Pandemic and populism

General view of a makeshift crematorium for COVID victims in New Delhi, India, on April 23 DANISH SIDDIQUI / REUTERS

The race will be long.

It is still premature to think about the goal.

China, hitherto glued to the wheel of globalization, has started to run on its own and is even taking advantage.

With the United States mired in its wars for 20 years, only the apotheosis of Trumpist chaos was missing.

The game is not played this time on European soil, as it happened during the Cold War. It is fought in Asia and this time, unlike the struggle between Washington and Moscow in the second half of the 20th century, it is more maritime than continental hegemony. It is the Indo-Pacific region, central to the interests of the United States and Europe, in which Delhi is a strategic ally against Beijing. Hence the relevance of the calamity of biblical dimensions that has befallen the Indian subcontinent.

By demographics and location, it is the only regional power that can play in the same division as China. Its young population pyramid, compared to the aging Chinese pyramid, gives it strengths for the future, but its federal system, democracy and linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity, contrast with the facilities that an authoritarian, uniform and rigid State has. like the Chinese communist to face a pandemic.

India now projects the image of an ungoverned country, a producer of vaccines but incapable of immunizing its population and controlling the pandemic with confinements and social distancing measures.

And what is worse, with a populist and ultra-liberal government, which weakens health care and lacks the will and means to combat corruption and the black market that parasitize the health system, oxygen supplies and respirators, the provision of of beds, and even the ritual cremations of corpses.

More information

• Lack of oxygen, overflowing crematoria and black market: the devastation in India

Narendra Modi, the leader of Hindu supremacism, has just lost regional elections in several states where he campaigned without heeding the norms of prudence against the covid.

His prestige lags behind that of Trump due to his denial in the face of the pandemic and the one that is leaving Jair Bolsonaro by the wayside.

The worst figures are three countries among the largest on the planet, the three federal democracies ruled at the beginning of the pandemic by populist and neoliberal leaders who sacrificed lives in favor of the economies.

The record is Trump's: 33 million infected and almost 600,000 dead.

Behind comes India in infected: 20 million (226,000 dead);

and Brazil in deaths: 410,000 (15 million infected);

figures all of them official and very low.

Francis Fukuyama's diagnosis is as clear as it is universal: “I don't think there is a correlation between democracy and good or bad results with the pandemic. But there is definitely a correlation between populist leaders and poor results. " The drag is Modi, not Indian democracy.