Europe

My friend ‘D’ is an instantly recognizable type in the Middle East: the middleman. He’s always chasing the next deal, always about to make millions. One scheme was to build a London Eye in a flyblown town in the Levant. Another was to buy a ‘Trump sex tape’ for $10 million. His latest scheme is to get the British government to buy coronavirus test kits from Turkey. This could be the big score: for biotech companies, testing is a new goldrush. And though there’s a touch of Del Boy about my friend, he’s right about the need for test kits. In fact, to get out of the crisis caused by the coronavirus, we might have to test on an immense, unprecedented, almost unimaginable scale.

Professors of medicine do not usually look as if they have emerged from the pages of Asterix, or alternatively as if they were the drummer of a 1960s rock band just emerged from drug rehabilitation for the 17th time: but that is how Prof Didier Raoult, recently elevated to the rank of the most famous infectious disease doctor in the world, looks. If you type 'Didier' in your search engine, up comes Raoult, before even the soccer player, 'Drogba'. When infectious disease doctors are more famous than footballers, you know that an epidemic is serious.  Raoult says that he adopted his appearance to irritate his colleagues, which is another specialization of his, one at which he is undoubtedly very good.

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

Political realignments occur when large groups of voters desert one party for one or more other parties, shattering old coalitions and forming new ones. In America and northern Europe, working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, native and white — have been leaving established left-of-center parties. On their way out, they have met college-educated metropolitan professionals and managers migrating the other way. Center-left parties have exchanged the industrial workers who were once their core constituency for a new upscale clientele. The emerging center-left is supported by the college-credentialed middle classes, native minorities and immigrant diasporas.

COVID-19 has a horrid ability to turn fiction into fact. Deserted modern cities are usually the realm of post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. Now, many of us live in them. The world's greatest streets are dramatically empty; suspended suddenly in a dream-like quiet. It's eerie and also very beautiful. We usually often don't notice how remarkable our cities are the commotion. We are distracted by the crowds, the commotion and the congestion. Now it is hard for urbanites to notice anything else. The Spectator has looked around the world, and asked various writers in various places to describe where they live in lockdown.

The growth of COVID cases in Britain is now slowing according to Professor Neil Ferguson, who is emerging as the de facto chief strategist of the government response to the crisis. No government data has been issued to confirm this trend but Ferguson has access to other real-time data through SAGE, the medical emergency committee. His words are worth following carefully. He told BBC Radio 4's Today program this morning: 'In the UK we can see some early signs of slowing in some indicators. Less so deaths, because deaths are lagged by a long time from when measures come in force. But if we look at the numbers of new hospital admissions, that does appear to be slowing down a little bit now.

Fear and the frisson of fear are two very different emotions. The one is horrible and the other delightful or at least often sought after.Who, after all, does not enjoy a good fright in a cinema or while reading a thriller? When I arrived in Paris just before the lockdown was announced and one was no longer allowed out of the house without a laissez-passer (signed by oneself), all the places of public resort such as bars, restaurants and cinemas, had already been closed: but the atmosphere was still one of frisson of fear rather than of fear itself.

We are all improvising now. In front of the supermarket, at 6.30 a.m., we stood at a cautious distance from one another. Then the doors opened, and men and women rushed forward as one, in a habitual desire to be first inside the shop.Normalcy ended last Wednesday. My office closed its doors, like many others, with the optimistic hope of opening them again in two weeks. I had a beer with a friend in a quiet bar as my phone buzzed with news of closures and infections. I doubted there would be another pub night soon.It is a beautiful spring in Tarnowskie Góry, in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. Of course, few of us are in a position to enjoy it. All the bars, cafés and restaurants have been closed. No mass gatherings are allowed.

‘OK, can do it, but I am ill (NOT the virus).’ With that, the interview is set: an hour on the phone with Slavoj Žižek. As I thanked Žižek for his time, he stresses, ‘Don’t expect too much. It’s not the virus, but...how do I put this, I have a lot of symptoms of the virus, but hopefully not the virus.’ ‘I've had these symptoms for years,’ he noted. ‘You know I’m sneezing all the time, and so on.’ We are meant to discuss Žižek’s upcoming book of essays, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name, which the 70-year-old says is an easier read than the majority of the books he has written in the past five decades. But Žižek is far more eager to talk about the COVID-19 coronavirus.

For decades the United States has tried and failed to make peace in the Middle East. This week Donald Trump, succeeding where so many presidents have come unstuck, unfurled a brave vision capable of persuading enemies to turn their swords into plowshares and transforming the region. Finally, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz are in agreement.As for the ‘deal of the century’ announced at the White House today, Trump and Netanyahu are expert practitioners of the kombina. This Israeli term describes the deal that’s really within the deal, and also the side deals within the deal that’s really within the deal. The kombina allows all parties to feel that they’ve profited. The parallels to complex real estate ventures are obvious.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.

There’s money in misery, so the world’s corporate elite welcomes eco-catastrophist Greta Thunberg to its cult center at Davos. There’s also money in optimism, the fuel of markets and speculation — but Davos doesn’t like Donald Trump. Strange that a legendary capitalist turned deregulating politician is the odd man out on the magic mountain of money, but a socialist child who calls for overriding democracy and the forced transformation of national economies is a spiritual figurehead for the masters of moolah.The smart money at Davos is on Greta, because the risks are lower in the command economy that Greta and her drones want. The outcomes are pre-ordained, and all innovation is fixed between business and government.

Benjamin Netanyahu has made some of Israel's foreign enemies his friends, but he's finding it difficult to do the same domestically. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi visited Israel in July 2017, the first Indian representative to do so since the two countries first established a diplomatic relations in 1992. Netanyahu returned the gesture by visiting India in January 2018, when the two leaders spoke of a future together that would benefit both countries. In January 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu re-established diplomatic relations with Chad as part of his effort to pursue diplomatic ties with African states.

After the Ukrainian crisis and the Iranian crisis, we now have the Ukrainian-Iranian crisis. For the second time in six months, Ukraine finds itself inexplicably — and inextricably — in the midst of a world-historical crisis that it had no part in crafting. As it was with Trump’s inquiries into Hunter Biden’s business activities, Kyiv is marooned politically and facing difficult and even unpalatable choices between warring opponents, neither of whom it wants to antagonize. The American airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani had threatened to set off a conflagration which many observers — 99 percent of them never having heard of the most interesting man in the Middle East — histrionically predicted as ‘World War Three’. Blessedly, that did not happen.