Bucharest pressed: Ukraine’s election effect

0:02The Economist

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.

0:25In Britain, a political project called Leveling Up was supposed to bring a shine to places where the glories were former. Money was spent, yes, but political discontent is nevertheless still easy to find. We pinpoint what it is that the communities still lack. And it has taken a shockingly long time for some people to realize that women can be excellent at sport, and are well worth watching. But in America, audiences for women's basketball are finally catching up with men's.

1:01First up, though.

1:10Today in Istanbul, the long-awaited peace talks on Ukraine begin. Only problem is, Vladimir Putin hasn't turned up. Though Donald Trump hinted that he himself might go, instead he's heading back to Washington. But if those talks in Turkey are a non-event, one place where something will be happening this weekend is Romania. Elections are being held there only months after the last lot were annulled because of alleged Russian interference. Peace may be elusive, but the ripple effect of the war in Ukraine continues. Romania is an interesting country from the perspective of the Ukraine war. It's been an enthusiastic ally, it's a member of NATO, and it has helped Ukraine so far with both arms and with making sure that its economy continues to run.

1:58Matt Steinglass is our Europe correspondent There are talks taking place in Istanbul about whether to move ahead with a ceasefire At this stage, lower-level teams are meeting in Istanbul But at the same time, a lot of people are looking to elections on Sunday in Romania to expect the president of the country It's a turning point for Romania's policy towards Ukraine because the two candidates are so sharply opposed in their attitudes Tell us about these elections. The Romanian presidential elections are the culmination of an extremely interesting six-month-long process. The confrontation between a populist hard-right leader, George Simeon, and a centrist anti-corruption candidate, Nico Jordan, kind of crystallizes a lot of political conflicts that are happening all over Europe.

2:50On the one hand, if Simeon wins, it could grow the pool of populist hard right leaders that are destabilizing European politics. The first round of the elections back in the end of November were annulled in December by the country's constitutional court because of allegations of outside interference, probably Russian interference, to destabilize social media platforms and some campaign finance irregularities. The annulment of those elections produced an uproar in Romania, and that's led to a really sharp polarization around the second round. So who's the frontrunner now? The frontrunner is George Simeon.

3:30He's the leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romania. He's a hard-right populist candidate. He is a big fan of Donald Trump. He describes himself as totally in agreement with MAGA ideology. That includes their culture war positions against climate policies and LGBT rights and so forth. He also has an autargic streak on the economy, which is similar to Donald Trump. He wants to bring back manufacturing to Romania. We can produce more here. When I met George Simeon inside Romania's parliament building in Bucharest, He told me that he wanted to model his government strategy in some ways on Elon Musk's doge purges of bureaucrats in the government.

4:16And he said that his economic policies would be modeled on those of Argentina's Javier Millet. I want the administration to be efficient. And my model is Javier Millet and the Austrian School of Economics. The thing about George Simeon is that he says a lot of things. And other economic commentators who I mentioned, the Javier Malay point to, sort of raise their eyebrows and said that's not something that he usually says about his policies. But there is no question that if he wins, he will take Romania sharply to the right. And in his case, that also means seeking out a neutral position, as he describes it, on the Ukraine war.

4:58He said that he wants to cease aid to Ukraine. He says that Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is only marginally better than Vladimir Putin. He's not pro-Russian. Romanians aren't pro-Russian. Romania has a long history of a conflict with Russia. And in our interview, he made it clear that he thought that Vladimir Putin was engaging in a cynical negotiating strategy in order to undermine Ukraine. But European leaders are worried that he will not be a reliable ally on the war in Ukraine. So tell us about Simeon's main opponent. Simeon's opponent in the second round of the elections is Bucharest's mayor, Nicu Shordan.

5:36He's built his profile partly on civic issues, but also largely on fighting corruption, which is a huge issue, probably the biggest issue in Romania, according to surveys of voters. Now, Dan is seen as an anti-system candidate because of his anti-corruption profile. He's not a member of one of the classic parties of power in Romania, which are the Social Democrats and the National Liberals. That means that there are two anti-system candidates running in this presidential election. And for Dan, this is his big shot. I talked to Radu Magdan, a Romanian political consultant, who used a very piquant Romanian expression to describe the situation.

6:15So it's saulabal, saulaspital, either to the ball or to the hospital. It means that when you pick an important fight, But you have to understand that you either win big or you may actually lose what you had before. So Jordan is actually becoming gloriously the new president of Romania, and he will be becoming a lame duck mayor of Bucharest for the next three years. The sense is that people on the anti-corruption side of Romanian politics are always looking for the next savior. And this time they're hoping it's going to be Niku Jordan. done. If he doesn't win, it probably means this is the highest stage that he's going to get to in Romanian politics.

6:55And Matt, you've just been in Bucharest. What are voters saying? For voters in Romania, this is another stage in a long-running drama. They have been wrapped up in this sort of dynamic between corrupt centrist parties for a couple of decades, and they've been trying to find a way to extricate themselves from that trauma. It has never quite worked. And there's a certain sense of exhaustion, which may explain why you're getting two anti-system candidates this time around. If you talk to educated urban people in Bucharest, then they're very excited about Nico Chorda. They think he's been a very good mayor.

7:33He has the kinds of pro-urban mobility schemes that you would expect of any liberal mayor in Europe. When I was walking through Bucharest on the day of the first round of voting, I walked by a church where there was a wedding taking place with some beautiful Orthodox chanting in the background. People coming out dressed in gorgeous traditional Romanian clothing. Their friend had just gotten married inside. But I talked with them about who they were voting for. Nico Chardin. How come? Because he's a reformist. He has a great vision on how to do things. He's more on the technical side also. So he has great knowledge of how to deal with things.

8:13And also he has already done great things as a mayor for Bucharest. So I think he will do greater things. But the general impression one gets is that people who are angry at the system are more likely to vote for George Simeon. He has that classic throw the bums out kind of attitude. He's seen as a true outsider. Some people see Nukushordane as more of an insider simply because he's an urban intellectual. He's a Paris-trained mathematician. He doesn't have the same kind of revolutionary attitude that Simeon seems to project. So if Simeon does win this election, what happens? There are different takes on George Simeon.

8:53Some people feel he's extremely pragmatic, which he is, and that he might become something of a Georgia Maloney in office. Maloney is the hard-right prime minister of Italy. She has become a very constructive player in the European Union since taking office. People talk about the melanization effect of a hard-right candidate actually winning and then starting to work as a normal politician in Europe. And Simeon explicitly says, we've already seen melanization. If I win, there will be Simeonization. It's kind of a funny thing for a candidate to say that if they get elected, they're not actually going to be as aggressive as they've been on the campaign trail.

9:30But that's the pitch that he's making, at least in English, to foreigners. Other people feel this is a very dangerous moment. He'll be unpredictable on the economy. He'll be unpredictable in his attitude towards Ukraine. He'll be unpredictable in his attitude towards the EU. He is trying to cultivate better relations with Viktor Orban in Hungary. At best, he will be an unreliable player for Europe. And that's very concerning to Brussels. Matt, thank you very much for talking to me. Thanks, Rosie.

10:04Thank you.

10:34released every Monday. And yes, as you should have worked out by now, you'll need to subscribe to listen. Search Economist Podcast Plus to sign up.

10:49Could I grab a donut, please? Yeah, just one nice. A few weeks ago, I visited a great Yarmouth, a British seaside town. Archie Hall is our Britain economics correspondent. There's all the things you'd expect for a place like that Seagulls screeching, families on day trips or staying Arcades, fun fairs, large promenade, the works But that wasn't why I was there Although I did enjoy a very nice donut on the promenade I was there to investigate something of a paradox Which is the previous government had a policy called levelling up Which sought to support areas of the country that felt a bit left behind Like Great Yarmouth and in much of the country, not that much money was spent, but in Great Yarmouth, a pretty considerable amount really was.

11:35You could see it in big new projects being built across the town and you set a winter gardens on one side, a new town centre on another side and much else besides. And yet the political mood of discontent and anger that all that government investment and all that attention was meant to satiate and finally address didn't seem to be going away.

11:57it. At the last election, Great Yarmouth was one of five constituencies of the country to vote for Reform UK, Nigel Farage's populist party.

12:08So at least as regards Great Yarmouth, then, how did the levelling up project not work out? If the idea was to throw some money at places to bring them a bit of polish, where did they go wrong? The thing the levelling up project did do, particularly somewhere like Yarmouth, where money actually showed up, was these big flashy capital projects, large new bits of construction, where the theory was you could very clearly say, look at this, this is a nice thing we've brought to your town that is paid for by the government because we, the government, care. And that was the theory. Now, that didn't quite work.

12:39And the reason it didn't, I think, speaks to a problem you come across again and again, not just in Great Yarmouth, but in communities across Britain, that things just day to day aren't quite as clean and well-maintained as they used to be, that things are a bit more disorderly, that in general people's experience talking to the state, interacting with the police, A &E rooms in hospitals, the courts, local government when they try to get the bins taken away, none of that functions quite as well as it could, and quite as well more troublingly as it did, say, 10 or 15 years ago. And so this This is not just a matter of perception or a grumpy electorate or what have you.

13:17People have a real right to complain about this kind of thing, about the environment around them and their social services, what have you, being a bit crap. I think so. These things are so hard to measure. It's not, you look at GDP, does the line go up, does the line go down? This is all much more anecdotal and diffuse and soft. We commissioned some polling and had some polls to share data with us. And people certainly are noticing and are unhappy about both national level services getting worse and their neighbourhoods just feeling a bit worse and shabbier than they used to before. If you look at the Institute for Government, for instance, which is a think tank that tracks very closely performance public services, they reckon barring schools, every single major public service they look at has gotten worse since 2010.

13:58If you speak to people involved in road maintenance, they agonise about the stage of the potholes. Shoplifting has gone up like eight times, which is a vast amount and speaks to the way that policing has kind of stepped back. There are specific data points you can poke at, but it's also part of a general mood that you get to by kind of looking at all these things in the round. So fair enough, if a national program aims for the big flashy capital projects you describe, shouldn't the relatively low-level stuff like potholes be the matter for local governments? I think local governments would wish the same thing.

14:28Unfortunately, in Britain, the job of local government has transformed quite a lot in the past 10 plus years. In a way, it's made it very, very difficult for them to actually find money to do things like fill the potholes, collect the bins and do the kind of ordinary day-to-day making communities nice business that people generally think really is the core job of local councils. Particularly what's happened with local councils in Britain is that a few very very acute areas of need, things that are really really important to address, things like special needs education for children, things like social care for adults and children, things like temporary accommodation for people who are facing homelessness, all of those items in local government budgets have just exploded in cost and in many cases particularly around special needs education, local governments also have a very, very strong legal duty to provide that, which makes it very, very difficult to, when you're doing the budgeting, have almost a two-track system where it's very easy to slimy slice away the money for the potholes and very, very hard to do anything about those really, really big and deep areas of acute need.

15:27But along the way there, you mentioned not just things like potholes, which are annoying, but also changes in crime stats, which is often much more than merely annoying. Yeah, absolutely. So the other street level bit of government that's not working tremendously well is policing, courts, prisons, kind of the entire criminal justice system. And thankfully, that's not resulted so far in a spike in murders or the really nasty crimes, but has meant that certain crimes like shoplifting, phone snatching in a lot of big cities have gone up by a lot. confidence in the police is down tremendously. Almost any measure of that in the past five years or so is down by 10 to 20 percentage points, and particularly measures of, is the police visible in your neighborhood?

16:07Do you actually see police officers as you go about your day-to-day life have gone down by even more and are some of the starkest falls? And so that speaks to another side where kind of aside from local government struggling with the day-to-day basics, people are also living in areas that just feel a bit more disorderly as a result. And as you hinted at before, all of that, both the perception and the reality of things being grubbier than before, has political effects. Absolutely. So this is very, very difficult to definitively prove. But if you ask people how worried you are by grubbiness in your neighborhood or national services not working, the people who are the most unhappy and the people who see the biggest decline also tend to be the people who are likely to vote for reform.

16:49But if you just observe political conversation in Britain, speak to people. There is this bad mood of things not working. Some of that's the economy. Much of that is growth not being good. But there's also a sense that people feel the state's not quite delivering for them and making their lives straightforward and pleasant and easy and good in the way it may have been, say, 10 or 20 years ago. And that too lies behind a lot of this discontent. So what's the direction of travel, though? Are there reforms underway now that simply haven't taken hold yet? Or are we going to be talking in a year and things are going to be even worse.

17:19It's really tough. A lot of the structural problems don't seem to be going away. The government has various headline plans for hiring more police officers, but also will see their full spending plans for their term in Parliament in about a month's time, but it doesn't seem as if the police are getting transmits more money. Local governments, the statutory duties they have that force them to spend lots and lots of money on those areas of acute need don't seem to be going away either. Things like filling potholes in principle should be cheaper, should be doable. If you're thinking of quick wins for the government, that should be a really great case of that.

17:50Some local councillors were saying they think things might get a bit better, but we've not seen convincing evidence to my eyes that we're in for a step change. Archie, thanks very much for your time. Thank you. On a recent episode of The Weekend Intelligence, my colleague Matthew Holhouse went on the campaign trail with Nigel Farage, the head of Reform UK. What emerged was an unexpectedly frank interview. It's available to subscribers of Economist Podcasts Plus. You know what to Google if you're not one of those.

18:34Tonight, the new Women's National Basketball Association season tips off in America. Warning, the following footage is offensive. The Dallas Wings will be hosting the Minnesota Lynx in the first game of the most anticipated season yet. Defensive. Occasionally disrespectful. Viewer discretion is advised. Welcome to the W.

19:04The scheduler couldn't have picked a better opening tie. Lizzie Peet is a researcher at The Economist. The Lynx are looking for their fifth title, which would be a record. The Dallas Wings haven't yet won, but they have snapped up this year's most exciting new recruit in Paige Beckers. She'll also be playing against her hometown team in Minnesota. Women's basketball has been stuck in the sporting doldrums in America for decades, but its popularity is now finally booming. So just how popular is women's basketball, Lizzie? So last year, a record 54 million viewers tuned in, which was double the number that did so in 2022.

19:44Each game averaged about a million viewers, which is actually getting quite near the number that tune into NBA games, which is, of course, the male equivalent. And so if you look at pretty much every metric, so ticket sales, TV ratings, merchandise revenue, the WNBA is growing at a really rapid rate. So what's happened, Lizzie? Have people finally realised that women play excellent sports? Well, yeah, it's important to note as well that this is all the more impressive given that the league was only founded in 1996. The NBA was founded in the 40s. So it's pretty new, in fact, in the grand scheme of things, this women's league.

20:19And it's also only got 13 teams, which is pretty small compared to other major sports leagues. I think the key change is that it's recently become a lot easier to watch. So the league used to be shown on really niche channels at kind of random times of day. the phrase relegated to ESPN2 kept coming up when I was talking to analysts about this. And so obviously, if it's hard to find, people don't tune in, people don't become fans, people aren't really aware that it even exists. A lot changed around 2021, when mainstream networks agreed to broadcast 100 games. So that was across ABC, ESPN, CBS, the networks that most people in America have access to.

20:57And this year, at least 175 games will be broadcast. So essentially what you're saying is it's the mainstream networks waking up to women's sport that's been the change. Why did they finally come round to this view? Well, there's a lot of reasons. I think a really important one, which is not the whole reason, and it has been discussed a lot, is the impact of this one player called Caitlin Clark, who entered the professional league last year. Wheeler finds Clark from the logo. She spearheaded this wave of talent that entered the league from the college level around the early 2020s. I think the important thing to note about Caitlin Clark is that she arrived at the college level of the game at the same time that ESPN started showing it on mainstream networks, as they've been doing for men's college basketball for decades.

21:45So viewership rocketed. Caitlin Clark is also an incredible basketball player. And so people wanted to tune in to see her play and do her incredible shots from a distance. They're called sort of logo threes, which is when you shoot into the basketball from the logo, which is around the halfway point of the court. It's a really impressive feat and she's very famous for doing it. And so again, you're seeing that the more access there is to this, the more people can tune in, the more people take note of these individual star players. Beyond just Ms. Clark, though, there was a big rule change a couple of years ago, where college athletes were allowed to profit from their name, image and likeness.

22:20And so the earning potential massively increased after this. And so did the attention on these players who suddenly became a lot more high profile once they were allowed to sign major deals with Nike, with other brands. And how much are the women themselves making as stars? Well, this is a really key question that's come up a lot because as you might expect, they're not making anything like as much as the men. So the WNBA's rookie salary, so the salary paid in their first year when they first entered the league, is$75 ,000. Even the best players, once they're kind of settled into the league, will be on roughly about$200 ,000.

22:55The average NBA salary is$10 million. So that's a pretty extraordinary difference. It's something that actually really came to light. I don't know if you remember, Rosie, but in 2022, a big time basketball player called Brittany Greiner traveled to Russia and was imprisoned for almost a year. And people were sort of like, why was she in Russia? And the reason she was in Russia was because she had to go there in the off season to play to supplement her income. And that really shone a light on how unequal the system is. And so there are a lot of discussions going on at the moment, particularly with the league's revenue booming so much that obviously the women should be paid more.

23:30And they're actually in the middle of salary negotiations at the moment. And they're due to sign a new contract this autumn. So it'll be really fascinating to see how that pounds out, given the context of how well this season does. Fascinating. Lizzie, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Rosie.

23:50Thank you.

24:20is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway, Sarah Larniuk and Alizé Jean-Baptiste. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Henrietta McFarlane, Benji Guy and Jonathan Day. We'll all see you back here for Boss Class tomorrow.