371. Question Time: Buying Gaza, Macron’s AI Stunt, and Europe on a Knife’s Edge

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1:58Welcome to the rest of the politics. Question time with me, Alex De Campbell. And me Rory Stewart. So where do you want to start Rory? Well I want to start with Alice. What's the significance of the death of the Aga Khan? Haven't seen much coverage of this but it seems like a crazy story. So the Aga Khan has just died aged 88. And the Aga Khan is the head of the Smiley community. He was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, famous see one of the wealthiest families in the world. He was both an extraordinary leader in international development, but also ahead of state without having a set geographical nation.

2:40So I got to know him probably 25 years ago. And he was a really extraordinary entrepreneur. His father and grandfather had a little bit more of a reputation as a playboy. And he definitely was somebody who was a great skier. I think he skied in the Olympics and had racehorses. But what he really did was caravan international development. And it was really impressive. It's the sort of sign of what you can do and what I'd love to see some of these American mega billionaires do with their money because he did both pure development and he also did development impacts investing. So he spent about five and a half billion dollars a year.

3:27But to give you an example of how it came together in Afghanistan, he would be funding cultural restoration. So they did incredible work restoring Babel's gardens, for example. but he also had a hotel, best hotel in Kabul, where I was staying last time we did a podcast, the Serena Hotel. He would also invest in really good, basic healthcare and clinics, particularly in remote rural areas. He would provide support on banking and microfinance. He ran airlines in Africa. He had big nurses, training colleges going. And because he was able to draw on the Asmari community, There was a lot of local expertise.

4:07It was done incredibly professionally. Often largely with local staff with very few international staff. And I've never seen, I think, anywhere in the world, including Bill Gates, anybody in international development demonstrate such kind of imagination, creativity, flexibility on bringing stuff together. He believed in enabling environment for business, but he also was somebody who would say that a country's culture is just important as it's mineral resources and it's water for its development. So he will be deeply missed. I don't recall ever meeting him, but I did go to his museum once. Aha.

4:47The Aga Khan Museum is in Toronto, is it? Toronto, correct. Yeah. And I'm sure you would have you never been there. You would have to love him. I've never been to this museum. This full of Islamic art. But it's a beautiful, beautiful building. It was actually, I was there doing a mental health thing, a friend of mine who has got an interesting architecture, said you've got to go and see this building. So it was absolutely beautiful. Anyway, that was a very nice tribute to our issue, which we return to politics. Very good, yes, here we are. Question for you then. Car Surprise. Where should Canada look to in future for trade relations, as we clearly can't rely on the US?

5:22And maybe tell us a bit about some of the response we got from subscribers and listeners, really engaging with us on the on the Canada question. We threw it through an hour last week when we talked about Justin Trudeau's the way that he dealt with and the other politicians dealt with Donald Trump's threat of tariffs. And I was you were saying basically you thought that Trudeau should maybe have gone the whole hog and take the pain and I was arguing no I'm not sure that would be the right thing to do. You should just have to stop the tariffs which is managed to do for this 30 -day reprieve. at the end of which I suspect Trump will have moved on to, as Tommy Vita suggested, invading the Forkland Islands or something.

6:00I'd say the very strong balance of opinion amongst many Canadians who responded was that they supported the pretty tough approach that Trudeau taken and also supported him giving this line about having, will have, offenders are. Just remind people what they were saying often is yeah, okay, we get Rory's theory that we have played brinksmanship with Trump, but the reality is that the impact of these tariffs on the Canadian economy would have been completely catastrophic. And that actually most Canadians support him for giving a little bit of a concession in order to get the threat of tariffs suspended.

6:36I think he's any suspended them for 31 days. My only question is this divide and rule question that I'm beginning to think that countries need to stand together against Trump. And even if the concessions he's getting are, as you say, pretty minimal, nevertheless, he got concessions out of Canada and Canada didn't get any concessions out of him. Well, they did in a way. They did. They didn't get the towers imposed. Well, there's not a concession. What a concession. That's like, I come up. I threatened to club you over the head. Yeah. And you, unless you do something and you say, I don't want you to club me over the head.

7:09So you give me a book and then you say, well, we both made concessions because I didn't club you over the head. Okay, I think Trudeau won that one. I do. Also, I want to give a shout out, Roy, to a boy called Magnus, I think his name is, and he's got a podcast. He's nine years old, and he's got a podcast called Magnophone, and he sent us a voice note about why he was agreeing with me in Trudeau, and his basic line was, you have to stand up to Bullies' roaring. This is where this is exactly Magnus, where the disagreement is coming from. What the Canadians are saying is yes we did stand up, but we also gave him some concessions because we actually couldn't bear to go all the way to the wire on this.

7:50He didn't really give him concessions. He said we're going to do this, which are things that we're already doing. And you have this fentanyl -zar idea, which Trump, honestly, Roy, I think, listen to me in the Canadians, Roy. We're right about this. We're right about this. And just to remind people as well, Saturday, sometime in the afternoon, UK time, we're going to do a Me the Mooch and the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, X -Cover of the Bank of England. So we'll talk a lot more about Canada there. Now, Rory, what about some of the stuff that's going on in Europe? Yeah, here's a question for you.

8:24I want to get this Valdorin Emini, big fan of the podcast. Love to see these detailed discussions about current affairs happening around the world. Love to get your opinion on Kosovo's general election and the tweet by former American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grennell, who we've raised that sheep in the past when we're talking about Trump and Kosovo and what's happened to Western Balkans. His tweet about Prime Minister Albin Kordtty. Let me just remind people what he said. Grennell labelled Albin Kordtty the Kosovo Prime Minister as an unreliable partner for Washington. Grennell was the Director of National Intelligence under Trump, has been named Trump's nomination to run the Kennedy Center and his, I think, an envoy for special diplomatic relations around the world.

9:05The courty's government was unreliable during Trump's first term, it's also been unreliable during Biden's term. And he blames Courty, in other words, he's basically taking the Serbian side. And the Serbian side is to portray Courty and the cost of Albanians as causing all the trouble. And portraying Vuchich, the Serbian leader, and so he's the one offended against. Over to you. We can't match the point about America's unreliability. There's musk interfering, trying to to fear in the German election, which we'll talk about in a minute. And this is Grenel, essentially in trying to interfere in the in the cost of election.

9:38Grenel, who by the way Rory's yesterday was in Venezuela with Maduro talking about, you know, Venezuela taking back some of their people. And there's a horrific story of Venezuela at the weekend. There was a guy filmed, I don't know how they got the film, being dragged out of his flat in Chile, but by what looked like Venezuela, Venezuela and security people, and his body was later found encased in concrete. So, in the course of the Albin Courty who we interviewed last year, was it last autumn? Yeah. Primarily it was a course of the very interesting character, a very tough character, and a course of a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny place, not recognised still by some countries, including I think half of those European countries, but clearly emerged out of the the war with Serbia.

10:28Just again for younger listeners, very, very symbolic, because Kosovo, along with Bosnia, was a two big international humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, where they were challenging Milosevic and Serbian -led ethnic cleansing and were seen, controversially for Russia and others, but generally for the West, the successful examples of the West being able to work together into the intervene, and stop further killing and set up states, more democratic states, coming out of authoritarianism and putting them we hoped at that stage on the past towards European Union membership back over the year.

11:07So he won last time around with the, he got an overall majority because he got more than 50 % of the vote. This, this time he got 41 .05%. The PDK, which is the Democratic Party of Kosovo, they came second, 22%, then the Democratic League of Kosovo, 17, turn out very badly down. Just 40 .6 % took part in the election down from almost 50 % last time. But in a sense, he is an amazingly tough character. I mean, we saw this in the interview. He really didn't mind saying very critical things about America, very critical things about the European Union, he now has to try to build a coalition, which obviously makes things more difficult, especially as some of the other parties that he might be tempted to form a coalition with.

11:58Their basic line was we have to improve relations with America and with the European Union and indeed some of them with Serbia. But the Serb -Costoman relationship is not in a good place. Meanwhile in Serbia, of course, you've got these extraordinary demonstrations going on at the moment. They're still going on. Student demonstrations against the Voucher regime. It started with this, we talked before about this collapse of a railway station roof and since when these demonstrations have broadened out and become much more about it seems trying to change the regime, Voucher's got rid of the Prime Minister to see whether that sort of stems the flow as it were but we'll see.

12:36Anyway, Percurti's back in power but now has to work with other people. Yeah and it's a contrast that she because for all the problems in Cosmo it is a democratic election and courtly was seriously challenged by a serious opposition group and that's not happening in Serbia. Serbia you're absolutely right there's demonstrations on the street but there's no political party that they can arrange themselves around because Vucic has been very successful at dismantling his political party opposition and Vucic is someone to really watch because in a world which is increasingly going in a kind of Putin Trump direction where governments sweep civil society aside and begin to make national statements about their borders.

13:20We have in Republic of Subska which is the Bosnian Serb bit, a joining Serbia which came out of the Bosnian war, a leader who is openly now saying Trump, like things openly saying, you know, USAID's criminal organization, we always told you so, etc. Grennell very much, whose Trump's man very much on Fooch's side, and so to return to something we've discussed in the past, the threat remains that Serbia will make aggressive moves towards trying to re -annex Northern Kosovo and re -annex Republican Serbska, which would basically undo those humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo 25 years ago.

13:56So, got to keep our eyes on that. Now I'm going to wrap in a few questions together, Rory. And we're going to whizz around Europe. Austria, France Friedrich who says he's a member and thinks it's time that we inform our viewers and listeners as to, quote, has Austria got a government yet. You can maybe deal with that one first. Macron AI, Vanessa Goul, what do you think about Macron's use of deep fakes to publicise the start of his AI actions summit? it. And T. double O wants to know how is Friedrich Mertz, the CDU candidate in the German election, later this month, including the far right for campaign leverage seen internationally.

14:35So the big story is that Europe is now in the last chance, Salin. The West is basically disintegrating under the pressure from Trump. And in most of these countries now, far right popular groups are emerging who are joyfully imitating Trump's language, Trump's language on immigration, Trump's language on constitutions, Trump's languages on the rule of law. And in Germany and Austria, we've got this very interesting question about what the big old parties do. Can they form coalitions to exclude the far right? Can they govern? And then what happens when new elections come along? And it's the last chance to learn because if they don't manage to bring together functioning coalitions that work, it's giving that opportunity to the far right.

15:25And here's a little update from today on Austria, which is a good example of the Simmelgette you on Germany. So Kiko, who people will remember, is the leader of this very, very extreme group in Austria. The FPO, which was always had Nazi roots, has become much more extreme under Kiko and he got the most votes in the election. So many votes, in fact, that when a coalition collapsed, it seemed inevitable that he would probably end up as chancellor. But his demands have become more and more extreme. So he's demanded the suspension of the asylum system. He's demanded leaving the WHO, nobody knows why the hell he wants to leave the WHO, but he just imitated.

16:06Trump. Exactly. He says when EU court decisions are things that he disagrees with, Austria should just ignore the European court, no sanctions on Russia, cut all the funding to public sector broadcasting, put more money into government money into funding right wing news outlets, remove the EU flag from buildings. And then he's also very interested in these very extreme moves on citizenship. So you can only get citizenship in 15 years. You get the feeling that he's trying to provoke them to say no and not do a deal because he's also asking for all the big departments, the ones where you can change the institutions of the state, which of course is the way that all ban, all banised Hungary, added to which the guy that he's negotiating with, the leader of the more conservative right wing party, they're sort of long term sworn enemies.

16:54So it's hard to see this one ending anytime soon. In a bit of a sort of replay of a theme across Europe, what you'll see is the Ova Pay, which is, as you say, that more traditional conservative party, probably is in the end going to try to return to form a mass coalition against Kekel's party because his demands have become so mad that presumably what he's trying to do is trigger another election where he'll think he'll get even more of the vote and be able to take over Austria. Now over to you on Germany because to some extent we've got a very interesting question there after the election on what are the CDU going to do, how do they work to exclude the AFD, can they make a coalition with the Greens and the Social Democrats?

17:40Yeah, no, it's a bit of a mess. I mentioned last week a German interviewer who I said had given Alice Vidal of the AFD quite a going over and her name is Karen Miosga. And I also watched her, she did, there was a TV debate this week between Shots and Mets and this issue that we talked about last week was it all the week before, where Mertz got a vote through the Bundestag with the help of the AFD. This being seen as a sort of breakdown of the brandt amount of the firewall between the mainstream parties and the hard right. That was a very, very big part of the debate. It was interesting to debate because we're so used these days to think that the TV debates, all that's Donald Trump sort of insults and all that stuff.

18:26It was by German standards it was quite rough. At one point, Schultz used the word Duff of maths which sort of means stupid, crazy kind of thing. That was about as rough as it got actually. But the debate about immigration, about how to deal with the AFD, about the economy, it was a pretty traditional debate. And then what followed, which I also watched with Karen and Miyazko, she was interviewing Marcus Serder, who's the leader of the CSU, the CDU's, the other part of the union, as it's called, and also a guy called Lars Klingbail, who is one of the leaders of the STP, and a journalist from the Spiegel, and he was really into an hour without a break, just talking about what had happened in the debate, with quite a lot of sort of agreeable disagreement going on.

19:17And on the one hand, you think this election needs a bit more fire and a bit more excitement. On the other hand, this is quite nice about seeing them sort of being moderately polite to each other. But I think that the CDU look like they're going to come first. The AFD looks like it's going to come second. Meeath's is adamant that he will not do a deal in government with the AFD. In which case, he then has to look at things like doing a deal with the SPD, who have basically said that they can't trust him because of the way that he dealt with the AFD in this vote a couple of weeks ago. So it's a bit of a mess.

19:54I also saw another interview he did, Mertz, where, because he's got a reputation of it being very stiff and very conservative and very traditional. And actually when he lightens up a bit, he's maybe more impressive than I thought he was from seeing just a straightforward debate. He had a bit more life around him. But anyway, we're gonna have to get used to it because I think it's very hard to imagine that anybody other than Mets is going to win this election. It's again this question that's repeated across Europe of do the conservative parties cut a deal with the far right? So in a British context, does Camibade knock in the end merge with Farage?

20:31Which basically she has said today by the way, Roy, I don't you've seen in the daily telegraph, she says there's no way she's going to get into bed with Nigel Farage. I think we should all be very happy about that. She said herself that is a truly horrible image. And in that French example, I guess it was the Leopold Picard, it Chauti decided to try to go with Marine Le Pen, and by doing so, tour his party apart. So some of the leading figures in the city of, for example, the leader of the city in Westphalia who called the FD Nazis are not going to put up with it for a moment, it would split the party to pieces.

21:02Okay, we're going to have a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll will answer the macaron part of that triptych that I set out a moment ago.

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22:21Welcome back to the Restistus Politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And with me as a gamble and we we were so long on that previous question, or we had a break in the middle of the question That's that's the first I think we need to be disciplined on not asking three questions at once I was trying to give you an opportunity to go bang bang bang a bit of gym Here's your question Vanessa gold What do you think this is from a subscriber to what do you think about macros use of deepfakes to publicize the start of the AI Action Summit is it a clever to a promotion or does it poke fun at something that is in fact of deadly serious concern.

22:56Both. I was in France on Sunday staying in a hotel and I turned on the tele and I was channel hopping and I lighted up hot. I don't know you got about what could be this sort of, what was the word usually the day blow -vating? I still think he's sort of the finest communicators in the world. He did a one hour interview about AI with a French presenter and an Indian presenter ahead of this AI summit that was co - it was in Paris but it was basically put together both by France and India. And honestly Rory he just was so articulate, so eloquently new, so much about it. And it's interesting, so France has had this AI summit.

23:43He was talking eye -watering sums of money that the French were announcing. So the video that the question refers to was this he put together a compilation of lots of deep fakes that have been doing the rounds about Macron. Including somewhere he was clearly being projected as gay, as a woman, you know, lots of him dancing and they were all complete fakes. So what he was doing, he was using that to get attention for the summit. Peter Kailash, he was also at the summit. He did something similar. He posted a video of himself speaking French, but then admitted that he couldn't speak French. And what had happened is he used an AI tool to translate himself and it was very, very, very convincing.

24:24But what's the big point? Because I guess the big strategic challenge that he needs to face is getting the balance between risk and growth as with all this. And the normal criticism that you would get from the AI guys in Silicon Valley is that But Macrom and the European Union are basically going to choke AI development because they're so worried about the risks, they're barely even allowing the models to develop and that you can't even really regulate these models until you see what they are. Yeah, the analogy they use is it's like trying to, I don't know, regulate a car in about 1908 when it's still traveling at 20 miles an hour and if you start putting in rules that people have to walk in front of it with a flag because you don't really understand what a car is.

25:09Yeah, and when Kierstharma had his equivalent AI event recently, he was very much on the side of take more risk. I saw Macron's interview, I didn't follow the event itself because I was traveling. He essentially was saying to Europe, we've got to catch up here and we've got to catch up by being pretty innovative and pretty entrepreneurial about it. He did have some very, very big private satirine engagement at the event. And Modi was there, quite a few of the big world leaders were there. So I just wanted to draw to your attention, though, Roy, that for all your accusations that he just like sort of saw Bonn style blowviation that is still a very, very, very effective communicator.