terms of professing rule of law, governance, democratic virtues, and so forth, and then here you have Macky Sall saying, "You know what? We're not going to have these elections." Just a few weeks ahead of the scheduled elections, he announced it would be delayed till the end of the year, and it was a highly unusual period of time. He has maintained that he was trying to resolve some sort of dispute over the eligibility of presidential candidates and that members of parliament had urged him to do this, but there are others in the political sphere who dismissed this and called it sort of a standard power grab by a sitting leader, which we have seen all too often in Africa.

But again, this is a country that is governed differently. There is rule of law that's holding sway here. Sall is now saying he's going to be leaving office by April 2nd, as he's supposed to. In the case of a runoff, the head of the national assembly, Amadou Diop, would be the interim leader. And so we are entering into a competitive election period in a country that has, it must be noted, a very large youth cohort, something like 60 percent of Senegalese are under the age of 25, and so you are seeing candidates courting that vote. Youth were in the streets protesting when Sall announced the delay, and so I think you're going to see a lot of activism. I'm not sure what it's going to translate to in terms of where support is going to go, whether it's going to be the ruling government coalition candidate, Amadou Ba, or whether it's going to be the main challenger, Bassirou Faye, but Senegal is in for another rough period potentially given that we've had violence, we've had fatal violence in and around the protests over the delay attempt by Macky Sall.

ROBBINS:
Well, I'm a real believer in shortened campaigns, but this is really, not just a short campaign, this is a really short transition. He says he's going to get out when, April 1st? Is that what he said?

MCMAHON:
April 2nd.

ROBBINS:
April 2nd?

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

ROBBINS:
And we are end of March here. There's a really short campaign, really short election counting period, and he's finally getting out. Maybe if they can do it and move on, that would be great, but it's certainly something to watch because given the level of disruption there, it's a real fast turnaround.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and I think we're in for a ride in Senegal and, again, a part of the world that can ill afford another sort of unstable electoral period. It could be in for one. But we'll see. This is a test. Senegal, again, has had strong institutions. It has, by many accounts, a well-run economy, well-run government. There are still issues, though, out there, such as corruption in particular that are seen to be galvanizing for an opposition. So we'll see if we do get a runoff period, if we do get sort of a vacuum, a leadership vacuum when a strong leader like Sall steps down on April 2nd and there's not yet an elected candidate.

That's a real test for West Africa and for the region as a whole, and we should just say that in the context of other military coups, we just had the very poor country of Niger announce it was cutting off its military ties with the United States. That was a big development in the last week or so. You have a courting of Russia's Wagner Group in the region, you have all sorts of alliances taking shape that are not looking good for democracy. Senegal, it would be good to have a Senegalese peaceful transfer of power as it has in the past.

Well, Carla, let's take our attention to South Asia, where Pakistan, for one, will be marking its Republic Day on Saturday, March 23rd, but Republic Day is coming at a period of some increasing tensions, security tensions in particular. It's got domestic tensions, but it also has security tensions with a force that until fairly recently seemed to be aligned with, which is the Taliban leadership of Afghanistan. Now, just this past Monday, Pakistan fired missiles into Afghan territory. So Carla, given this latest exchange of fire, what is going on between Pakistan and the Afghan's Taliban leadership?

ROBBINS:
So let's stipulate that I don't think this is going to escalate into a major hot war, but you can never tell. Pakistan still values good relations with the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at a minimum because it doesn't want India getting in there and it doesn't want to be encircled, and the Taliban have almost no friends, so they would like to keep some form of relationship with Pakistan, so I think both sides have a pretty strong incentive to keep this on a low boil. At the same time, the Pakistanis are accusing the Afghans of providing safe haven to militants who've been staging attacks on their territory, and for those of us who've watched the Pakistanis play all sides for two decades supporting and enabling militants from Afghanistan on their own territory while taking money from the U.S., we must say that there's no small amount of irony in here.

So early Monday, the Pakistanis launched these airstrikes on what we presume were bases for the TTP, which are Taliban from Pakistan, in two provinces in Eastern Afghanistan, reportedly killing eight people, including three children, and the Afghan Taliban responded by firing on Pakistani positions along the border, and these strikes from Pakistan came after an armed group with suicide vests and a truck packed with explosives attacked a military post in northwestern Pakistan, killing seven security force members.

On Monday evening, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement accusing the Afghan Taliban of enabling the Pakistani Taliban. These are separate groups. And it's said that over the past two years, the Pakistani government has repeatedly urged Afghan authorities to take concrete and effective action to ensure that Afghan soil is not used as a staging ground for terrorism. And it accused "certain elements" among those in power in Afghanistan of actively patronizing the TTP and using them as a proxy against Pakistan. That doesn't sound good.

And Bob, we discussed in the run-up to Pakistan's election how the country has seen a rise in terrorist attacks since the Taliban returned to power, and that number of attacks was up 20 percent last year. So these strikes seem to be a sign of the new Sharif government is going to take a much harder line than its predecessors, so we'll see whether or not they can keep this to a low boil.

And meanwhile, as ever, the Afghan people are the ones who are getting squeezed. Last fall, the previous government in Pakistan announced that all unregistered foreigners, of which Afghans are by far the largest group, were deemed to be security risks and they had to get out of the country before the end of the year. And by December, more than four hundred thousand Afghans of an estimated 1.6 million had gone back to Afghanistan, and since then, it's estimated another hundred thousand have been forced out, and the prediction is that as soon as Ramadan is over with, they're going to go back to expelling more and more Afghans back into Afghan territory, and we know that the situation in Afghanistan is really pretty horrible, incredibly repressive, vast hunger, drought. These are the people who suffer.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it strikes me as an extraordinary turn of events, Carla. As you said, there are journalists and Af-Pak watchers of a certain age who have just so accustomed to seeing this Pakistan-Afghan Taliban relationship that had mutual benefits, seemingly had mutual benefits, the strategic depth for Pakistan in Afghanistan and, obviously, the haven and support for the Afghan Taliban when they were fighting the U.S. military and its attempt to build a nation state in Afghanistan, and now to have them fighting like this...And also, these are ethnically-aligned groups. I mean, the Pashtuns, if you draw a map of ethnicity, you can draw a giant block of Pashtuns that crosses the Afghan-Pakistan border pretty extensively, but I guess this gets into the tribal differences among other things, as you pointed out these subgroups, and the Pakistani Taliban being an anti-government force that, for whatever reason, the Afghan Taliban have decided to make common cause with. Is that what's happening here? Is there anything else? Is there any other turf that we should be aware of that's under issue here?

ROBBINS:
Honestly, I don't know. All I know is that Pakistan has been enabling a whole bunch of groups for a really long period of time, and not surprisingly, this would come back and bite them, and the response of the Afghan Taliban is been basically to shrug when the Pakistanis complain about it and say, "Maybe you should be negotiating with these guys." That's not all that much of a surprise either. And the Afghan Taliban themselves, I'm sure there are divisions inside them about what...It's interesting that the Pakistanis referred to groups within the ruling Taliban that there are divisions, so we know there are divisions between Kabul and Kandahar. We know there are divisions in there. I mean, this is not a particularly organized government as well.

So what a surprise that there's a certain measure of chaos in Afghanistan itself, but the Afghan people in Pakistan are the ones who are suffering a great deal. And so whether they can keep this in a low boil or whether this escalates, we'll see, and not least because the lack of legitimacy of the Pakistan government as well. And this new government, we talked about that a few weeks ago, and certainly, they have to prove to their own people that they're in charge, and the military's pulling the strings there as well.

MCMAHON:
And it's going to be also worth watching whether the Afghan Taliban leadership feels like they can generate support to continue to extricate themselves from support dependency on Pakistan and turn towards neighbors, potentially Iran. There's been reports of that, or even Russia or China to some extent. They might be seeking a new balance in the region because they used to rely on Pakistan for the arms, the group known as the Haqqani Network certainly did, but now the arms have got to be coming from somewhere, and it's not clear whether they have opened up some new avenues.

ROBBINS:
And then they also have their own internal terrorism problem, irony upon irony, with ISIS.

MCMAHON:
It is a rough neighborhood.

ROBBINS:
A very rough neighborhood. I understand why we wanted to get out, but we left and the vacuum has become more dangerous.

Bob, let's head over to Belgium. Today-

MCMAHON:
I'd love to.

ROBBINS:
Yes, I know. We all want chocolate, and we want moules, and we want french fries with béarnaise sauce. Yes, I'm hungry.

So Brussels hosts the global Nuclear Energy Summit. I think they're doing that with the IAEA, right? And this is the first and the highest-level meeting exclusively focused on nuclear energy. And for those of us who are IAEA nerds, we know that the IAEA actually has a dual mission. One is it's supposed to control the spread of nuclear weapons technology. At the same time, it champions the joys of peaceful nuclear power. This is the Atoms for Peace bargain. 

And senior officials, particularly ministers of energy from about thirty countries and industry professionals, are meeting to discuss innovations and global opportunities to address climate change through nuclear technology. You know, there's always been enthusiasm in Europe for nuclear power as a carbon-neutral source, although after Fukushima, it looked like it was losing a lot of its luster. Does this summit mean that the excitement is back?

MCMAHON:
It's quite possible, Carla. As I was reading about this event that's playing out today and tomorrow, I was surprised that there had not been one before that was focused solely on nuclear energy. And the statements that are coming out from the IAEA, from officials like Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency and other government leaders, it's basically all adding up to nuclear power should come in from the cold, and it's time that it be wedded to in a responsible way and with all the caveats, but that it's time that it be associated more firmly with reaching climate targets, because nuclear energy can deliver lots of energy certainly, and that's not been its problem. Its problem, as we well know, and Europe well knows, whether it was the Fukushima disaster as a reminder, or certainly those with the memory of the Chernobyl accident, nuclear energy can be very dangerous, and also, there is a expensive sort of long runway to standing up nuclear energy reactors because of all the concern over safeguards in addition to just the sheer cost in standing up a highly-functional nuclear plant.

But as France has shown, France, I believe, to this day gets something like 70 percent of its power from nuclear energy, it went all in on it years ago, it's a famous case study, and I think the time has come, and you're hearing French officials say this. The United States, which gets a decent amount, I think up to 20 percent of its power, still from nuclear energy also is making the case as well, if they can provide the right safeguards, the right financing, just the institutional support of powerful nations and rich nations, they can maybe see this as a reliable part of a sort of all-of-the-above approach to renewable to carbon-free energies if you add them to the solar, the wind power, and others that are being championed to replace carbon.

But still, and we're seeing with the kickoff of this summit today, there's still environmental concern that this is just foolhardy to go back on this route, and so there's going to be pushback. The German government, which has the Green Party in its coalition, is certainly one that's not going to be coming out and trumpeting this at this point. But there seems to be strong wind, pardon the expression, wind in the sails of nuclear energy, and I think we could see this as a moment, we could be pointing to this as a moment where it bounced back and it got a bit of a boost, and it might be one of the things that adds up to reaching the targets for carbon reduction that still seemed to be so elusive, and we just got new reminders this week of the global warming and that the last year was the warmest ever and they were on track for another one. There are hot days being reported from Brazil to sub-Saharan Africa, heat levels we haven't seen before. It's all to say that I think there is a consciousness to try to do more to react and that the current efforts have just been inadequate.

ROBBINS:
It is carbon-neutral, but they don't seem to have solved the storage issue, the waste storage issue, and that seems to be-

MCMAHON:
Yes.

ROBBINS:
All this talk about proliferation resistance and how Fukushima was the result of neglect, not an inevitable error, but waste storage seems to be a really...The stuff stays around for a really long period of time. On the other hand, if you don't want to buy oil and gas from the Saudis or the Russians-

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
I suppose that's a big part of the discussion as well.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and, as the IAEA well knows, that having peaceful nuclear energy still does not resolve you from responsibility to safeguard. Whether it's a country like Iran, which swears it only wants nuclear energy and not its weaponized aspect, or a country like Ukraine, which has now been occupied for two years by Russian forces and it has a nuclear plant that is in very grave danger of a potential accident, as the IAEA has warned, the Zaporizhzhia, nuclear energy is something that needs to be carefully treated. There's still only something like thirty countries that have it, and the safeguards are really important, IAEA is an extremely important organization, and so there's, I think, still a long way to go before things really move forward, but again, it looks like there's some momentum.

ROBBINS:
And the basic rule, of course, here is that the same technology that produces fuel for a nuclear power plant, with just a little more work, can produce fuel for a nuclear weapon, and it'd really be great if they could change the rules that could somehow figure out how you could have nuclear power with it not inevitably being guaranteed if you wanted the technology to produce fuel, but they haven't been able to reform the NPT for that, but that's nerding out for another day.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, we're not done yet about important global developments because we have a Figure of the Week to talk about, and that, of course, is the Audience Figure of the Week. This is where listeners vote Tuesday and Wednesday of each week at cfr_org's Instagram story. The audience this week selected eight, as in 8 billion, as in the "EU's $8 Billion Aid Package to Egypt." So what's going on here?

ROBBINS:
Okay, first of all, I'm totally bummed that they didn't choose Obama's surprise visit to 10, Number 10 Downing Street, so I'm going to take the prerogative and talk about that for just a little bit.

MCMAHON:
Please do.

ROBBINS:
Okay. So I was remembering when we put this on how Obama drove London wild in his first visit as president for a G20 meeting in 2009. I don't know if you remember that, Bob. He was on his way to Number 10 Downing Street to meet with the prime minister. He shook the hand of a London bobby who was standing guard. And people usually ignored these guys, right? And when the bobby then stretched out his hand, I mean he was so surprised, to then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Brown, of course, ignored it. I mean, his guards were like wallpaper. And this of course led everybody to talk about how fabulously, you know, "The Americans, they're so democratic." As for this informal Obama visit, The Guardian reported that during his hour-long tea meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, they talked about AI and other subjects. So I had to just get that in there because it was a wonderful memory.

Okay, onto the Egypt-EU deal. On Sunday, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU president, and five other leaders signed an agreement committing $8 billion in aid in loans, which are going to be doled out over four years to Egypt, and it's intended to help bolster what is an economy that's in desperate shape. But ultimately, what the EU cares about is reducing outmigration, including by strengthening border controls. This is one of several deals that the EU has been making. We obviously know about Turkey, Tunisia, Mauritania, soon with Morocco. And Giorgia Meloni, Italy's PM who's been trying to put a kinder and gentler face on her fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric, described the Egypt deal as a chance, and this is pretty creepy, to give residents of Africa a chance "not to emigrate to Europe."

Propping up Egypt, everybody has a real interest in Egypt these days, not at least because of the role it's playing to try to help negotiate a temporary ceasefire for hostage deal. There's lots of reasons why you don't want Egypt to collapse. But I think human rights advocates are right to also raise questions about giving pretty large checks to the Sisi government, and they're criticizing this deal for putting a lot of money into an autocrat, including the autocrat-running Tunisia and certainly into Egypt, without clear conditionality on their human rights behavior. Last year, Tunisia blocked EU lawmakers who tried to go to the country to check on how the money was being used, and the Tunisians said, "No, thank you."

MCMAHON:
It seems like an attempt to try to echo the deal with Turkey back in 2015, but very different circumstances, and it must be said, Erdoğan has done a better job of hosting a very large community of refugees, even though there's still a desire, an understandable desire to create some more permanent living plan for those refugees in Turkey, which numbers more than 2 million, I think, still to this day. But as you say, North Africa, very different track record, very different leadership, and it's hard not to be cynical when you see this. It's also hard not to see European Union trying to spin up some sort of plan for dealing with the really unchecked flows of migrants of all sorts crossing the Mediterranean. And so yeah, I don't know whether we're going to see more announcements of this type or whether we're going to see Egypt in some way turn a page, but it doesn't seem like it's solving much at this point.

ROBBINS:
These EU leaders, one of the reasons they're pushing this right now, of course, is everybody's very nervous about these June parliamentary elections that are coming up, and polls in Europe, like polls here, cite migration as a main concern of voters, and their migration numbers are bouncing up again as well. The EU is also increasing resources for their border agency, Frontex, so they're hiring lots of border control agents. This seems to be a massive concern around the globe, but dealing with it in a humane way and subcontracting it to a country like Egypt, which does not have a long history of treating its own citizens in a humane way, is a disturbing thing. But also, as I said, we have other relationships with Egypt to cultivate. Tony Blinken, the xecretary of State, is stopping in Egypt as part of his, what is it, his sixth trip to the Middle East this October 7th, and the Egyptians are playing a major role in these negotiations to find a ceasefire for hostages deal. So nobody wants Egypt to collapse, but an unconditioned aid without taking human rights into concerns, that makes me queasy.

MCMAHON:
This is the world we are in right now. 

And that is a look at the turbulent world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. France's President Emmanuel Macron, visits Brazil at a time where the Mercosur trade deal seems ever more parlous; lights turn off across the globe for Earth Hour; and India celebrates Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, love, and spring.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program is produced by Ester Fang and Sinet Adous with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to our intern Olivia Green for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. And this is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.