INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: HIGHLIGHTS AND EXCLUSIVES, JUNE 23, 2008

COVER: The World’s Most Popular Leaders (Well, the Least Unpopular, Anyhow) (All overseas editions). Assistant Managing Editor Jonathan Tepperman reports on a new global leadership poll taken by WorldPublicOpinion.org that confirms the world’s low opinion of President Bush—but adds a twist. No other world leader enjoys significantly greater trust abroad. The poll, taken in 20 countries and released exclusively to Newsweek, also shows that the leaders who do best are Vladimir Putin, Gordon Brown and Hu Jintao. In other words, the bosses of what are often cast as the biggest, baddest authoritarian states—China and Russia—are among the planet’s most trusted officials. Tepperman reports that the poll shows that most of the world now seems to have more confidence in undemocratic than democratic leaders.  The war of ideas may not be over, and a close reading of the poll suggests there’s still room to turn things around. But at this point, the West clearly isn’t winning the battle for influence—and freedom, to borrow Bush’s phrase, is not reigning. Tepperman analyzes the poll results.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141764

Greeting Bush With a Yawn. Special Correspondents Mike Elkin and Michael Freedman report that the relative calm during President George W. Bush’s final trip to Europe indicates that Europeans are already focused on Barack Obama and John McCain. Gone were the scathing editorials and bitter antiwar protests that once drew 1 million people to the piazzas of Rome and 100,000 to the streets of London. Italian officials said there were no more than a 1,000 or so this time; British officials expected less than 10,000. In Germany, there were only two dozen angry demonstrators in a village near the castle, their protest for higher farm subsidies aimed at Angela Merkel, not Bush. “The overall mood will be one of good riddance,” said The Guardian just before Bush arrived in London. Le Monde put it this way: “Tourner la page Bush.” 

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141454

A Question of Class. London Reporter William Underhill reports that Great Britain’s Labour Party is mired in debt and is now becoming more reliant on its traditional backers, the trade-union movement that founded the party more than a century ago. Labour’s debts total more than £20 million, and donations are tumbling along with the party’s fortunes at the polls. Without a bailout, bankruptcy looms. In the first quarter of 2008, union contributions accounted for 80 percent of the party’s £3.1 million in donations, up from just half of the £5 million collected in the same period last year. Already the renascent Conservative Party is gleefully warning of a corresponding rise in union influence.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141455

The New Face of Islam. Middle East Regional Editor Christopher Dickey and Moscow Bureau Chief Owen Matthews report that important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom Osama bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. And a new vision of Islam is taking shape, one that re-examines what seemed to be immutable tenets, and challenges what had been taken as literal truths, opening wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close so long ago.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/139433

Europeans Go Back to Work. European Economics Editor Stefan Theil reports that after a decade of labor reform, countries in the EU are creating jobs far faster than America and are close to eliminating mass unemployment. But now the politicians want to turn back the clock. Rather than rejoicing, a wave of discontent has spread across Europe. In many countries, the reforms that helped kick-start the jobs miracle have been put on hold or reversed. The discontent is due in part to reform fatigue. Labor reforms, and the cuts in welfare benefits that made it more attractive to look for work, continue to be deeply unpopular. The main problem with Europe’s labor reform is that it has been haphazard and incomplete. 

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141453

Against the Grain. Special Correspondent Brian Byrnes reports that in Argentina, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner imposed a tax on farm exports, just as global farm-commodity prices were peaking, shutting the Argentine breadbasket when it could have been most profitable. Her plan led angry Argentine farmers to withhold exports in an effort to hit at the government’s coffers. Protesting farmers have sporadically blocked roads, preventing food deliveries from reaching grocery stores and exports from getting to port. The government’s inability to solve the stalemate has undermined Kirchner’s popularity, which dropped to 26 percent in May, down 30 points since January.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141456

GLOBAL INVESTOR: Don’t Follow the Momentum. Contributor Barton Biggs reflects on the financial  “roller-coaster ride.” He writes that “the wild gyrations in the price of oil are certainly the primary villain, but there’s another, more subtle force at work as well, namely trend and momentum following trading by literally thousands of trigger-happy investors.” During the first four days of the opening week of June, as the price of oil fell, retail sales beat forecasts, and the ISM nonmanufacturing index rose, equity markets worked higher, with the S&P 500 surging through the key 1400 level and the NASDAQ Composite actually setting a new recovery high on June 5. The next day, erroneous news coming from Israel, bad news on the employment front and fear of stagflation, created “the perfect one- day storm.” For the day oil jumped 13 percent and the major market averages fell over 3 percent.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141468

WORLD VIEW: Turkey’s A La Carte Liberalism. Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes that although Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is working to prove it is a liberal party, not an Islamist one, evidence “suggests the party’s liberalism comes à la carte: since it came to power in 2002, it has fused religion and political conservatism in a way that emphasizes certain liberal values while refusing to recognize others.” However, “the West should expect from the AKP’s Turkey what it expects from any liberal European democracy … As Turkey goes soul-searching for what it means to be a liberal, secular democracy, its political yardstick for liberalism should be Italy and France—not Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141465

THE LAST WORD: U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser. Schloesser, the new commander of NATO’s troops working in eastern Afghanistan, says that although the U.S. is working closely with the Afghan national security forces to achieve a great deal of success in security, governance and development, his “daily concern is the [unstable] border region that seems to add tension between the Afghans and the Pakistanis and Coalition forces. We are all really fighting the same enemy. I have to spend a lot of time addressing those issues along the border.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141464

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