Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is 2018’s Biggest Winner Also: Italy’s Salvini, Turkey’s Erdogan, Syria’s Assad, and Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed. By Walter Russell Mead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-bolsonaro-is-2018s-biggest-winner-11546909119
Twenty eighteen was a disquieting year. Although capitalism continued to raise living standards almost everywhere, the geopolitical outlook dimmed. An antimarket backlash gained strength in many countries, and relations between the U.S. and China continued on a downward trajectory even as global defense spending hit a record high.
Some leaders thrived in this environment—either despite the geopolitical headwinds or because of them. Here are the five men who, for better in some cases and worse in others, were the biggest winners in world politics in 2018.
• Abiy Ahmed. The new prime minister of Ethiopia took office in April and almost immediately launched a stunning series of political and economic reforms. In his first 100 days, the new prime minister released thousands of political prisoners, ended a state of emergency, began liberalizing the economy, and moved to implement a controversial peace agreement with Eritrea. Ethiopian institutions remain weak, and the country faces a tangle of ethnic and security issues that guarantee trouble ahead, but in 2018 Mr. Abiy gave hope to a country that desperately wants to put decades of civil conflict and authoritarian rule behind it.
• Bashar Assad. The Syrian strongman’s forces achieved a series of decisive victories in the bloodiest civil war in Middle East history. A host of morally vainglorious Western leaders demanded for years that Mr. Assad step down; with Russian and Iranian backing, he has had the last laugh. The country he rules is a ruin, but he occupies a palace in Damascus rather than a prison cell in The Hague.
The Syrian civil war will be remembered not only for the atrocities and war crimes but also as the event that brought Russia back into the Middle East and demonstrated to the world just how hollow optimistic liberal slogans like the “responsibility to protect” have become absent the will to uphold them.
• Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey’s president managed an extraordinary feat in 2018: Even as he ran an increasingly autocratic state that is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, he nevertheless wrapped himself in the mantle of respectability as he wrong-footed Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Mr. Erdogan won’t soon realize his longtime dream of returning an Islamized Turkey to the regional supremacy the Ottoman Empire once enjoyed. With economic troubles looming at home, he could face a difficult 2019. Still, not since Kemal Atatürk has any Turkish ruler had Mr. Erdogan’s power or international sway.
• Matteo Salvini. Italy’s deputy prime minister broke all the rules in 2018, declaring war on the European Union’s austerity and migration policies. Italy’s populist governing coalition forced Brussels to accept a more expansive fiscal policy than the Eurocrats had wanted. Italy also began deporting illegal migrants, banned NGO-operated ships with Libyan refugees from Italian ports, and negotiated arrangements with Libyan militias to reduce the flow of Mediterranean migrants—from 120,000 in 2017 to about 23,000 last year. “La pacchia è finita,” Mr. Salvini told migrants and refugees in November as he announced the changes in policy: “The party is over.” Human-rights watchers and the European political establishment are gnashing their teeth, but as of November Mr. Salvini was Italy’s most popular politician.
• Jair Bolsonaro. The biggest winner of 2018 is the most unlikely president of a major country in modern times. Brazil’s Bolsonaro, an even more divisive figure than Donald Trump, dedicated his vote in favor of impeaching former president Dilma Rousseff to the colonel who was responsible for her torture under the country’s military dictatorship. He has crudely insulted women, sexual minorities and Afro-Brazilians and praised military rule in Brazil and Chile.
After 28 years of undistinguished service in Congress, Mr. Bolsonaro was widely dismissed as a marginal figure. That didn’t matter in 2018. An economic collapse, a national crime wave and the worst corruption scandal in Brazil’s history destroyed the public’s faith in the political establishment. In October Brazilians swept the ultimate outsider into office with 55% of the vote.
As Mr. Bolsonaro rescinded his predecessor’s offer to host the next round of global climate talks, stripped references to LGBT issues from the country’s human-rights ministry, downgraded claims of indigenous populations, dispatched soldiers to high-crime areas, and announced plans to move Brazil’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, it was clear that he intends to govern as he campaigned.
Investors hope the “Trump of the Tropics” will liberalize Brazil’s economy and reform its costly pension system; entrenched special interests are gearing up to resist. It’s easier to mobilize public anger than to introduce effective reforms; 2019 will be a momentous and challenging year for Brazil and its new president.
Appeared in the January 8, 2019, print edition.
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