The Dragon Awakens

"When China awakes, it will shake the world."
The iconic words of Napoleon, supposedly uttered during what may not have been the worst decay of the corrupt and ultimately historic Qing dynasty - for its momentous crumbling rather than its well precedented and rather predictable rise - are still being realised, and the questions mounting as adjoining predictions of the decline of the western sun pretend no longer to ask whether this giant will reach its influence further laps around the globe, but rather what forms this influence will take. And truly, half a century past a vision of a Maoist and the Beijing political model might have been a thing not to fear, but to wail in terror about, while grasping guns in defiance if not for a final stand. But as the compacts of the Maoist formula changed well beyond the 70-30 calculus modestly offered by Deng once the old man's had entered his final stage of rot, the destruction of the Sìrén Bang and the dismantling of outer vestiges of the Maoist regime, within years of the lit de parade which must have been representative to one man's legacy, the enfant terrible to left and right alike that is "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has won further hearts and minds in the mold of its capitalist ethos, and made many question the viability of Western, "leftist" or "liberal" or both (perhaps best, if derisively, summed up by the Chinese expression Báizuǒ, 白左) democracy in favour of the rapid growth and seemingly superior flexibility of Deng's, Jiang's and Hu's authoritarian but - in the Chinese imperial tradition - relaxed and strangely subservient - and thus rather Chinese - take on the "left", as well as orderly and non-autocratic (as for now, we must wait and Xi) management.

The vestiges of this intellectual tendency - or anti-intellectual in the Western, Enlightened mold - may thus turn the tables of those who took for granted, many of whom are still taking or holding this truth for self-evident, that the institutions of once-"red" China will gradually (or dramatically) adapt to Western designs and customs, or at the very least do so more - and in more fundamental ways - than the Western democratic sphere will synthesise with or undergo a exchange with its implied adversary. It can only be condemned with pity, I must say, how this failure of assertion goes against a long and often proud Western tradition of seeing democracy and constitutional government as the practice of working constantly against the slipping tide towards tyranny, and that this transition (for reasons that may mirror those of us, the plebs, but rely on more obvious reasons) seems to be no less true for those we call our leaders.

The Leader, scrutinised by the main keys to his position. That is, if you regard the crown above the sword and the staff of faith. The Gongchandang of China, arguably the largest, most powerful and bloodstained political party in human history, has blurred and annexed all these aspects, and condensed their features in the four high offices of state - all held by the man referred to with the singular "Chairman". For how long, if yet in 2022 or 2027, the post-revolutionary, and post-Tiananmen generations will know.

The march of this colossus, however defined, is perhaps inexorable. And it is certainly one which will affect the coming century, and the one after that, just as the tripolar theatre of the Cold War was forever altered - and in my best judgment determined - by the dragon's crawl to the camp of the eagle, in the twilight of the Maoist debacle. Having asserted the collapse of the notion of an "end of history" in the peculiar Hegelian-Fukuyaman sense that came with the downfall or rather degrading of the supposed other pole and dastardly audacious proposal of a reduction of the geopolitical game to a singularity, if not finally disowned its spirit and promise of inhibition against autocracy and arbitrary rule, the question is whether a bipolar world can emerge again, and whether the competition heralded by the awakening of this formless, giant will be within states, or actors smaller and within states. The careful chess game waged by the Chinese leadership, which only recently acquired a military base in Djibouti, on what was French soil as late as 1977 to support its substantial interests in the region, does not entail a confrontation of equals, and its nuclear arsenal is significantly more limited in projection than its Russian neighbour, and more limited in size than the French one. 

The paradox of a globe predominantly steered and chaired by one never-dwarfed (if not quite overshadowing) military might and one strictly economic superpower one may seem impossible, but the eagle's talons know its foes well and its previous call as the proud bearer of a legacy of universal liberty and unsullied example - if yet sullied by its shortcomings at home, and tempered by early interventions well aware of contemporary counterparts - may just as well be reproduced by the Sun-Deng-Xi notion of republicanism and popular sovereignty as the one reproduced in its twin across the strait. It may as well be capitalism and "the people" under authoritarian governance maintained as by Jefferson's republic, as Jefferson's republic in his own days, and its values, were sordidly divided into enslaved and ostensibly free. And while a march towards such a completion as suggested by the equation, it may well be that the forces commonly subsumed under the spell of liberalism - economic freedom and entrepreneurship - and of liberal values of republicanism, federalism and the rule of law - so useful, in these days, in tormenting its challengers - may well split in ways not foreseeable to those termed the best among us.

Possible, plausible, potent - under the spell of authoritarianism? Half a century ago, we had deemed it impossible. Democracy and capitalism, destined to belong together towards whatever end the century would take. With the 20th century well in the past, we are well past the duty of asking whether solely culture and ethnicity keeps Times Square another 50, or 100 years on, from resembling its equivalent in Hong Kong, or Shanghai? Will liberty be the call of free peoples or, in Mussolini's words, the "putrid corpse" we "buried", while still singing her songs of praise?

Some may, in the mold of the same past, foresee confrontation as inevitable but of any breed - such as that between the American republic and the colonial empires of Western Europe, a subject thoroughly understudied but which continued after the 1812-15 confrontation for over a century until the trembles after Suez and the final reduction of France and Britain into regional power hubs within and foot-in-the-door inside a wider European Community. The future of this community which, while staggering even in its most foolhardy rise and attempt to walk in the world, has already proved precarious without the Marshall doctrine which has clearly survived the Cold War, its division too obvious and grim on the palate to be swallowed. With any rate of invigoration beyond the merely symbolic, or the increased strain reaching for consequences now all too known (and simultaneously unknown). The European Union is not one, but (in this akin to the United States a grammatic misnomer) a "they", and if this concession to the case of the united nationalists of Europe - that this pseudo-continent is too divided to be ruled as one, except by means negated and repudiated by the very existence of this union - then it will be a fine lesson indeed. 

The sprawl of its increasingly polarised politics, with rebellious Syriza, straddling Greece, in one corner, Czech right-libertarian populism that has already spurned much opposition in another, a new FPÖ-ÖVP coalition emerging in Austria on the hope of solidifying its own Alpine promise of Festung Europa, and authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland developed far past the mark that would have permitted entry, the question is not so much whether the call of a federal structure will be established, but whether the arena allowing its mere discussion can be salvaged at all. As for Russia, it is certainly true that the Cold War was won for the west by a tripolar contest, and the realignment of the bear with the dragon has increased the potential of both - but for how long? To conflicting interests, it is possible that a new rivalry will emerge from this partnership of circumstances of this new world order heralded with the reduction of one to a supposed, and humiliating, second tier and the will ignorance of the other. The question of Chinese-Russian relations may be the great question of American diplomacy in the future, and its implications bears as many questions as there are pathways to re-examine the 1972 realignment.

The gerontocracy in its prime. Deng Xiaoping, never chairman (Zhuxi) or either party or the state, can rightly claim a place as one of the five most influential human beings of the very eventful and transformative 20th century. Will he change the world in the next century, as he changed China in his own?

What then are the lessons to learn from history writ in present? First, recognise that Xi means business, and may be the fourth leader in the post-imperial era worthy for his own 思想 (Sīxiǎng) (we would say "-ism", and too often). While the thoughts of Sun Yat-sen, or a bastardised version of the same is flourishing in the nation now known to all but its leaders as Taiwan - for an unseen period of time - but in all essence subjugated by the wheels of history, while the thoughts of Mao are swept aside even more thoroughly, even its political thought being rather a product or copy of what preceded it, the unspoken "-ism" of Deng, until now predominant, may be as much under siege by the winds of history. As for what may replace it, and whether Xi will surpass his two predecessors and make the power and glory his own, all but the kingdom, in name, we must watch and scrutinise all that was "known" about this rising giant, its inner workings of power, its constitution (not in name, but the ever-changing ways of precedence and limitations, its predominant clique and the main contenders according to already-outdated assertions) and then assume, chillingly that a new and more authoritarian state of affairs well may arise, with a far greater strength to its back than the reemerging bear. 

Added to measures of a chilling push for homogenisation and increased authority, the Maoist model may well be heralded to come back, with its reach extended and its name washed clean of the allusions of "red"-ness, now addressed with admiration in spite of the most horrendous past abuses committed in the name of this alleged refinement. This prospect, and the cultural and political implications that may enable its passage must be taken seriously, and the efforts to expand its influence met with the strongest demands and reminders of its record - and beginnings. While China as an inevitable place to play on the world stage, the same is not necessarily true of the faction which has presided over its rise. As so many times before, dynasties rise and fall. Even the republic, whose rise in 1912 may have been thought as impossible (as well as ahistorical) progress, was demolished within a few years, both in name and for every practical purpose it may have been intended, and the poor surrogate that rose from Guangzhou - forged together as much by the Japanese as its own blood-soaked campaign to cleanse the republic from its rivals - was unfit to compete with the increasingly tedious and attractive spell of the Gongchandang. Whether China will still be a "people's" republic within another sixty-eight or seventy years to come will be subject to this less dramatic transition, but also to the natural constraints posed by the people who has been its - sometimes grudging - benefactor, but also counterposed to that greatest of its rivals which still can claim the title of democratic: India. With both popular growth and rule to its advantage, it may well set its northern rival and neighbour on a course to increased Xi-ism or a Deng-ism for politics, equivalent in form (if not in haste) to the development of the remnant "republic" under Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui, which saw the equally nascent and industrious island rise from industrialisation to modernisation to fledging democracy, despite (or thanks to) its many consistent perils. To expect the China once thought derisively as "red" would take that same course, or remain in a cordoned-off space of its much-reduced influence, was ever a lie of convenience. It is time to decide, in Delhi as much as in Brussels, London, Paris and Washington, what sort of partner is desired, and how the basic questions of diplomacy - friendship or enmity, and on what terms - will form the basis of relations with the grand dragon, now not only of the east, but whose breath will be felt across the whole new world it has built, out of convenience and economic factors as much as by a blueprint rubber-stamped with any "thought" or "theory", let alone a deliberate, revolutionary design. For as far as the brand "revolutionary" goes, we may be witnesses to one.

"I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." Except, of course, by the perfect example for which the author himself would make a self-avowed incarnation. And with its failure to spread wings as it soars, what is the dragon to do now that it has taken flight? Will it - as the American republic in the days of Mr. Clemens - betray tradition for ambition and slither its extensive weight around a shrinking orb? Or retain the secure position of its cave, watchful over growing riches, but perilous to disturb for the fear of harkening sound and fury?

Mugabe, a teacher and tutelage ended

"When they write the history of my reign, sweet sister, they will say it began today." Those afforded the implicit say on the terms stated by capricious but not full-grown despot (on the macropolitical stage he so desired, or thought himself in need) and Filii Tyrannis Viserys III can certainly dictate the terms of history, such as Henry Tudor's decision to begin his reign the date before Bosworth Field and to this beam hold his foes accountable and even hang, sometimes far after they themselves have been reduced to skeleton or ashes - as whim or custom dictates. But so it is also deplorable to see tyrants grown out of their garments of power go to their graves in relative security and obscurity, and to already hear the clamour of when - now deprived of everything but that which he has been expected to lose long since - the laurels of civility were discarded and the auspices of tyranny began. The move of the Zimbabwean Armed Forces, an entity having lived through a rather unubiquitous existence throughout the charismatic authority and tactical deploy of paramilitary state terrorism and famine-as-policy of the Mugabe regime to confine, if not dethrone, the man whose name has been more synonymous with the country than the Ancient ruin city that shares its name has set a simultaneous low-key and yet groundbreaking end to its nascent thirty-seven and half year tutelage.

It is true that, in the African continent, a few strongmen (including, but by no means limited to Equatorial Guinea's cruel, efficient and seldom-bespoken tyrant Teodoro Obiang Nguema) have held court for longer than Zimbabwe's creator and alleged benefactor-turned-abusive grandfather, but few have successfully presided over such human desolation and destruction, not necessarily physical - though the astounding brutality and cynical motives of the Gukurahundi campaign, the dictatorship's christening and evoking by its very name a rain of terror and cleansing, has been sadly drowned out by the occupation and eviction of European settlers - but of a great human capital and what was once referred to as the breadbasket of a continent. With the clock of his government coming to a meeting with its burgeoning, if slightly improved life expectancy - sadly joined with the hushing of criticism in lieu of rather polite calls for an appropriate "retirement" - the question is how he is to remembered, he who broke loose the last cherry of the cake that, at his birth, was the British Empire at its prime. It could be argued, however, that "honour" (with all the sullen edges of the postcolonial regime and its faults) could as well as should rather be placed at the feet of Mr. Smith, allegedly lamented by his successor Mr. Tsvangirai as the best holder of that office but for the pigment of his skin.

When you do a deal with the devil... talk is already surmounting the difficult past of the Movement for Democratic Change in government - and in opposition - for its chairman to resume his old position and head a new Zimbabwean government. Will he walk in the footsteps of his former partner and near-bane (?) and if... how far?

Already, the excuses are being unsheltered and moved out of the closets. He who lived too long, he who sadly suffered too much before he came into his rightful place (the notion of a "rightful throne" being obnoxious even in the - entirely symbolic - absence of its second part). The mentioning of the word Gukurahundi, until it is as well recalled as Srebrenica or Ravensbrück, and a stark reminder that it was bishop Abel Muzorewa - well befitting his name - and Josiah Gumede and the United African National Council - an organisation and cause much deserving, in my view, its acronym; or at least did during those difficult months which ushered in the Lancaster House agreement - who his ZANU thugs overthrew, to wage a campaign of terror and political and moral blackmail into a re-poll that it could win at gunpoint competition, just as sure as it could expand its majority step by step after establishing it. The absurd "white" count of 28 Rhodesian Front MPs was slashed to 20 in this first defining contest of the merry 1980s, but asides from that there cannot be much said to its favour, and - arguably - plenty of famine as policy, bloody carnage and wasted human resources to its count.

I cannot but note the coincidence the death - for all purposes - of Mugabe as a phenomenon - his lifespan being, like his short-term countryman Hastings Banda, too extended for him to either resurface like Idi Amin's predesuccessor Milton Obote or, like a small but fatefully growing number of strongmen such as Charles Taylor, face justice - with the final degeneration of the being of Charles Manson and the downfall, it seems, of another Amin. Regarding Manson, what may be apparent would be the flamboyant, sociopathic unhinged psyche tending towards what used to be madness, but must be stated equally is the decisive manipulation of and conviction held by the members of the "family" (or shall I say comrades?). Indeed, is the two men had exchanged bodies five years past, I cannot see what course would have developed differently. The obstinacy and complete lack of remorse making itself painfully aware at recurrent hearings, and the ritual near-maddening thunders of haphazard condemnation of enemies since long reduced to obscurity or exile. Both flirted with the image of Hitler - though none took to his creed seriously - and saw no greater objective than the perpetuation of the self, and the imposition of fear and brutal violence to draw it out.

Too late, and to no avail. For all the teacher's experience, and undoubted rhetorical and organizational skills, the hat only befits him in the incidental presence of the hanging judge's cloth, proudly elevated on a pedestal.

The question now posed, other than the symbolic one of the old man's future - Pinochet's notion of retirement being the greatest hope which history could extend, though analogously with that case it will likely be too long before charges are raised - is how much of the regime made symbolic with one man's name, image and vision was a product and component of his own abilities in the merely Machiavellian sphere, and how likely the disintegration of "Mugabeism", however defined, now that the teacher-king has been evicted from his Katheder. Given all that has been stated, and the history of the continent in the past quarter of century - the time after the glorious and hopeful turn of 1989-91, mind you - there are several reasons to be soberly skeptical. 

The attempt to re-introduce the attempt at a currency, as well as the generally reconciliatory notes from the transitional government, herald at least a short outbreak of surging support and pragmatist policy implementation. But high expectations, typically imposed, and the ballast of Chiwenga and his cronies - the real architects of this ouster, must be weighed against the traditional practice of the institution on the continent whenever it crosses the threshold into politics. The Zimbabwean military is not the Turkish one, or its Thai and Honduran counterparts in their respective "constitutional coups" against burgeoning strongmen Shinawatra and Zelaya in 2006 and 2009. The Zimbabwean military will look over its shoulders and, quite possibly, give President Mnangagwa reason to look over his in their struggle to enforce an orderly succession while not letting the system itself crumble. Not to be reduced to further corpses or pathetic old men beneath the rubble, they will have to maintain its basic foundations, at least for years to come.

Finally, the role of South Africa - so far only disgraceful on its northern neighbour (and very near constituent province) at least since the pressure of long-overdue Prime Minister Vorster for Smith to resign - and the priorities of its almost as frightening first man, but very soon to be the lowest, and likely the views of Crown Prince (if not Prince Regent) Ramaphosa, will be crucial. The possibility of constructive engagement here stands against the decade-old Chinese influence, which since the alliance between the Maoist famine state and the rebel-within-rebel cause of ZANU has expanded rapidly across the continent's face, and arguably not to its unequivocal development. The current divided - as well as divisive - policy of the American administrations (in this area much a plural at best against each other) is likely to expand this scope and leave the coup makers as well as the men and women on the street to the mercy of Beijing gerontocrats and their investor beneficiaries.

Above all, the handicapping of the opposition that once seemed so credible and hopeful - and led Mugabe into some of his worst acts, and a country to its moral and material bedrock - and relative obscurity of leaders Tsvangirai, Mutambara and Ncube makes the future of the Zimbabwean seem equally obscure, if not outrightly grim. But failure to deliver reforms, and the promise if yet cautiously implied in the call of Vox Populi, Vox Dei (a phrase I cannot elect whether to love or resent) will bear a political cost, and not being established, or trusted as he once certainly was, Mnangagwa will have to steer a careful balance between the forces that conceived his reign, for all the less than thirty-seven years it is to last, and consider his legacy before it shortly begins. Between the general outcry, sadly muted and paralysed (in no small measure in the most literal, as well as deliberate sense) since its last great seizure in 2008, and the oligarchic structures of a government that will now have to be remade to accommodate a system of orderly succession beyond the caretaker and no further ad hoc solutions. It will also accommodate the formation, in no small part, of new forces of opposition no doubt emboldened by the destiny, or substitute thereto, of this order being one of transparency, rule of law and political pluralism. While the hammer of state must be grasped firmly even in the face of the anvil, it is impossible to imagine a path back to the order of the dominant-party state between 1987 and 2000; not unless Mnangagwa wants to be known as the caretaker in every sense. One may thus hope he has learned the teacher's greatest lesson, one which has sadly replayed millennia before the far too aggrieved and ecstatic calls of the electoral campaign of 1980 (at least for those considering President Trump a violent demagogue) for one to hope for the best. The world - and Ramaphosa, Tillerson and Haley in particular - would do best to recall it once again, and leverage all pressure as to match the conserving forces of party and military which have raised, and will drum him from the start.

"The people have spoken." And yet, so recently he wore the face of the "de-spoken" as a badge. And yet, have they? The people has not been given a true say since the country came clean and clambering into the world. "The voice of the people is the voice of God" may be a slogan of empowerment, but as everything stated by the voice of God, an orphan amongst a million siblings. 

Ultimately, everyone must dream - mindlessly if not - Nelson Mandela's dream of an Africa at peace with itself. But as the example of Europe, the closest individual tile to the vision of Immanuel Kant and Alexandre Kojève to a world of independent states led by peaceful cooperation and interdependent understanding, there can only be peace where the Vox Populi reigns, locally as well as on the often disillusioning national stages (the hopeless state of the latter being best managed, if not redrawn, through the former). And throughout the stages of decolonisation, the Cold War, and the elusively free and prosperous era after the cold, the same hope has gone from nascent, to persisting, to subverted in progression - such as in post-Hutu Power, post-genocide Rwanda - and sometimes, eerily, in silent boredom - such as in Ghana and Botswana. Zimbabwe has no true precedent, no tradition or historical continuity of democracy or credible representative system, much less one transcending tribal bounds and firmly instituting rule of law (two precepts which ought, or rather must be fulfilled if a healthy multi-party system is to flourish). But it does have - unerased - immense resources, and the hope that is the hour of change. Whatever President Mnangagwa may now promise, he has much to fear for himself (more so as the calls for inquiry into his involvement in past atrocities have, gracefully, reminded us of them) if the more enchanting and outward of pledges are successfully delivered, and possibly the prospect of tribal violence as well. Whatever the claims of the already disheartened clinking glasses to the demise of an old man, who won the game on all counts but - hopefully - for his legacy, there is plenty on that score before his country is truly ashes. Smith's prediction, that Rhodesia was not to see black majority rule before 2976, is laughed out as if it was as outdated as the name of the country (a name, I must admit, emitting a rather pleasant daze when spoken in Swedish), as if it were not a clock still ticking. It is time to set an end, not this year but within a credible timetable, and deliver the promise called for when black nationalists such as George Nyandoro, James Chikerema took to the streets and that old lion Harold Wilson set out majority rule as condition for an independence already long denied - and yes, I think, the hopes of Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, Roy Welensky and Garfield Todd as well - in negating that ignominious statement through fulfilling it.

A past that has too long been buried, and seems already forgotten. But dig very shallow, and you will find silent but grave testimony of a regime, its main architect all but beyond the verdict of courts, that did not culminate in bones - as the fusion of the tragic hero story arc with the mythos of la Terreur suggest - but built on their foundation. Remember, with the vindication of this week and its plain memories in consideration, that more skeletons lie beneath the arid hills of Matabeleland than under the fields and forests outside Srebrenica. Never let the seemingly clear image of the present cloud the understanding of the past. Doubtlessly, even Hitler - onefold - on the dock had made a pathetic sight, and incongruous in juxtaposition to merely the image of atrocity.

The new Saudi state, speeding onto the highway (at its own pace)

The series of purges, still unexpected and adjoined with questions and estimates on the course it will set the country on (and not without the almost customary parallell to the Night of the Long Knives) followed swifter than most experts had deemed themselves audacious to foresee, and have unquestionably served to reinforce the transition as much expected as already speeding, which will exchange the fragile balance existing since the death of old man Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1953 - the year of the death of Stalin, the Rosenbergs, Dylan Thomas, Sergey Prokofyev and Mary, Queen of the Empire in 1910-1936, mind you - for something yet more fragile but purposely stronger and more fitted to ever-changing but now pressing times. Its most distinguishing feature mirrors that undergone by the first Caliphate following the death of Ali ibn Abi Talib, or (to coin a phrase) its repeal and replace by a monarchy of Mu'awiyah's line and the Banu Umayyah - an elitist clan who in the Prophet's days had been at best sceptic, and zealous at most when battling or torturing the pious - and the transfer of rule by consensus by a brokering oligarchy and a careful balance of power for the supreme domination of one man's loins (ambiguously cheered by some heralding it as a step in a long march towards an open and equal society).

So far, the reforms undertaken by father-son in a too-open and yet closed collegial relationship have met with little resistance, and its swift boldness - from the death of Abdullah the power-broker to the ascension of the Sudairi as the epicenter of the inexorable and long-expected shift to a third generation, and then the straight line from, all in less than thirty full moons - show the paradoxic drive for cohesive survival among the ranks of undoubtedly jealous brothers, nephews and cousin, now cast out into the cold (a deadly realisation, but in its most literal sense and by the joint sensations of ostracism) but which are all hallmarked by a common realisation of fear. No bulwark of resistance is likely to emerge soon, or before Salman is dead or dying. After that, it will be a short timespan - in the terms defining the workings of this family and the economic system that upholds it - before the new order is established within.

Seven brothers, father superimposed. The irony of the tribalist, bedouin culture which spawned the might and progeny of Abdulaziz Ibn Saud is its necessary insistence of matrilineal bonds. The Sudairi Seven, defined by an ambitious and insistent mother contriving cooperation within a competitive family and the cohesive power of asabiyyah, Ibn Khaldun's definition for the arid-climate phenomenon of extended self-preservation through group solidarity, which among the Saudi clearly exists in a multitude. 

For a multitude of factors could bring about not only the overthrow of the Al Saud family, but the destruction of the Saudi state before its centenary in 2032. The Arab-Persian cold war with an Iran entering a center role on the Middle Eastern stage and with all the resources to keep such a place for the future - even as its own system is facing challenges just as serious, which can best be boiled down to the "population clock", and increasing political emancipation of a post-1979 generation not too keen on and impious against the conclusions laid out half a century ago by architect of its own system, and the "nuclear clock" heralding an inevitable confrontation with its neighbours, if not the established nuclear quinquevirate - the Saudi monarchy have embarked on a rivalry since nearly forty years, with calamitous fallout outside the frontiers of these competitors for the mantle of the prophet (the continuous hold and solidifying of Israeli rule over Jerusalem making the Saudi prospect of a Caliphate impossible, beyond its quasi-form of "Custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques") seems bound to clash in open conflict over the fate of the region. The dress rehearsal in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, now Lebanon and - not for much longer - Iraq have been ongoing since years, on all these fronts to the apparent benefit of the plague of Khomeinist Ja'afari Shi'ah expansionism, with its altering faces. With the most powerful armaments in the region per capita, Saudi Arabia have yet awe-striking powers to unleash (hence the denigrating use of "dress rehearsal" for what would better be termed in squeals as cries of bloody murder) but which may just as well turn against them in the event of an uprising. Just as matters started to look underway, or at least under control, and the dead spirit of consensus fitted for euthanasia and succession by a new and just as innovative order as the bedouin pan-tribalist kingdom, or the ulema-and-oil system once was.

In the struggle to into modernity and to best define it, with past and present already crumbling, Salman's agnatic ascendance may have placed a firm lock on the march towards progress, however defined. Hereditary monarchy, while rightly defined by Thomas Paine as equally absurd as a hereditary doctor or hereditary mathematician (though he equally gets the point about both the values of monarchy and hereditary qualities, a doctor or mathematician in Paine's day being far more likely to be the son of a doctor or mathematician than any other profession) sports a brand of continuity in which a state without a nation increasingly finds itself wanting, and which may be its own alternative to a democratic revolution; which will be as likely to keep the Saudi family as regalia as the August 1792 uprising did the Bourbons, or its own fully-fledged, capacious, and undoubtedly cruel Wahhabi Salafist paraphrase of the Jomhuri-ye-Eslami. Barring near-certain foreign intervention, the last may actually come to pass. The first, the promise of the Jasmin spring, is sure not to, even in the context of the most beneficial American intervention or continued Western treatment with many stripes, both hard-green economic, rainbow cultural-relativist or (brazenly) anti-Jihadist hopes.

The now departed, already so concerned. Meritocracy looms in the background while the one and future king has smugly claimed his seat in the halls of power.

For what might be established within may well be weltered from without. The Islamic Republic, deadly foe as much as alternative to the Saudi system for nearly four decades has for that same period, after accomplishing its own Shah Mat in an alleged revolution - in a move which must have stirred something in the ulema south of the strait and (certainly) kindled some of their hopes enough to reevaluate the existing model - strategically extended its influence with a chessplayer's mood for patience and quiet indulgence in opponents' mistakes. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia, or Salman's Arabia, has spent the period - verily enough to make empires rise or fall or both - squandering resources over an endless set of causes that have maintained retardation and caused upheaval at home and abroad, and whose legacy which must rightly be given the same association with international Jihadi terrorism as that of the president with its two irreplaceable and broken victims.

The process of reform of an allegedly ossified and hermit kingdom - by some alleged progressives termed "revolution" - now underway will thus be the foundation by which the future of the country will stand or fall. The social and economic reforms delayed, as the inevitable question of succession, until the very last hour are already underway, with a number of high-rising, groundbreaking and unrealistic (but given the desperation equally possible) investment projects designed to burn oil to move ahead to a more refined model of sustainment - a return to bedouin ways being apparently impossible after a mere 80 years, thus yet again confirming Ibn Khaldun's thesis - and emancipate, at a pace designed to put Slomobius to shame, the Saudi woman within the framework of the domination simultaneously strengthened, and even fit to turn lambasting critics into all but admirers of this prospect (but so did the old and very dynamic order of Singapore, not entirely successfully but disgustingly so, by the most shallow but almost admirable appropriation of identity politics).

Laying their hands on the globe. But some are already retracting. The new Pharaoh appears prescient, donning his constant calm. The First Lady seems unmoved by the juxtaposition of the family and industry so credited with changing the face of Manhattan with the ones held to blame for scarring it. The President, above all, dons the visage of the gambling table as he, careful as never before, fondles the palantír. As the wizard said, one never knows who is watching... or listening.

The most dramatic bow may yet be announced, and may (as predicted by Caspian) involve the separation of the two titles held since the 1980s, wherein Salman will retain the title of Khadim while King Muhammad, the first Al Saud of that name and title to reign, will rule as political incarnation of Ibn Saud's legacy. For this reason, the abandonment of the ecclesiastic title would be considerably more dramatic than its adoption, which was a mere formality stolen from the Ottoman Sultans and, supposedly, a Kurd known as Saladin. In the Saudi system, for all its deep-founded hypocrisy and ill-aged instinct of bargaining with the times, separation would mean the historic establishment of a new order: a socially contracted Leviathan rather than theocratic incarnation of both the secular and ecclesiastical.

The fallout of this symbolism, especially if it will mean a break with the alliance of the Wahhabi ulema and the Saudi bloodline, older than the United States, cannot be overestimated. The social and economic reforms, drastic and altering what remains of Saudi religious orthodoxy whatever their contents and aspirations, will put equal pressure to the uneasy bonds between pragmatists and traditionalists within the ruling elite. Once they break, a society bound together by such consensus and welded only by stark brutality and oil wealth, may have to rely entirely on the latter to survive. Which, in all likelihood, it cannot. Fiscal and economic reform, including phasing out the oil industry - while singing a hymn of salvation for the rest of the world - is both corrosive and absolutely vital. The platinum key out of a suffocating vault, resting immersed in a vat of acid.

Will it succeed? Unlike the lock held by the Persian-Arab oligopoly on the oil market innovation (unlikely to be rivalled by a remerging Bolivarian Venezuela, the actor most well placed to profit from it) innovations merrily recited, and now tested, as the way of the future; technology, IT and financial services, tourism are frail to other sorts of competition, and will mean higher standards regarding the conditions of an already-dying third Saudi state. While changing social patterns will predictably be accepted as a reverse carrot, spurring calls for further incitement, lack of civil rights, a constitution and an even rubber-stamp elected legislature will further the clash between crucial reform and outside expectations, as will continued involvement by Salman's Arabia in regional wars.

This is a lever which the King may incline to be pulled against the Iranians, and whoever is to emerge as the next Rahbar from among the cool-minded turbans already self-empowered and long-since plotting across the strait. But each and every bomb dropped in cause of a waiting democide against an Arab neighbour, every riyal spent in prolonging the Syrian cause - the Iraqi one being sordidly lost, to the detriment of anyone remotely professing the Sunni dogma within its borders and his grandson - will hurt the cause of modernisation and force Muhammad to set a course between waging the old King Fahd agenda for regional geopolitical domination, reinvented on a new and concerning morass with a burgeoned arsenal including Swedish arms, or that of his eastern neighbours and make his country a middle ground between or juxtaposition of a mystical Lawrentine Arabia, the technocratic-metropolitan tyranny of Lee's and son's burgeoning city-state, and a futuristic counterpart of antebellum Beirut - and eventual scenery for the next Star Wars trilogy. As of present both these spices have been cast into the mortar of "reform", now to be molded and formed in a new dish at the cook's discretion, and the pestle swifter spun and brought down harder by the day. The growing prospects of reconciliation with Turkish interests against the Greater Shaytan, as well as increasing Indian, Chinese and African capital made available will likewise provide much-needed support on both these paths, but only with certain promises made and kept, certain standards affirmed, certain legal requisites securely established.

Dusk steals upon Riyadh... for a day, or a century about to close. As Ibn Wahhab might have asked while standing at this spot and beheld the desert; What could possibly replace it? If this sight would have been a fright to the first scions of Saud and Wahhab, I can imagine far worse.

What highway this process, eventually inexorable, will put the country on, whether it will lead out of the desert, and how well the Islamic Republic will be able to take advantage to press the present conflict within the frontiers of the kingdom (rather than the self-confidently stated opposite) and burning at its doorstep before its own clock runs close to midnight is a question of time. As for now - as before - Muhammad stands against looming and impossible odds but he has the initiative, the lever that is a country of his own, the will to act. Nonwithstanding, and in the same breath it must be said, countless have been given the lever. Few have equalled the strength of the messenger and, considerably more crucial, his Rāshidūn, and few the follies (Byzantine, one might even say, if not so sassy) of Constantinople and Ctesiphon. Measured in success, the exploits of Erdoğan may be more admired than accursed, but the Iranian geopolitical strategy seems as grandiose in its perfection as a well-played round, not least by the other players, of the old game.

To counter this, the captain - sole at the rudder, now or shortly - of the fourth Saudi state will need more than a less dogmatic and greener banner of pure audacity. While his grandfather's blood, the last to act so strongly may be in him (and even his best uncle's, perhaps) this is a different time, and this a calf untested against the trials which have vested him, rather than by which he have been entitled. Paine's observation of absurdity echoes the somber observation of the first regal Muslim family, of the society and structures which were encapsulated by the faith rather than overthrown by it, by its echo regarding a hereditary prophethood. The first Madinah and the sonless, cobbled construct which followed could succeed because it was - in the fully un-ironic sense - aristocratic in a part of the world where, as the daughterly heirs of the prophet found, only the best prevailed. Where the creed proposed, and taken until the very edges of the kingdom, by the Zaydi-Houthi rebellion would have taken the first Muslim state remains unexplored, but upon such a noxious premise - to me and to old man of the desert Al Wahhab - rests the future of if not the entirety of Sunnidom the present tenant-occupant of its primeval landmarks, its moral and spiritual bedrock already challenged, and as of yet, this quasi-Caliphal authority of which nothing has been conceived to rival it that could conceivably could be born and actually live. Not yet, that we know. All that is known is that the old must finally die, and this order has - like its nominal steward - lasted too long to craft the new. In other words, the great game is on.

Comfortable at the center stage, no questions asked. But how much the prince that was promised can take in from the world he wants to mimic, if not surpass, will be judged before he comes into his throne, and the fall will be his if he fails to deliver. For the sake of those deemed fit to be his subjects, if not for his own, one is sordidly forced to recall then-President Obama's words of well-wishes and genuine hopes for the success of his impending successor.

The Presidency, Trumped

Though it may not have been very widely noticed given his probability of spit flinging to a backdrop of noise, the disabling of the President's Twitter account (a rather unfitting verb for his rantings, even by its later and less soothing connotations) has affirmed, for once, the determined response that so many of both camps have called for against the man who broke every expectation to rule and is now - even by his most vitriolic detractors - expected to break every rule.

But beyond the mere haphazard guilt-free loathing expressed to cheer the song of his anger, the action of this one rebel enjoying the audacity of an unpenalisable (is that a word?) action has a keen sense of timing. The noose slowly and delicately tightened around the neck of US President Trump has, since and before his inaugural, been compared to the proceedings of the Watergate Scandal (and, perhaps less admiringly, the Iran-Contra affair and President Reagan's unkeenly disturbing assurance to the nation that his memory could not instruct him of his well-established complicity) and thus its sordid and so far unique conclusion. This is a fact perhaps as much subject to desires and whims as to the revelations expected by the ongoing Mueller investigation, a tribute to the culture persisting since the Clinton days and the second impeachment in American history. Now, with pressure mounting on both sides of the proverbial aisle for such a conclusion, it is perhaps time to ask whether Trump will consume - if not collapse - the Grand Old Party with its unsteady rider. Or else, he may be destroyed by the beast into whose maze he ventured. After all, the grand old man is not Pericles.

The dejected state of the horde of far above 300 (and well below 300 million) was the most dreaded thing to be expected from a Trump defeat. As Swedish columnist Johan Norberg poignantly expressed, perhaps there was less to fear in victory than defeat for the Kekist cause. Yet, a deliberate aggrandisement of the "deplorables", or of the green one, is not to be taken lightly. Remember that Whig, and Tory, and suffragette were once words to be flung as insult. As was democrat, lower case.

The Kekist rebellion against, rather than within the Republican party (with its counterparts and partly overlapping tendency behind the banner of the donkey) is greater than one man, and will not vanish even if Trump is convicted, killed or, perhaps least likely, resigns in disgrace and hailed as Leonidas drowned by a Thermopylean swamp. One of my hopes, more general and perhaps as inexplicable to a general audience, was that the loathing - usually accompanied by self-loathing by anyone of conscience - and critique of his indecency would result in the relative stagnation of the presidency, akin to that after Andrew Johnson's just as cumbersome and race-related (alright, give the man a break) feud with both parties one and a half century ago, which resulted in his conviction and the elevation of the first senator to the highest office but for one principled vote. (I count my opinion to that of Edmund Ross, who lined up with six "Nay" Republicans out of respect for the office, which he may just as likely have denigrated, and subsequently lost his seat.) I quite recall the relative silence to the actions of president Obama on numerous fields and legal excesses, and for this reason as much as the prospect of an enduring Kekist movement, with further spawns down the avenue of race-based politics, it would be soothing to see its powers even more restrained than critics and cheerleaders have this year found them to be... in practice if not by the first constitutional amendment since 1992.

However, despite the persistence of these desires-predictions, I believe there is no breakthrough to be had soon. Mueller's investigation, with double expectations of a legal coup d'etat or conspiracy - both with the questionable elevation of a man of Wade's party affiliation, but not much more to fit even into the crumbiest of clauses to his merit - mounting, will is more like to drag on until election defeat has passed or is looming. Wait - do I believe that he will be defeated? This list of possible contenders, smugly including Zuckerberg - in the end, and given the recent past, not a choice of sensationalist garbling - and probably putting obvious long-shots Biden and Sanders too high (Jerry Brown, however, does make the mind spin; for all his flaws and near-octagenarian state he is spry, a liberal with good outreach and astounding experience, a bridge between new and old, the quirky Indie-thinker and the established administrator, "alt-centrism" defined - and besides, if he selects his running mate in a mood for balance, we could end up with a single-name sticker) is worthy of thought, and contains more than enough material to cancel the mistakes of the Clintonista machine. And, I must admit, put a reversal to the sordid result of the 1992 primaries.

Too old to be president... or old enough? Indeed, Deng Xiaoping - true father of modern China and the role model of its Zhuxi, or literally "Chairman" - maintained supreme power until at least 1990, age 86, the age Governor Brown would be after a single-term hiatus from his life post-defeat against Clinton two years later. Could he beast the rebel who broke that dynasty, set that record for America, and be the first Democrat since Knox Polk to surrender willingly after half his bounty? Time is likely his enemy, but may tell us differently.

But individual hopes will fuel no more than aggregate hatred. So far, the Democratic leadership has handled its role in opposition poorly. Despite the ravings, often near-uniform, against a president who, while not (yet) the most poorly equipped or most worthy of spite in American history, has seen already questionable polling numbers plummet to depths from which ascent would prove an even more unlikely experience than his impossible coronation. Mere disgust and objection to the thing in itself will not fuel a rebound, and the elections of 2018 are already predetermined to maintain a workable GOP majority in both chambers. It is my belief, thus, that a backlash may be expected in 2020, not so much against Trump as the dreaded and only sustained through fear-of-else policies soundly and firmly rejected in 2012, which has so far been the bulk of what has been enacted. The fruits of the promise of Trump, as much in line with isolationists like Buchanan and the European nativist right and their ilk, has been the degeneration (which, like cancer, would have happened anywise at a later date) of the American empire abroad, and the slowing of the globalisation process equally inexorable. Both these facts will empower the isolationist, protectionist left, a trend already unraveling, whose more populist elements will try to pick up the promise of the infrastructure package as well, where Trump will fail or renege the promised deliverance.

An interesting prospect to consider... a battle of the new, waged by the aged. Regardless if they both lose, in the long run, their spirits will hang over electoral politics in the same manner Goldwater's and McGovern's undeniably have for decades.

A bid against Bernie Sanders in 2020 would be a cross-prosecution of traitors, one alleged and one well underway, of broken promises by the man hailed as a new type of Republican, and the crossing of Trump voters across the line. I firmly believe that both Bernie and Jerry have a sound chance, just as I believe they will not win their primaries. Neither will Ben Sasse, or whoever the never-Trump movement will field, if not in an attempt to impeach by ballot so as to throw an impossible man into the simmer and bubbles to feel the heat, or Governor Kasich or any other who might deem the emperor vulnerable in his own camp and grasp the hilt while in the mind rising to proclaim a moderate conservative message built on optimism and breaking gridlock (the term has gone out of fashion, but in this case out of an overuse for its need rather than the opposite). Mueller will be the Republican, if any, to put an end to the Trump administration. Or, conceivably and in his own words, one of the second amendment people.

You should be... "Thnxful". If not shameless. The denigration - if not dismemberment - of words and terms, including flinging epithets such as this against Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, shows the distortion and de-rationalisation of politics on all fringes, if not also creeping to the centre. Trump may have earned the tongue-in-cheek moniker of the first post-modern president. He will unlikely be the last.

Meanwhile, for those who do not believe that Trumpism, or Kekism in power - an unsafe assumption - is heralding the breakup of American democracy, if indeed not already having it underway, the question of the future of the Democratic party is haunting. A little more than a year past, I all but predicted the end of the GOP in power for ages to come - if not from its seemingly unimpeachable gerrymandered lock on the House of Representatives. For all the failures that underlined that assumption, and the prospect (probably already failed, as repeatedly demonstrated) of a Kekist-Republican predominance for many years to come, the question still remains: Where will the donkey lead us, when it is burdened and clatters into motion again?

Here, there are often as disturbing, if not as powerful signals of a downwards spiral both in intellectual dissonance as well as faith in the democratic process and marketplace of ideas which made America great, whenever that was, and a steadfast rebellion against truth, mainstream media, and politics as a vocation, with its tragically known counterpart on the other side of the conservative-liberal divide. If you could, by the widest stretch and with good conscience, use the latter term. Dissidence is oppression, speech is hatred, words are punches. Jews hounded and issued threats laced with anti-Semitism after departing and denouncing Breitbart News are good Nazi sympathisers. The examples are piling up, the overtures to overtly totalitarian assumptions of a society purified from all that is unsafe, all that which makes discomfort and aggression - in one pitiful slogan, all that is "Fascist Intellectual Thuggery in the service of the Trump/Pence Fascist regime" - very real and very dangerous to the spirit of democracy, if not its institutions and practices. Whoever will lead against the Republican ticket in 2020 will have to either spearhead against this trend, and (wisely) adapt the notion carelessly or graciously put out by Stephen Bannon regarding the failure of the left, or catalyse on it.

As with the example of the often self-promoted King Aerys, the use of Fascist twice in one sentence says more about the user than the arguments that may be perceived beneath it. And wherever it is actually applicable, as George Orwell established in the 1930s - he shortened it, wherever individuals do not self-identity as fascist, to "bully" - it is just as much a case of its users as the people of whom it is used. And just as with their perceived counterparts on the end of a spectrum of increasingly hate-infested and divisive politics, it is a movement whose momentum may be harnessed and used by authoritarian power-seekers also from among the Democrats. No names issued here.

A doable duo (left) when the Republican checks out? Will the grand old man have the affiliation at the time or be the first since Tyler - quite a long time ago, though I hear he also has living grandchildren - to hold, and to leave, the supreme office as a non-partisan?  

The future of the presidency and the nature of the end of the Trump administration disregarded, I would like to say this; the corrosion of the great American experiment, to whatever degree, has been a work of bad people on both sides - on all sides I would say, to escape the somewhat treacherous binary of a two-party system - and while the Grand Old Party since the mid-1990s (in some sense the 1960s) has laid the groundwork for a very confrontationist and ultra-purist form of conservatism - with its seemingly unique contribution to its maybe terrible consequences of the weakening of the American mission undergoing since Truman as well as its more ominous internal subversion, But there is equally good here on the state and local levels as there is filth and bigotry on and outside the shores and jetties of the party of Jackson (as there has been at least since its foundation). There is also something to be said of the terrible bipartisan consensus - yes, today that term might seem a mark of insanity - on the issues which truly catapulted the Trump campaign to office long before it was conceived, and nearly put a self-proclaimed socialist (with victories in Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Idaho, Utah, West Virginia - not the promised land of progressive thinking even in the time of the Populists and Eugene Debs) as its main contender if not its bane. (On the issue of whether Sanders ought to have been, as well as might better have served as nominee than Clinton there is, as we see, plenty to be said, and more tears to be spared from the reading experience of what supposedly happened.) Free trade, migration, increasingly climbing debt ceiling, an arguably un-American American empire stretched and stretching itself and its increasingly strained confidence and resources across the globe - these points of view long since entering the tiresome dictuum of consensus, but have since far longer held long-standing opposition never embodied, or allowed, representation within the national political spectrum for decades, with an unkeen pressure cooker effect once the promise of established politicians have gone so low that the electorate will look at almost any quarter for salvation. (Enter, I say already, the next to carry the banner of repeal and replace the seemingly unshakable order.)

Perhaps it is the electoral system must change - beyond the cause for reforming the Electoral College, which will before long will be taken up by Democratic frontrunners, and equally repelled by Republicans. Perhaps the powers of the supreme office must be curtailed. And perhaps, though unlikely, the powers of "Washington" must retreat from both globe and the vast-enough stretches of the American nation, again to put it allegiance and politics with the citizens of the individual states, now all but geographic swathes allocated a number of equally obscure "electors". This is one point where my views would in principle align with those of traditionalist conservatives, and arguably - I would say - in the interests of many progressives, whose solutions would be better tested with policy directed and funded at the state level and thus for a greater expanse of ideas to be tested, and not merely long discussed and argued and finally lit, and then snuffed out (and if you think Vermont is an extreme hopeless case surely Maine, Minnesota or, well, California would not be strong enough in its popular base to see if it is to be mimicked; indeed, in this case Canada and the neither populous, nor very progressive Saskatchewan proved more decentralised and innovative, to the benefit of much of the country).

Whether the established political clubs, from which you could exclude Sanders and Trump, will take the cue or a new flora of parties, or a new consensus must emerge, we who are younger than the aforementioned couple are like to see, if yet to a price. What is clear is that the fact that both have turned on the savage beast, now being savaged piece by piece, will not take away the current momentum of hate-and-fear-driven rage which may yet carry a true messiah, or a true autocrat (I can ofttimes hardly separate the two) into the position where - now it has been proven, and to the credit of American democracy - he cannot do so much harm, but where there is so much more harm to be done. Ending it on a sudden note and a beacon of obscurity, how about we pick up on President Wilson's proposal from 1884, when he was a doctoral student at Princeton - the first and only such to reach the supreme office, and then under auspicious and perhaps prescient circumstances - and penned a little-known but profound critique of the system which would bear him, and his country, into the workings of world affairs from which it now seems so reluctant and simultaneously audacious to retreat.

There, I've said it.

Too late for spoilers...

"At dusk, as the polls are being counted at the end of this week Emmanuel Macron will be proclaimed the President of the French Fifth Republic. In this, he will follow Valery Giscard d'Estaing (stay strong...) as the only candidate not of the Socialist or Gaullist camp to have bested the last of contests since the May crisis of 1958 that swept the current order into its increasingly uncomfortable setting."

Thus I wrote, at the beginning of last week. And in this outcome - indeed, regardless of the outcome - the contest of last Sunday would have proclaimed the end of the order of the Fifth, heralding a new Époque in French politics whether a new constitutional document is inaugurated or not. For whereas Giscard d'Estaing, akin to every president until 2007 had been in politics under the stout general, the forces currently in the race remains virulently in opposition to this order and have risen to their places on the chariots on the promise of drastic change.

And if change is on the table, it may as well be regarded a fortunate answer to the call of history. The French economy, far taken from the Trente Glorieuses in its growing debt and long-term unemployment rate of double digits, abundantly so for the young and particularly ignominious in its isolation of the foreign-born from the open, white economy. Once the envy of Europe, centuries of post-Colbertian dirigisme has worked out not so well for the growing section of unemployed who may cherish the idea more than the reality, and will in the end end in the certain downfall of the Fifth Republic itself. Mirroring this gradual destruction of what was once the great power of the Western world, the Socialist and Republican parties both turned to outsiders with drastic, even visionary proposals aimed at revival and restoration of the glorious growth of former times (if not geographical). Untypically for Western democracies and by now even for France, they were vindicated in their respective parties, but ultimately failed in their grasp for the final prize, decidedly and with humiliation. Hamon's and the Socialist Party's stunning reduction, from a majority to a mere six percent of the electorate, will be remembered in the annals of the republic as the end of an era, which however was far greater than the party that produced two of its eight (lest more will follow) oarsmen. Fillon's, by the disease which consumes far more of the supposedly best of us, but here unusually early. This was a defeat to make Kim Campbell shudder, to keep Edwin Edwards from considering another bid.

Three for him to her one. A political analyst, I would not estimate her chances so highly... but the tide of the FN, almost imperceptibly and to the relief of many of my professional counterparts, has risen sharply since Chirac's Lukashenka-like figures in 2002.

The choice between Le Pen and Melenchon, who I previously chided for wishing to put humans first under an iron weight of economic chute (an accusation that, I think, must be reiterated for Mme Le Pen) would have arranged a contest between two who could not possibly reach the 50 % threshold except for either civil war-like circumstances, the destruction of Lyon by a suitcase nuclear device, or under such circumstances where the only option was the other of the two. Now, with a populist of solitude and a master of utilising la peur faces an elitist - though ardent in populist tactics, if not so crude as the term would evoke - in mongering hope, the result is all but determined.

Marine will make significant advantages, but even against the backdrop of a majority of Melenchon's supporters staying at home or dropping spoilt ballots, their support for Le Pen is as miniscule as might have been expected (though not from reading their programs) there can be not the scantiest of chances for the Front in its quest to liberate France from Eurocrats. Not on May 7, nor in the parliamentary election yet to come, in which even a quadrupled share of seats would mean only a fraction of its present two seats, added to Dupont-Aignan's one (always good to be lent the support of an ally who you may later discard for the wolves after skinning his five percent, a good showing, to the bone). Marine only has to swallow the bitter tears of defeat, and brace herself for the fact that she will, in my mid-election approximation (nearly) double her father's result against the "crook" Chirac. The Bonaparte-like tally of 2002, which I well remember with an instinctive sense of loathing (for whom, I cannot tell) was not up for repeat, and given the scenario which could have brought her victory already this year; who is to say she may not double it again in five, ten, fifteen years. The woman who will, to little doubt, continue her bid to be the first president of France is not that old, and still has many years to her father's last bid for a term at 79 in 2007 - after which he has all but survived two.

"... and then there were two. A big bear hugged one..." Or was it the other way? The one to be frizzled, alas, may return in 2022, and with a vengeance.

For the outcome was all but ascertained in the moment Fillon, the last candidate of Gaullism, announced the downfall for which he had only himself to blame. A last hope for the re-baptised Republicans, to replace rotted Fillon with old fighter Alain Juppé, could paradoxically have saved it for a new era. Sealing the verdict on his party without dissent, Juppé refused to break the sacrament of the primary which became become France's way, his downfall - and the downfall of the Fifth Republic, as we know it.

Yet there is in this new man supposedly of the left, the youngest Head of State since Emperor Napoleon in that defining summer of 1815, younger even than his cousin - he who was the first to bear the title president, the hope for a renewal mirroring that of the general whose name came to define a generation of politicians of the right. While enthusiasm has sealed a coalition that was broad enough to secure a landslide only doubted due to the pessimistic nature of the age - though, as I have said and will have to repeat, this was no repeat of the contest of November - it is too early to celebrate the Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram, that remains irreversibly imbued in the comparison. (But imbued they are still, long after the downfall of father, son and ghoul-like nephew alike.) All that is certain is that the great game is still on, and the skills of this man not a politician, who unlike Blair - who twenty years ago rose to the helm of Her Majesty's government as the first, and only position in it he would ever hold (well... those of us disillusioned with Mr. Corbyn may well disagree outwards). 

Who will he select for his Prime Minister? The National Assembly is just as certain not to be dominated by the partisans of En Marche!, the best of results mirroring that of 1993, when the equally centrist, somewhat aloof Giscard's UDF movement swept to a secure second place behind Chirac's Rassemblement. A coalition with the Republicans, more certainly to become a plurality - if not a majority - than the wholly-disgraced Socialists (as I hope I made sure to predict in 2012, if not in clear-enough terms) would immediately discredit his leftist credentials, weakened already without the Melenchonist turn that has swamped what was once the Mitterrand coalition. The rest is in tatters, and may - if the trend remains and stability somehow joins hope and change in matrimony - claim a significant prize, but will still be a mere arm for the Elysée into the National Assembly. Alliances must be built, maintained, fed, and for the man selected by history, to make history, no choice of compromise spells godliness. The honeymoon which has not been long but intense will not last, and the first choices must well be made.

Look beyond the smiles of today... if a fraction of accusations lately leveled in smear are true, and Republicans increase their hold, there might be a Clinton treatment in spare for the youthful unifier and centrist. Were Macron to be impeached, conservative President of the Senate Gerard Larcher (right) would assume the Chateau in another first, and the man to his right (so to speak) could mount another, yet more implausible grab.

How the parties of establishment has chosen to respond, being aware if not convinced of the outcome long since, will be equally interesting. These are men well accustomed to power, and where it must be shared, they will fight for every inch already claimed, and for good reasons. Strong men of history are seldom beautiful in the making, often horrendous when at work, and imperial only when safely separated by at least one generation. Macron, while having presented a program that would prick few bleeds outside the core supporters of the Front and the Megret-Dupont-Aignan-Villiers throng, holds no loyalties and few questions of heart. His initiative to invite climate change scientists was typically audacious (though I would prefer them to work with Governor Brown, and other giants of the resistance which will one day define America as much, if as falsely, as the French one) but with a favourable zeal. 

That question cannot be ignored, and if the research and development required to parry it will benefit the long-stagnant French economy as well, he may truly achieve greatness, perhaps even in time for re-election. Not that I will pass any verdicts there; the future is best left unspoken until the sun of today is in the setting, but if Macron finds the courage (and, indeed, the support) to run for re-election, I would not mind to bet for a re-match. One might thus hope for an Eisenhower-Stevenson setting, though the case of Mitterrand-Giscard seems eerily possible. It took time to build the present Socialist party as well, and for all the substantial opposition, the time may work as well in her favour.

A resistance that will not be quelled. Chirac's figures were stronger still, and his second term was not one of much more ease, with scandals undercutting his supposed image of a statesman. And yes, for all the imbalance between the insults, the lady may return like the Louvée de la France... with a terrible vengeance, that is.

The words have been said, the figure pronouncing them heartwarming but somehow meek in the hour of grandeur. But what is equally true as the significant gains of the Front - if not as significant as might have been the case with Fillon or Melenchon for an adversary - is that the opposition, having won the argument amongst the proverbially disenfranchised, the aggrieved minority, will only continue fester and grow, and grow... and grow. Unless he triumphs.

Ours is not a time fit for heroes, for all the cheers of the night passed into subtle brilliance before the night sky and the peak of the Louvre, now with a somber solitude to its predicament, like a blunted knife lit in commemoration to praise its former glory. But in time, even a shrewd and reckless man - the creator of the Fifth Republic being the prime example - may be saluted for a hero. Let us hope, and not without a certain conspicuousness, that the man who has once again clung to the ladder of state by embodying hope and change will succeed in wielding power as in claiming it this era of meek conservatism and stagnation, and in so doing proves to be as shrewd as those who made him, and made him so desired. Only then may he actually outlast it.