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India’s education minister resigns in victory for Cockroach youth movement protests
India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, has resigned after a week of mass demonstrations, handing a major victory to a new youth movement that has posed an unprecedented challenge to Narendra Modi’s government. In a statement on Saturday afternoon, Pradhan said he had submitted his letter of resignation to the prime minister after student pressure. “Considering the situation that has arisen at Jantar Mantar and across the country, so that anti-national forces do not take advantage of this situation … I have sent my resignation letter to the prime minister,” Pradhan wrote in a social media post. He said he had been “saddened by what unfolded over the last 10 days”, but added: “I deeply respect the aspirations, feelings, and legitimate expectations of the country’s youth.” During his 12 years in power, Modi has cultivated a strongman image and has maintained his ministers are not accountable to public pressure. This was the first time a mass uprising had forced one of his most loyal ministers to resign. The protests were organised by a newly formed youth political movement, the Cockroach Janata party (CJP), which has escalated into a nationwide uprising of youth dissent this week. The core demand of the CJP and its supporters was the resignation of Pradhan over an exam leak scandal that has devastated the lives of millions of students and led to more than a dozen students taking their own lives. The refusal by Modi to sack his minister over the scandal was widely seen as symbolic of the alleged lack of accountability of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and its repeated failure to address the issues faced by young people, particularly in the country’s flawed education system. CJP organisers confirmed they had called off their demonstration after Pradhan’s resignation and a meeting with senior BJP ministers on Saturday afternoon. In a speech to the crowds gathered at the Delhi Jantar Mantar protest site, CJP’s founder, Abhijeet Dipke, saluted the “courage” of students who had turned out in huge numbers, even when they were subjected to police violence. “We have done it,” he said, to cries of “victory to India” and “long live the revolution”. But Dipke also emphasised Pradhan’s resignation was “just the beginning” in the movement’s push for systemic education reform and its fight for democratic rights. He also cautioned against people making a hero of him. “Do not make this mistake,” said Dipke. “The country has been ruined by making one person a hero.” Faria Asif, 26, a lawyer who was in the crowd, said: “I am extremely joyous. This is a huge victory, not just for the students, for the constitution and for the entire nation. Being part of this movement has been extremely empowering for all of us. I think it’s the beginning of change.” The news of Pradhan stepping down was met with ecstatic cheers by tens of thousands of CJP supporters gathered in Delhi, who have been demanding accountability from the government. “This is one of the most historic days for our country,” said Rochelle Cope, 27. “For the first time in 12 years, someone from the government has been held accountable for wrongdoing. And it wasn’t political parties that did this; it was the people. “This is a movement of unity, love, solidarity, peace, justice and power. Being here has made me proud to be a citizen of India. This is only the beginning – this government will not be able to rule like it did before.” For many of those present, this week was the first time they had taken part in a political protest and the movement was described as a “gen Z political awakening” in India. Among them was 16-year-old Kanishka Dabla, who said she hoped to become a doctor one day. “It’s wonderful that he has resigned,” she said. “It has made us all feel very powerful. And this also feels like justice for those students who committed suicide because of the exam leaks. It’s made me hopeful for my future again.” In a statement, the CJP said the resignation was a victory for democracy. “We have a free country where we are free to express ourselves, dissent, criticise the government we elect. We will never let anyone take that away from us,” it read. The statement added: “Remember, do not mess with cockroaches.” Sonam Wangchuk, the renowned Indian engineer and activist who had galvanised the movement as he went on a 26-day hunger strike, celebrated the “victory of democracy, straight from the streets”. The CJP demonstrations had taken a dramatic turn on Monday, when hundreds of thousands of young people and students took to the streets of Delhi in the largest youth-led protest seen in years. The police had hit back against the peaceful gatherings with brutality, including teargas and baton charges, leaving hundreds injured. Widespread anger erupted at the violent police response, prompting more people to come out in support of the movement. Throughout this week thousands had flocked to the CJP’s Delhi sit-in to chant slogans against the government and call for Pradhan’s resignation. Demonstrations also broke out across the country, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in Kolkata and Mumbai. For weeks, the Modi government had ignored the CJP protesters, but as support grew into ahuge mass movement this week, the government agreed to have a dialogue. Modi had agreed to fast-track justice for the exam leaks, but had made no mention of the CJP’s core demand, the resignation of Pradhan, who was seen as one of his most important and loyal ministers. However, the CJP’s leadership had made it clear the resignation of Pradhan was a non-negotiable demand for the movement. As more protests erupted over the weekend and negotiations were at a deadlock, the BJP government appeared to be backed into a corner. Not all those who took part in the protests were gen Z. Annie Raja, 62, beamed as she looked out at the celebrating protesters. “I feel enthusiastic and happy,” she said. “The young people came out on the streets and they saved our democracy. Previously the government thought they had all the power, and the people were living only in fear. Now the Modi government is scared of us.”
How English-speaking Colombian islands have been caught up in Trump’s ‘drug war’ airstrikes
Officially, the islands of San Andrés and Providence belong to Colombia – but the language spoken by most of the local Afro-descendant population is not Spanish. Walking among brightly painted wooden houses raised above the ground and lined with verandas – architecture more reminiscent of the Caribbean and the southern US – the language most commonly heard is Creole, a distinct variety of Caribbean English. Yet the same emerald waters that provide fish for local communities and attract tourists from around the world have become “mass graves” for local fishers. Because of the islands’ strategic location north-west of mainland Colombia between South and North America, young seafaring-skilled men have for years been recruited by groups moving cocaine produced in Colombia northwards, often as far as the US. They are members of the Raizal people, shaped by different waves of settlement over the centuries, but above all, defined by their African heritage. Although the involvement of young Raizal men in drug trafficking is not new, residents agree it is growing and has acquired a dramatic dimension since the US began bombing speedboats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The airstrikes have killed 215 people since September in what the UN has condemned as “extrajudicial killings”. At least 16 fishers from San Andrés and Providence have gone missing since January, according to Edgar Jay Stephens, 58, the president of the main local association of fishers, I-Fish. He said some of them might have been carrying drugs, but “certainly” not all. The disappearances have also been a decades-long problem on the islands – whether because the men were killed, arrested by other countries or fell victim to harsh conditions at sea – but Stephens said the current pace was unprecedented. A spokesperson for US Southern Command, which conducts the airstrikes, said it “does not comment on specific operational details”, but added: “We have no information of any strikes, operations, seizures, or arrests involving residents of San Andrés or Providence.” Given that the US has recently denied responsibility for other bombings in accounts that lawmakers, experts and academics have criticised as inconsistent, Stephens does not rule out the possibility it were involved. “How many people could have died without us knowing what happened to them?” he asked, echoing a frequent criticism made by human rights activists about the bombings: the US does not release information about the victims, making their identification a difficult task that has been accomplished in little more than a dozen cases, thanks mainly to the efforts of lawyers and journalists. The sister of one of the 16 missing men said her brother had been trafficking drugs alongside two other Raizal men. “He accepted the job because it was easy money and he wanted to buy a plot of land and build a house,” said the sister, who asked not to be identified. When she saw the news of a US airstrike on a speedboat carrying three men near Costa Rica, she sent his documents to Colombia’s embassy in the neighbouring country, hoping he might be identified among the three. He was not. Meanwhile, Raizal fishers point to another consequence of the attacks: a direct impact on their livelihoods, as has happened in other traditional communities across the region. “We’ve changed our routines,” said Ling Jay Robinson, 38, explaining that there have been days when he chose not to go out to sea. “Those people [the US military] could mistake us for traffickers and bomb us. We’re living with fear,” said Robinson, who is the son, grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson of fishers. “It goes back through our ancestors.” The islands of San Andrés and Providence lie closer to the coast of Nicaragua – 260 miles (420km) away – than to mainland Colombia, which is 450 miles distant. After being initially claimed by Spain, they were permanently settled when English Puritans arrived in 1629. Pirates also passed through, and although Spain later reasserted control, it did not expel the English settlers. Enslaved Africans were subsequently brought to work on plantations, particularly cotton estates. Following Colombia’s independence, the islands agreed to become part of the new nation. But it was only from 1912 onward that the state began to exert significant influence, imposing Catholicism and Spanish as the official religion and language in place of Protestantism and Creole. To this day, however, many Raizales prefer to call Providence by its older name rather than the official Spanish one, Providencia. “I would say that the Raizal people are trilingual. We speak English, Spanish and Creole,” said the political scientist Sally Ann García Taylor, who was born in San Andrés and whose mother is from Providence. The Raizal people, she said, were the product of the interactions between all the peoples who had passed through the islands, although “Afro-descendant heritage is a major element in the formation of our identity”. Another profound change came in 1953, when the government declared San Andrés a freeport – exempting imported goods from taxes – and encouraged large-scale migration from mainland Colombia. The impact is still felt today in the island’s overcrowding. San Andrés, whose airport has daily flights to Bogotá and even Panama, covers 26 sq km (10 sq miles) and is home to 56,000 people. Providence, which has flights only to the neighbouring island, spans 17 sq km and has just 6,000 residents. Many local people say that, with its lack of hotels, fancy restaurants and duty-free shops, it is “like San Andrés 50 years ago”. The difference is also reflected in the islands’ ethnic makeup: while Raizales account for about 91% of Providence’s population, they now make up only 35% of San Andrés’s. The contrast is also visible in the architecture. Providence, although still recovering from Hurricane Iota, which devastated more than 90% of its infrastructure in 2020, has largely preserved its traditional Caribbean architecture, while in San Andrés it is largely confined to the island’s southern areas, where most Raizales live. “If you ask how many Raizales own hotels in San Andrés, I don’t think there are even two or three,” said Jairo Rodriguez Davis, the secretary of the Raizal Council, the community’s main representative and deliberative body, adding that most of the money generated by the island’s tourism industry ended up in the hands of non-Raizales. To determine whether someone is Raizal, he relies on family trees tracing lineages back to the 1700s. “If they have a traceable root back then, you are considered Raizal,” he said. Davis’s office is located in what used to be the first and only Raizal university, created on the initiative of the community and a Baptist minister. The institution operated briefly – teaching in Creole – between the late 1990s and early 2000s, but closed for lack of government and private support. Today the building, stripped of most of its windows, railings and boundary walls, but facing the sea and surrounded by an endless grove of mango trees, serves as a community space for meetings and events. “We dream of having the university here again one day,” said Davis. Davis’s more immediate concern, however, is the violence. “Neither coca is grown here nor cocaine produced here, but many of our young people have been used by traffickers to carry drugs on those boats,” he said. Trafficking has passed through the islands since at least the 1970s: first marijuana heading north, then weapons moving south to fuel Colombia’s armed conflict; later cocaine flowing north again and, more recently, people attempting to reach the US. “Everyone has a relative who has been killed or disappeared at sea,” said Miguel Angel Castell Cano, San Andrés’s government secretary, who previously worked as a lawyer for Providence’s fishers’ association. His own father has been missing for 10 years after becoming involved in a drug-trafficking trip near Honduras. “It is neither something I am ashamed of nor proud of … But no one deserves to disappear, regardless of what they have done,” he said. Being missing does not necessarily mean being dead. Hooker Cabeza Ignacio Agenor, 40, was arrested by Costa Rican authorities in 2021 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for international drug trafficking. He has been eligible to apply for parole since February. His family has submitted a formal repatriation request to the Costa Rican government so that he can serve the remainder of his sentence in Colombia, but they have yet to receive a response. Families are often reluctant to speak out about their missing loved ones. “The islands are deeply religious. When people disappeared, even if they had simply been fishing, no one wants a relative to be subjected to moral judgment,” said the writer and lawyer Maríamatilde Rodríguez. Between the 1990s and 2000s, she led an investigation drawing on documents and interviews with dozens of relatives that arrived at the staggering figure of nearly 700 disappeared people across the two islands over the preceding 30 years. She said updating that count would require a similarly extensive effort. There is no official data from the Colombian authorities about it. “Our sea contains mass graves, and its beauty is matched only by the scale of the tragedies it has witnessed,” she said. Rodríguez said the Colombian state did not treat the issue with the seriousness it deserved. “There is both ignorance and a tendency to minimise the issue – people assume that because the islands are small, the problems must also be small.” The government did not respond to requests for comment. Stephens said that if such a large number of people had gone missing anywhere else in the world, “that would set off alarm bells. Yet here nobody pays attention, and young men continue to disappear.” He believes that, despite the US bombings, the number of drug-trafficking trips in the region is increasing – many analysts have already argued that the airstrikes have had little effect on the volume of drugs reaching the US – and this has led to greater recruitment of fishers. Beyond drug legalisation – “prohibition is what fuels the business” – the solution lies with the Colombian state, he argues. “We need more jobs for young people. Because they have so few opportunities here, some of them end up taking that path.”
Indian celebrities fiercely criticised for silence on Cockroach protests
Bollywood stars and other Indian celebrities have faced fierce criticism for staying silent in the face of some of the biggest protests India has seen in years. Hundreds of thousands of young Indians took to the streets this week as part of a new youth movement that calls itself the Cockroach Janata party (CJP), demanding accountability over exam paper leaks in an unprecedented challenge to prime minister Narendra Modi’s government. Many vented their anger against what they saw as “cowardice” from India’s biggest celebrities. “We are the ones who made them famous and wealthy by turning up and paying for their films and matches,” said Vijay Rai, 24, who travelled more than 2,000km from Chennai in south India to the site. “Now when it’s our turn for a little help, we get nothing.” CJP organisers and protesters have been sleeping on the ground, enduring scorching sunshine, monsoon downpours and the misery of sweltering humidity since they began their indefinite sit-in protest on 20 June in the capital. The mass demonstrations have led to the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Prasad – a central demand from the CJP over a paper leak in May that forced 2 million students to resit an important exam and led to more than a dozen student suicides. In the 12 years the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has been in power, it was the first time one of Modi’s most loyal ministers has been forced into resigning due to public pressure. On Monday, the mass peaceful student protest was met with police brutality, including the use of batons, teargas and, allegedly, pellet guns. Protesters were scathing about how celebrities had commented on global tragedies or injustices but turned a blind eye to the grievances of people at home, even when their most devoted fanbase were being baton-charged and teargassed by the police. “Just a few words on social media to express their moral support for our demands would have been welcome,” said Seema, who works cleaning homes in Delhi. In recent years Bollywood, which was once seen to be outside politics, is widely believed to have been co-opted by the far-right politics of Narendra Modi, leading to a surge of hyper-nationalist films accused of promoting the political agenda of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government. Many of Bollywood’s biggest stars are Muslims, and are seen to have to tread very carefully to ensure their films do not attract boycotts by powerful Hindu right-wing groups. Indian actor and film-maker Aamir Khan was viciously trolled in 2015 when he said, against a backdrop of Muslims being lynched, that his wife felt unsafe and wondered if they should leave India. Those few superstars who did eventually comment this week mostly refrained from directly criticising the government, and were condemned for their non-committal remarks. This included one of Bollywood’s most famous actors, Salman Khan, who in a statement told students to go back home and not make their “parents worried for them”, insisting that Modi had the situation under control. Anupam Kher, another Bollywood actor, said in a comment that he understood the “restlessness and anger” of students, but also warned about “political opportunists” and people with their “own agenda” taking control of the movement – echoing comments made by BJP ministers. As the CJP protests gathered momentum, Aamir Khan was also criticised after he claimed that his 2009 hit film Three Idiots was not based on Sonam Wangchuk, the engineer and activist, which had been widely accepted film-lore for more than 15 years. Wangchuk went on a 26-day hunger strike to support the Cockroach movement and many saw it as an attempt by Khan to distance himself and his career from the protests. Top cricketing stars such as Virat Kohli and his wife, actor Anushka Sharma, were also trolled for lacking a “spine”. In a post on X, cricketer Sachin Tendulkar posted a vague statement, simply saying that “we must create a culture where hard work is rewarded, honesty is encouraged, and merit wins”. Influencer Alexander Balakrishnan, 29, said he realised that some celebrities might be reluctant to antagonise the government for fear of damaging their careers by losing contracts and endorsements. “But the big ones are so famous, their fame gives them protection and even they haven’t spoken.” Notable exceptions were veteran actors Naseeruddin Shah, 76, who was damning of Bollywood’s silence, and Shabana Azmi, who was among those who travelled from Mumbai to Delhi to take part in the protest. She told The Times of India: “Why can’t they listen to them? We need to build their hope, not crush their spirit.”
Iran-backed Houthis claim missile attack on Saudi Arabia as regional tensions escalate
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed a missile attack on the southern Saudi city of Jizan on Saturday, after vowing retaliation against the kingdom for attacks this week. Iran, meanwhile, reported no strikes overnight on Saturday for the first time after two weeks of US attacks. However, tensions remain high, with the Iranian health ministry spokesperson, Hossein Kermanpour, saying “Iran had a peaceful night” in a post on X. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the US and Iran in June seemed to break down two weeks ago, after Iranian attacks on tankers in the strait of Hormuz prompted US strikes on Iran, which led to Iranian retaliation against US allies in the region. The MoU was meant to reopen the strait after its closure by Iran during the war and pause hostilities for 60 days to give room for negotiations, but active fighting has prevented progress in talks. Much of the current fighting has centred on the strait, a transit point for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas prior to the war. The US president, Donald Trump, threatened expanded strikes on Iran, meeting with top national security advisers on Friday to decide whether the administration should escalate attacks. He has warned he could widen the scope of targets in Iran to include civilian infrastructure, such as Iranian energy plants and bridges, as well as launch a ground operation to seize Kharg Island, one of Iran’s largest oil export terminals. “There’s a military exit where we just keep going just the way we are, and we can even make it a heavier dose, and it’s knocking out everything they have. Or there’s a smarter strategy that you make a deal,” Trump told reporters on Friday. Iran issued warnings to citizens of Gulf countries hosting US military sites to stay away from bases to protect themselves from future attacks. Trump insisted on Friday that, despite the fighting, negotiations with Iran were going well, calling them “by far the most serious that we’ve seen”. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the “American approach” was preventing peace talks from proceeding, while vowing Iran was “neither intimidated by threats nor will we yield to pressure”. Tensions over the strait continued, with the US firing on a merchant vessel in the Gulf of Oman, which it said was violating its blockade of Iranian ports, while the UK maritime agency reported an incident between a tanker and military forces on Friday, without specifying the responsible parties. Air defence systems in Saudi Arabia intercepted two ballistic missiles from Yemen on Saturday, Reuters reported. The attacks targeted oil refineries in Yanbu on the Red Sea, while the Saudi civil defence also issued warnings for the port city of Jizan, which is close to the border with Yemen. A video circulating on social media showed dark clouds rising above a refinery in Jizan belonging to Aramco, the Saudi oil giant. A Yemeni security source told Agence France-Presse a naval base in Hodeida and a military camp on Kamaran island were targeted by Saudi Arabia on Friday. The Houthis said the attacks were a “dangerous escalation”. The Iran-aligned Houthi movement, which controls northern and western Yemen, declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea last week after the kingdom struck the airport in Sana’a. The Houthis struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea on Thursday, prompting Trumo to threaten a “major military punishment” for Tehran and the Houthis. The naval blockade threatens to further upend global energy markets, as Saudi Arabia has been avoiding the closure of the strait by diverting millions of barrels of oil to the Red Sea. Oil prices pushed past $100 a barrel on Thursday for the first time since May, while the cost of shipping insurance through the southern Red Sea doubled for some companies. Araghchi said on Saturday that there was no military solution to the Saudi-Houthi conflict and that it was “rooted in old disputes”. “We believe that there is no military solution to the issue of Yemen, Bab al-Mandab and other regional issues,” Araghchi said in an interview with an Iranian newspaper. He called for further dialogue between the two sides. Mediators have tried to keep talks alive amid the escalating fighting, with Pakistan and Qatar delivering messages between the US and Iran over the last two weeks. The New York Times reported that Iraq had delivered a ceasefire proposal to Tehran, which was promptly rejected – a report disputed by Iraq. Pakistan has also reportedly been pushing for fresh talks between the two sides after a diplomatic initiative by China explored new dialogue. Iran’s interior minister, Eskandar Momeni, visited Istanbul this week to discuss the topic, reports said.
Can Japan avoid a Liz Truss-style shock as its PM embarks on a giant spending spree?
International investors are asking where Japan’s prime minister will find the ¥370tn (£1.7tn) of extra cash that she wants to invest in 17 industrial sectors by 2040. Such is the scale of spending by Sanae Takaichi’s coalition government that many in her own party fear she is about to blow up the Japanese economy, triggering a Liz Truss-style economic shock. Nerves are also jangling in financial markets, where investors are stunned by the plans of a usually sober Japanese government to rewrite previous budget rules and embark on a wide-ranging and unfunded shopping spree. The roots of Takaichi’s frustration date back to the financial crisis of 1991, when Japan’s property market bubble burst with spectacular effect. Tokyo had become the world’s most expensive place to live following the country’s export boom, but within months of the crash, banks behind much of the lending were bust. Before the turn of the century, a second slump brought more turmoil when some of Tokyo’s largest financial institutions, unable to cope with the hangover of bad debts from the first crash, went under. In the late 1980s, Japan’s government debts were equal to about 60% of national income, or gross domestic product (GDP). By the end of the 1990s, and after much of the financial sector had been bailed out, the debt to GDP ratio was 130%. Since the 2008 global financial shock, the economy has stagnated. In response, the government has regularly spent 10% more than it receives in tax receipts – much of it to cope with a rapidly ageing population – and debts have continued rising. By 2020, the debt-to-GDP ratio had reached 260% before tighter budgets and a modest improvement in economic growth brought it below 230% in 2025. Takaichi has said her investment plan will lift the productive capacity of the economy, keep Japan at the forefront of the AI revolution, and free the economy from its increasing dependence on trade with China. The stock market has reacted with a succession of downward steps ever since the proposals were unveiled in June, though the renewal of hostilities in the Middle East and the prospect of higher oil prices have not helped. Many investors sold up almost as soon as the government arrived in office, hitting the shares of the country’s biggest companies, among them Sony and Toyota Motor Corporation. Sony faces intense competition from rivals in South Korea and China while Toyota has stood out against all-electric cars, and now faces being crushed by a flourishing and highly subsidised Chinese car industry. Domestic and international lenders have pushed up the interest rate on Japanese government bonds (JGBs) to 2.8% in recent months, the highest in 29 years. Waning international support for Japan’s economic outlook has also hit the value of the yen. More recently it is Takaichi’s boldness, which like Truss’s is often characterised as recklessness, that has acted as a heavy weight on the currency, pushing it down to 163 to the US dollar, a four-decade low. Much of the blame for higher debt bills is connected to rising inflation, which has tracked upwards as the yen has fallen, largely because a low currency rate raises the price of imports of energy and raw materials. Although Japan’s core inflation has remained below the BoJ’s 2% target over the last four months, analysts a jump in the last quarter to the mid-2% range on higher oil prices following the Iran war. Kelvin Lam, an Asia specialist at the consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics, has said what the financial markets really fear is the lack of detail about where the fresh investment money will come from. “As long as you don’t say how you are going to finance your spending, you are on course for a Liz Truss moment,” he said, referring to the market response to the short-lived British prime minister’s plans for £45bn of unfunded tax cuts in September 2022. “The markets were already worried about Japan’s long term fiscal health and this plan hasn’t helped.” Takaichi’s conservative coalition secured victory last autumn with a slim majority that received a massive boost after she called February’s snap election, giving her a two-thirds majority in the lower house. A draft plan to revive the economy included forcing the Bank of Japan to walk in lockstep with the finance ministry and rewriting how government debt is calculated. A final submission agreed by the cabinet pledged to maintain central bank independence, but as a footnote. “To achieve a strong economy, it is very important for monetary policy to be conducted appropriately to see stable price rises,” it said. The damage was done, much as Truss found herself in an unrecoverable situation after going head to head with both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility. Translated literally as big-boned policy, the Honebuto no Hoshin investment scheme is aimed at injecting cash into 17 sectors over the next 14 years to more than double Japan’s economic growth to more than 1%. It will be a sharp break with previous leaders’ low-key policy blueprints and is in some respects reminiscent of Beijing’s grander five-year plans, which set national growth targets and direct industrial policy. The blueprint targets areas such as AI, semiconductors, biotech, defence, energy and shipbuilding to achieve a 1% growth rate “as early as possible”. The document emphasises “physical artificial intelligence” that combines AI with Japan’s strength in manufacturing hardware “to accelerate AI transformation in all sectors”. Forecasts by economists typically point to growth of 0.93% in 2027 and 0.85% in 2028, falling short of the 1% target, according to the Japan Center for Economic Research thinktank. In the background, successive governments have sought to disguise the country’s difficulties. Since 2022, the ministry of finance has spent about £160bn in efforts to limit the yen’s decline. It has also put pressure on the central bank to keep interest rates low amid a global drive to increase them to combat inflation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The BoJ has raised its policy rate to a 31-year high of 1%, but that is still low relative to its peers. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, all central banks financed government spending by buying government debt. While most have sought to reverse the situation in recent years, the BoJ is being encouraged to go further. Japanese pension funds are also feeling heat from the finance ministry, which expects them to buy government bonds out of a sense of patriotic duty. Takaichi said in a recent post on X that she spends all day and most of the night plotting Japan’s recovery, which is seen by many as an attempt to reverse last month’s 10-point poll rating decline. Takaichi is aware her project is fraught with danger now that financial markets have voiced their scepticism. Many are asking if an emphasis on manufacturing will prove successful as China seeks to produce more sophisticated goods, stepping into territory previously dominated by Japan, Germany and the US. The question is whether Tokyo has the resources to go up against Beijing and carve out a big enough niche to fund itself in the 2030s. Exports rose 20% year-on-year in June, but after taking into account the yen’s depreciation, the value of the rise was almost zero. Depreciating the currency every year to boost trade is not a sustainable policy. Maybe Takaichi’s investment plan will be.
‘I never mentioned it for 25 years. I didn’t want to be a victim of the bomb’: Hiroshima survivor Koko Kondo on horror, anger and forgiveness
Koko Kondo holds up a tiny salmon-pink dress. “This is what I was wearing,” she says. The dress, with its white-ribboned collar, is in perfect condition. A miracle. On 6 August 1945, Koko was eight months old and crawling on a tatami mat at the family parsonage. Mrs Takaki, a member of the church, had just popped round to have a chat with Chisa, Koko’s mother. Chisa gathered Koko up in her arms so she wouldn’t be a distraction, and they stood by the door. It was 8.15am; a serene summer day in Hiroshima. That was when the uranium-fuelled atom bomb, named Little Boy by the Americans, was dropped. The most deadly bomb in history. Koko and Chisa were buried in the rubble, unable to move. The parsonage roof had crashed down on them. For 40 years, Chisa couldn’t bear to tell Koko about the day, the pink dress, and how they survived. It was too painful. Today, 81 years on, Koko is talking to me via video link. She is an elegant woman with a kind face and a vertiginous silver quiff. She speaks quietly in perfect English, then surprises you by stamping on a word fiercely to make her point. The virtual background to her screen is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which was built on ground zero, the point directly underneath where the bomb exploded. Chisa could not breathe and was on the verge of losing consciousness. Koko’s screams brought her round. Chisa eventually clawed her way out of the rubble, baby in one hand, digging with the other. She made a hole big enough to push Koko through, then crawled out after her. “The whole house crashed. If I had still been crawling on the floor, she probably wouldn’t have been able to find me. Without my mother I wouldn’t be here,” Koko says. The parsonage and the Hiroshima Methodist church were less than a mile from ground zero. Both were destroyed by the blast and subsequent fires, alongside the other homes in the closely packed residential area. Chisa could find nobody to help Mrs Takaki, who was also buried in the wreckage. As for Koko’s father, the Rev Kiyoshi Tanimoto, he was in another part of the city at the time, and he also survived. Koko and her parents were lucky. Two days after the bomb, her aunt came to Hiroshima, with her baby daughter Kumiko, to support them. Kumiko suffered radiation sickness, and died five months later. Her father often told Koko she was the only baby in the neighbourhood to survive, and that she had a duty to remind the world what had happened. But for half her life, she turned her back on the enormity of the bomb. Like her mother, she found it too much too bear. So she made a new life for herself away from the carnage. Tanimoto was one of six survivors featured in a seminal 1946 New Yorker article by John Hersey that revealed the bomb’s true impact on the city. Before that, coverage had been limited and censored. Hersey’s 31,000‑word piece filled the whole magazine, which sold out in a few hours. The piece was turned into a bestselling book later that year. It was updated in 1985 when Hersey returned to Hiroshima 40 years on to see what had become of the city and, in particular, the six survivors. In his postscript, he wrote: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence … so much as it’s been memory.” A few years ago, an astonishing historical document was discovered in Hersey’s archive at Yale University: Tanimoto’s own real-time account of the disaster, and his hellish search for survivors of the Methodist church he ran. Apart from a handful of academics, nobody knew this 230-page diary existed. It is being published in book form, with a moving introduction by Koko. “I am 81 years old now. I am grateful for the life I almost didn’t have, and I love this world. There are not many of us still alive – the hibakusha, as the survivors are called. We are the only people left who experienced an event that remains unique in human history,” she writes. “My father had been a direct witness to a singular event.” And it has taken until now for the world to read this astonishing testimony to our capacity for barbarity and the power of human resilience. * * * There were about 350,000 people in Japan’s seventh largest city the day it was bombed. The heat after the bomb exploded was 3,000-4,000C (5,400‑7,200F) at ground level. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people died instantly or on the day, and by the end of 1945 the death toll had risen to about 140,000. An estimated 69,000 to 80,000 suffered nonfatal injuries. Of 76,327 buildings, 68% were totally flattened and only 10% were left intact. Three days later, a second atomic bomb hit Nagasaki. Between 40,000 and 75,000 people died on the day, and by the end of the year the Nagasaki death toll had risen to 60,000 to 80,000. The bombs led the Japanese to surrender, but at an obscene cost. At 8.15am, Tanimoto was two miles away from ground zero, on the outskirts of the city in the suburb of Koi. He was helping his friend Mr Matsuo move clothing and furniture to a safer place by pushcart. Its citizens were expecting to be bombed – after all, Hiroshima was home to the headquarters of the country’s second general army, served as a massive embarkation port and had about 43,000 military personnel stationed there. It just wasn’t expecting this kind of bomb. Tanimoto and his friend Matsuo were at the front door of a large estate in the valley belonging to a wealthy rayon manufacturer, ready to deposit their items in fireproof storage. When Tanimoto saw a sharp flash of light streak out of a brown cloud, he dropped to the ground on his belly between two large decorative granite rocks in the garden. (Matsuo ran into the house to hide. Although the building collapsed, he survived.) The rocks shielded Tanimoto from the heat and flying debris. When he stood up a few seconds later, day had turned into night, and drops of rain, the size and colour of blackberries, fell out of the sky. He ran up Mount Mitake, the hillside overlooking the Koi district, for a better viewpoint. Hiroshima was a sea of flames. An old woman with a little boy approached Tanimoto and said she was injured. He put the boy on his back and took him to a school already acting as a first-aid station. But all he could think about was Chisa, Koko and his church members. He sprinted through the devastation over dead bodies and injured people. To his shame, he continued running, ignoring their cries. “So many people asked for help,” Koko says today. “Help! Help! Help! But people were caught under houses and he couldn’t pull bodies from out of there, so he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive me!’ He said to me, on that day I only thought about what’s happened to my daughter and wife.” He felt guilty? “Yes, and when I heard that, I thought, ‘OK, Dad, you did a good job’.” Remarkably, Tanimoto came across the blood‑stained Chisa and Koko near a Shinto shrine. They were too traumatised to embrace. Tanimoto simply acknowledged that they were safe, and they parted. Chisa and Koko went to shelter in the suburb of Ushita, and he continued running into the city to help others. Tanimoto’s fame spread from Hiroshima through Japan and on to the US, where he toured tirelessly, asking for money to rebuild his church and the city, and to create a peace centre. He told anybody who’d listen about what he’d seen, preached Christian pacifism and argued for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Perhaps he was best known for featuring in Hersey’s Hiroshima. Hersey, then aged 31 and already an experienced war reporter and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, told the story of the bomb and its aftermath by piecing together the lives of the survivors. It was one of the first examples of what became known as new journalism, where reporters used creative storytelling techniques associated with fiction to create compelling narratives rather than simply reporting cold facts. In 1999, the article was ranked as the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a panel of experts assembled by New York University’s journalism department. Tanimoto’s account, based on his diaries, is the perfect complement to Hersey’s Hiroshima. Whereas Hersey tells the story through supremely crafted, understated reportage, Tanimoto’s version is a gripping real-time search for life and hope. Everything he sees is meticulously recorded: the flesh of the injured stripped away or hanging loose; survivors walking silent and expressionless “like a procession of ghosts”; houses looking “like toy buildings crushed by a hammer”. He describes soaking scattered cushions in a water tank, holding them against himself then running through fire. Victims are incinerated to white ash. A skeleton hangs on to the door of a street car. At its most dramatic, he comes across as the haunted hero of an apocalyptic action movie (which his story is being turned into). Tanimoto hauls five dead men out of a boat, says a short prayer for them, then ferries the injured across the Kyobashi River using only a single bamboo pole. He helps put out the blaze when trees catch fire in the Sentei Gardens; steals irradiated pumpkins to feed the sick; takes people by the hand only to find their flesh coming away like cooked fish off a bone. Even when he goes down with radiation sickness, suffering from high fever and violent diarrhoea, he continues until he’s on the verge of death. Tanimoto is as tough on his family as himself. When Chisa tells him that she had escaped without finding out what had happened to Mrs Takaki, he is indignant. (They later discovered that Mrs Takaki survived). Tanimoto had only lived in Hiroshima for two years when it was bombed. He had gone from Japan to the US to study, and graduated with a degree in theology from Emory University in 1940. This is why he still felt such warmth towards the US, despite the bomb, Koko says. I ask her if her father was her hero. “I guess so, because he was so concerned about peace. He loved the United States, he loved Japan, and he wanted to rebuild relationship between them. He so wanted world peace.” In the book, we travel through the city with Tanimoto, as he tries to account for his flock. He names every victim he finds and tells their story. It’s an extreme act of bearing witness. He prays over the dying Tanaka, a wealthy man who despised him and spread rumours that he was a US spy. We hear about the high-school girls who suffocate in the smoke while singing Kimigayo, the national anthem of Japan; the stench of the dead baby carried by its mother for three days in the hope that her missing husband could see the child a final time. Tanimoto describes the dead floating in the river, and his attempts to row past them. “I had no more human feelings,” he writes. “Pushing aside the dead, I propelled my boat.” There are moments of hope. Flowers and vegetables start to grow instantly out of the ruins. The radiation has somehow encouraged new life. He visits a woman whose eyeballs had been removed because of her injuries, and gifts her an aubergine, saying: “I hope you can overcome the atomic bomb as this plant has done.” Perhaps the greatest hope lies in the possibility of rebirth. Today’s Hiroshima is a vibrant, urbane city with a population of more than 1 million. * * * As KOKO grew up, her father reminded her that as the youngest survivor in their neighbourhood, it was her duty to work for Hiroshima and world peace. But she wasn’t having any of it. “‘No, sir,’ I told him. ‘Not me.’ I didn’t want to share in the trauma, or make it mine,” she says today. She refused to take her friends to talks he gave about the bomb. But its impact was there for her to see in everyday life. The parsonage played host to older, disfigured girls she regarded as sisters. Eyelids were stuck to foreheads, lips to chins, fingers were fused together. For a long time, she didn’t realise the girls were orphans. Other disfigured children just hid at home. “Girls stayed inside a big mosquito net so nobody could see them. Many families broke every mirror they had because otherwise the children who were disfigured would see their faces.” As soon as she discovered this had all been caused by the American atom bomb dropped from a B-29 aircraft, she swore revenge. “I said, when I’m a grownup I’m going to find the people who flew the B-29 Enola Gay and I’m going to give them a punch or bite or kick.” Incredibly, she got the opportunity to do so. Ten years on from the bomb, Tanimoto was famous in the US for his work on behalf of Hiroshima. At the time, he had taken 25 disfigured young women, known as the Hiroshima Maidens, from the city for reconstructive surgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. The US version of the TV series This Is Your Life surprised him one day. He thought he was going to give yet another interview about Hiroshima, but in fact he was the subject of the show. That particular episode gained notoriety as one of the most shocking, tasteless and strangely moving TV programmes ever. In between promotions for Hazel Bishop nail varnish, the presenter Ralph Edwards told the story of Tanimoto and Hiroshima. Behind a curtain, in shadow, a surprise guest said: “Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima, all I could think of was, my God, what have we done?” Tanimoto was frozen in shock when Edwards introduced the guest – Capt Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay. The tiny Tanimoto and the huge, bull‑necked Lewis shook hands in bewildered silence. Koko was in the audience, and the show changed her life. “I will never forget that day,” she tells me. “I was just staring at him. He’s a bad one. But, after he said that, I saw the tears coming down from his eye. I was so surprised. I thought he was a monster. I never heard of tears coming out of a monster’s eyes. So this person must be a human being like me.” At the end of the show, she held his hand. In 1983, Lewis died, aged 65. “When I heard that he had passed away, the first thing that came back to my mind was the inscription at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. I said, ‘Captain Robert Lewis, rest in peace – we shall never repeat the mistake.’” Despite the revelation when meeting Lewis, Koko still wanted nothing to do with Hiroshima. This resolve was hardened by a humiliation in her early teens. The hibakusha had annual medical checkups for radiation sickness. She was used to them, but one year she was led to an auditorium full of men speaking different languages. She didn’t know who they were, or whether they were even doctors. Koko was told to go on the stage and a light was shone on her. An anonymous voice asked her to remove her gown in front of the men. “It really hurt my feelings,” she says simply. You can still hear her pain when she talks about it. “I stared at the ceiling and removed the gown,” she writes in the intro to her father’s book. “I felt so ashamed that I didn’t mention it to anyone for 25 years. I never again wanted to be identified as a victim of the bomb.” There was so much discrimination against the hibakusha in Hiroshima and elsewhere. They struggled to find partners, get jobs, rent property. “Not many people want to marry a survivor who has experienced the atomic bomb,” she says. “Not many companies wanted to hire survivors because their health might not be good.” As her father had done, Koko left Hiroshima to study in the US. She graduated from American University in Washington DC with a degree in psychology and sociology. Koko fell in love with a Chinese-American student, and they got engaged in her final year. Her fiance’s uncle was a specialist in radiation sickness and he told the family that she would never give birth to a healthy child. His parents made her fiance call the wedding off. She returned to Japan in 1969, aged 24. By now she had lost her faith. In Tokyo, she met Yasuo Kondo, a young documentary film-maker. He admired the work of her father and the couple had a natural affinity, not least because he was an atheist. “I didn’t want to marry a minister so I decided to marry the atheist,” she says. “But life is interesting. Ha ha ha!” Koko starts to laugh before her story is out. She has a joyous, hiccupy chuckle. “He became a Christian and later a minister of the church. Ha ha ha!” Just as she couldn’t escape from the impact of the bomb, she couldn’t escape the church. Her faith returned. Koko suffered a miscarriage, and the couple decided not to try for children again. Medical assessments concluded that radiation sickness left her unable to carry a pregnancy to term. She and Yasuo adopted two newborn babies, who are now in their 40s. When he retired from his pastoral ministry in January 2025, they returned to Hiroshima. For many years, Koko worked in business. It was only when she turned 40 that she began to think seriously about Hiroshima. Her mother finally told her how they had escaped and revealed that she had saved the pink dress. When Hersey returned to Japan in 1985 to catch up with his survivors, the conversation opened up further. A year later, Tanimoto died, aged 77. Koko realised he had been right all along. It was her duty to take up his mantle. What’s more, she now wanted to. “I don’t think I can do it like he did, but I just wanted to walk in the footsteps of my father,” she says. She worked with orphans and abandoned children, and became a renowned peace campaigner in her own right. She presented Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the then Soviet Union, with a crystal globe as a symbol of the fragile Earth; shared philosophies of forgiveness with Desmond Tutu; advocated for nuclear disarmament with then US president Jimmy Carter; and, last year, Pope Leo XIV welcomed her to a peace conference in Rome. Like her father, she believes it is important to acknowledge the harm Japan caused with its aggressively expansionist ideology in the 1930s and 40s. Despite their phenomenal work, Kiyoshi Tanimoto and John Hersey were controversial figures. Not everybody was convinced by Tanimoto’s altruism. Critics said he was a vain publicity seeker. They laughed at the flash green Cadillac he briefly drove (an American friend had passed it on when he had no further use for it), challenged his use of funds, and questioned why he only sent young women to the US for plastic surgery. “I don’t know why my father was so concerned about the girls, not the boys,” Koko says. “As a father he might have been conscious of the beauty, and he knew life could be even more difficult for the disfigured girls than the boys.” After one of the “maidens” died in an operating theatre in the US, he was accused of exploiting them for political spectacle and medical experimentation. Meanwhile, the security services, on both the Japanese and US sides, were suspicious of Tanimoto’s support for the US. After his This Is Your Life appearance, there were suggestions that he might be an agent of the Americans or the Chinese. Some dismissed him as a useful idiot. Yet he had saved many lives and helped to broker peace between Japan and the US. Hersey was also regarded as politically suspect by the US security services. He spent the first 11 years of his life in China, where his American parents were Protestant missionaries. The Hiroshima article was considered anti-American, and the US war secretary Henry Stimson countered it with a defence of the atom bombs, arguing that they were the “least abhorrent choice” that saved more than a million American lives by avoiding a mainland invasion. In 1950, during the height of McCarthyism, the liberal Hersey was labelled a communist by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. While these were blatant smears, some criticism was justified. The writer celebrated for the integrity of his work went on to be accused of plagiarism in both his journalism and fiction. In 1988, five years before his death, Hersey apologised for a piece he wrote in the New Yorker about the novelist James Agee after Laurence Bergreen, Agee’s biographer, complained that material had been lifted from his book. Even Tanimoto’s recently discovered Hiroshima book is contentious. Why was it found in a box among Hersey’s papers at Yale University, where he went on to become a professor of English? Why had neither Hersey’s nor Tanimoto’s families known about it? The Japanese film-maker Taku Nishimae and Hersey’s grandson Cannon Hersey came across the book when researching his life. But even they disagree about when it was found – Nishimae tells me it was 2022, while Cannon insists it was back in 2014 when they made their first documentary film together. They are agreed, however, that it was in the form of a perfectly typed 230‑page English-language diary starting on 6 August 1945 and ending in November 1947. The new book condenses the diaries and limits it to the year following the bomb. Nishimae thinks Hersey was given the manuscript during one of Tanimoto’s visits to the US in 1948-49, but Cannon suggests it may have been later. I call Nishiame in Japan and ask if he thinks Tanimoto would have wanted it published? “Yes, certainly,” he says. Why does he think Hersey did nothing to publicise it? “Well, I don’t know. We don’t even know how it ended up in Yale library. There is no record. There are lots of letters between John and Kiyoshi, and there is no mention of the manuscript at all. It’s incredible. And it’s incredible that we found it.” He tells me about the genesis of the relationship between Hersey and Tanimoto. When Hersey arrived in Hiroshima, Tanimoto couldn’t initially meet him, so he wrote a nine-page letter for him about his experience. By the time they met, a day later, Hersey had read it and told him he found it “quite moving”. Cannon and Nishiame found the letter in 2014 when researching their documentary. “It is very similar to the account Kiyoshi is writing in his diary and John Hersey used those texts in the original book Hiroshima.” Hersey quotes extensively from it, saying it was a letter “sent to an American”. (He never refers to himself in the piece.) Why did he remain silent about the full manuscript he later received? Perhaps he thought Tanimoto’s memoir would detract from his bestselling book, I suggest to Nishimae. “Mmmm,” he considers. “I don’t think so. He was very generous and they were great friends. John was working with him all along until Kiyoshi passed in 1986. I don’t think he would have any such intention. I think it was just a lost memoir in his library.” Tanimoto revered Hersey and his work. In 1949, he translated Hersey’s Hiroshima into Japanese. He believed the book had made it far less likely that nuclear weapons would be used again, and that without it the rest of the world would have remained oblivious to the full horror. From New York, Cannon tells me he doesn’t think it was the job of his grandfather to find a publisher for Tanimoto’s manuscript. Nor does he think he would have succeeded if he had tried. “I don’t think the publishing world was ready to publish a book like this in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It’s only now that we’re seeing space made for people of colour to tell their story.” As for Koko, the thing she cares about is that her father’s book is now out there for the world to read and learn from. And the lessons are every bit as important as they were 81 years ago. She finds it distressing that nuclear warheads still in commission are far more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the rest of her life, she hopes to show people her pink baby dress and explain its significance. And she will continue to pass on her message that hope can emerge from the most profound despair. A few years ago, she discovered that a positive had come out of her teenage humiliation. “I was told that all the medical data from the children from Hiroshima was given to Chornobyl to help the children there. When I heard that, my gosh! My bad memory helped other children. It made me so happy.” Most of all, she is determined that Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never be repeated. “I don’t want to see any child go through that. That’s why I do not want to see any war in this world. This beautiful world.” And she swirls the word around in her mouth as if she can taste it. “Think of it. We cannot destroy it.” • Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir by Kiyoshi Tanimoto is published by Ebury on 6 August at £16.99. To buy a copy for £15.29 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
‘Proxy for Trump’ Milei tours Latin America to meet far-right leaders
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, is not particularly fond of travelling to multilateral forums – it is not unusual for him to skip Mercosur summits, as he did a few weeks ago. But on Saturday he begins a tour of Latin America to meet far-right leaders, starting in Brazil with the launch of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign against the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ahead of October’s election. Milei will then attend Keiko Fujimori’s inauguration in Peru on Tuesday, followed by Abelardo de la Espriella’s inauguration in Colombia on 7 August, from where he will travel to Ecuador to meet president Daniel Noboa. The self-styled libertarian has justified the trips as those of “a president willing to open up to the world, seeking to triple the country’s trade”. But analysts point to the timing: amid his declining popularity at home, the tour comes in the wake of a wave of far-right victories in presidential elections across Latin America. “As someone who has been in power for a little longer, Milei is trying to establish himself as a leader of that group,” said Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a researcher and professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. “I’ve never seen Milei take much interest in official visits to other countries,” said Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, a sociologist and professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. “What interests him are figures from the world of big tech and the far right, but in neither case is there any real interest in opening trade negotiations,” he added. Benjamin Gedan, a senior fellow and director of the Stimson Center’s Latin America programme, said a constant in Milei’s trips has been his effort to remain “deferential to the US president, Donald Trump, and never trying to upstage him”. When Trump took office in January 2025, Milei faced relatively little competition for his affection in Latin America, where fewer than a dozen other far-right presidents were in office, most notably El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Trump described Milei as his “favourite president”. Since then, however, rightwing or far-right candidates have won all seven presidential elections held in the region, with the US president accused of attempting to influence some of them. Almost all of the winners also interacted with Milei during their campaigns through public exchanges of praise or video calls but, according to Tokatlian, there is no doubt about whom they were really trying to please. “All these rightwing leaders see Milei as a kind of proxy for Trump, who is the one who is really in charge. They don’t want to be under any kind of Argentine leadership. It’s Milei who’s trying, but there’s no great eagerness for him,” he said. Tokatlian believes that any contest for Trump’s favour, if one exists at all, will be decided by “whoever gives the US the most on drug trafficking, migration, military cooperation and containing China’s influence”. The US has signed a series of military cooperation agreements with countries across the region. In March, Trump launched the Shield of the Americas, a “counter-cartel coalition” made up exclusively of far-right leaders aligned with him. Notably absent were key countries for drug production and trafficking in the region – Mexico, Brazil and Colombia – all of which are governed by leftwing administrations. After being elected, De la Espriella said that Colombia would join the initiative and establish a local Shield of the Americas office in Medellín. Ariel Goldstein, a researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires, believes Milei nonetheless remains ahead of the others in the race for Trump’s attention. “He has already spent the past two or three years building an intense relationship of friendship and subordination with the US,” he said. When Trump was re-elected, Milei travelled to Palm Beach to become the first foreign leader to meet him after his victory. The Argentinian president has also emulated a number of policies from his US counterpart, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and tightening immigration policies. Last year, Trump offered a $40bn US bailout that was widely seen as crucial to the libertarian party’s victory in Argentina’s midterm elections. However, Milei’s path to re-election next year is far from looking smooth: although inflation has fallen, purchasing power has also declined, while unemployment and informality have risen and his administration has been hit by corruption scandals. Meanwhile, Goldstein believes that Milei and Trump are now heavily invested in winning the next major prize on the electoral calendar: Latin America’s largest country, Brazil. Besides attending the launch of Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign, the Argentinian president had hoped to visit the senator’s father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest after being convicted over an attempted coup, but the request was denied by a justice. Milei has never held a bilateral meeting with Lula. “A Bolsonaro victory would be hugely important to Milei and Trump because it would allow them to reorganise the whole region around an axis of subordination to the US,” said Goldstein.