These three words do not leave my lips because, really, “Happy New Year”? How can we wish each other a happy year after such a start in Brazil and when we all know that 2023 will be the continuation of the war in Ukraine, the hangings in Iran, the ravages of Covid in China and the rest, all the rest, let alone the acceleration of climate change?
So “Happy New Year”? No, definitely not, except that…
I do not even dare to think it or write it, but it is no longer impossible that the great despots of the moment will not all be in place next year. Which one, I don’t know, but it’s not even totally impossible that several of them will have lost power, because, well, let’s take Mr Erdogan.
Presidential and legislative elections, Turkey votes next June on both of them, while inflation has already exceeded 120% and “the sultan”, as they say, stubbornly feeds it with salary increases and housing programmes without financial backing for it. His unpopularity is growing all the time, and while Mr Xi has no ballot boxes to face, he has had to back down in the face of protests against his zero-covid policy.
No more mass lockdowns, no more round-the-clock testing, no more anything, and as a result the epidemic has reached such proportions that the death toll is uncountable in a country where growth is falling, the virus is spreading to the countryside, and the real estate sector is still in bankruptcy.
As for the Iranian “Supreme Leader”, Mr. Khamenei has so few political cards in his hand that all he has left to intimidate his population is the gallows, and Mr. Putin’s situation is even more fragile than that of the other three. Because he has suffered nothing but defeats and humiliations since 24 February, the Russian president is no more than a tightrope walker walking on a thread, but the common belief is that he could not fall because “there is no opposition”.
This is true. Nor is there any in China or Iran. Only in Turkey is there an opposition, but there are more and more opponents to these four despots, because the Chinese can see that the king is naked, the Iranians have massively turned against the theocracy, the polls show Erdogan as the loser, and let’s stop saying that nobody would challenge Vladimir Putin.
When the boss of the Wagner groups, Yevgeny Prigozhin, drags the military command through the mud, is he unaware that the commander in chief is none other than the president himself? Of course not. He knows this and is only attacking the command in order to accuse the commander without naming him, just as those war correspondents and military bloggers do who attack the conduct of operations in Ukraine in increasingly poisonous words.
There is no longer any opposition in Russia because Vladimir Putin broke it a long time ago, but the contestation has spread to the heights of power where everyone is laying the groundwork for the succession of a tsar at the end of his reign. None of these four men fulfils the conditions required for a tyrant to last, these conditions being to have a social base and to ensure political stability for his country. Recep Erdogan’s social base, made up of the pious small-scale industrialists of Anatolia and the downtrodden of the big cities, no longer believe him capable of improving their lot. The rest of the country – the big industry, the high-ranking civil service and the urban middle class – sees him as a factor of instability. In power since 2002, the Turkish president can try to maintain himself by force, by cheating or both, but neither the army nor even his party will support him for sure.
Recep Erdogan’s social base, made up of the pious small-scale industrialists of Anatolia and the downtrodden of the big cities, no longer believe him capable of improving their lot. The rest of the country sees him as a factor of instability. In power since 2002, the Turkish president can try to maintain himself by force, by cheating or both, but neither the army nor even his party will support him for sure.
He is on a precarious reprieve, just as Xi Jinping is, because the very minute Chinese anger becomes so great that the regime could be shaken, the party would sacrifice its leader without a second’s hesitation and to the delight of all those he had removed from the leadership.
The Iranian Supreme Leader is the only one of the four to retain a social base. As the armed wing of the theocracy and the country’s leading economic power, the Revolutionary Guards have a vital interest in preventing an insurrection from toppling the regime. They have the military means to do so, but apart from the fact that not everyone considers the repression’s violence appropriate, they are no longer far from thinking that the best way to keep their power would be to keep the Leader and the theocracy only as a stage curtain, to take the helm and to establish a military dictatorship.
As for Vladimir Putin, his only asset is that there are so many contenders for his succession that none of them can step forward without risking to rally all the others against him. This is the president’s life insurance policy, but it does not protect him very well because the politically useful Russia, the one of the cities, services and high technology, is in exile or in complete dissidence; because the security services can no longer see in him a guarantor of stability; because the army has every reason to reproach him for having thrown it into an adventure it didn’t want; because only a change of regime could save the big fortunes and because the only base that remains loyal to this man is the peasantry, which is naturally conservative but has no weight in this great “every man for himself”-type of situation.
So, yes, perhaps we should risk a “Happy New Year”, at least for one among them.
