Fidelity flaggar upp i Africa Oil

Africa Oil meddelar att myndigheten Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission i Nigeria har godkänt konsolideringen av Prime enligt det avtal som aviserades i somras. Det framgår av ett pressmeddelande.

Oljeprospekteringsbolaget Africa Oil fortsätter uppåt på börsen efter att DNB justerat upp sin riktkurs för aktien. På onsdagen meddelade bolaget att man ingått ett så kallat utfarmningsavtal i Namibia.

Samtidigt som de stora utsläpparna börjar ställa om för klimatet syns en annan trend. En anti-klimatrörelse, skriver The Economist. Människor har börjat oroa sig för att omställningen kommer att bli dyr, obekväm och en liten andel ifrågasätter till och med om klimatförändringarna ens existerar. Som exempel på backlashen skriver tidningen om svenska Bensinupproret, Donald Trump och populistiska politiker runt om planeten. Cost, convenience and conspiracy-mongering undercut support for greenery By The Economist 11 October 2023 ”We need to be good stewards of our planet. But that doesn’t mean I need to do away with my gas vehicle and drive an electric vehicle with a battery from China,” said Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, on September 22nd. America’s Democrats, she warned, are trying to “convince us that if we don’t centralise power in the government, the planet is gonna die. That seems like one of the biggest scams [since] Darwinian evolution.” It would be tempting to dismiss Ms Karamo as an irrelevant crank, but she is not irrelevant. She represents an extreme wing of a movement that is gathering pace around the world: a backlash against pro-climate policies. One of its more familiar cheerleaders could be America’s next president. On September 27th Donald Trump said: “You can be loyal to American labour or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics but you can’t really be loyal to both…Crooked Joe [Biden] is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself.” On September 20th Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, announced a weakening of net-zero targets, including a five-year delay of a ban on the sale of new petrol cars. Two weeks earlier, Germany kicked a mandate to install green heating in new homes years into the future. France has seen huge protests against high fuel prices, and could one day elect as president Marine Le Pen, who deplores wind farms and thinks the energy transition should be “much slower”. In America climate change has become a culture-war battleground: at a recent debate for Republican presidential candidates, only one admitted that man-made climate change is real. How serious an obstacle is all this to curbing global carbon emissions? Michael Jacobs of the University of Sheffield in Britain sees reasons for cautious optimism. The world’s biggest emitter, China, understands the need to decarbonise and is investing massively in solar and wind. The second-biggest emitter, America, has taken a green turn under Mr Biden. Brazil has sacked a rainforest-slashing president; Australia has ditched a coal-coddling prime minister. Nearly a quarter of emissions are now subject to carbon pricing. And the pace of innovation is impressive. Two years ago the International Energy Agency, a global body, estimated that nearly 50% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net zero by 2050 would come from technologies that were not yet commercially available. In September it said that number had fallen to 35%. The political undercurrents are less reassuring. Voters are realising that remaking the entire global economy will be disruptive. Some—a minority—dispute that man-made climate change is under way. Others object to certain policies deployed to tackle it, because they impose costs on ordinary citizens, or add hassles to their overstretched daily lives. Some, particularly the elderly, do not like change at all, especially when it means fuss today in return for benefits they may not live to see. Even among those who accept that action is needed, views differ as to who should shoulder the burden. Many would prefer it to fall on someone else. Awareness of the dangers of climate change seems to have risen over the past wildfire-charred decade. In polls of 12 rich countries by Pew, an American think-tank, the share of respondents who said it was a “major threat” rose in every country except South Korea, where it was already high (see chart 1). Clear majorities everywhere bar Israel agreed with this description. Yet this does not mean they are willing to pay more taxes to help prevent climate change (see chart 2). In a survey of 29 countries by Ipsos, a pollster, only 30% of respondents said they would be willing to cough up. Perhaps most alarmingly, a partisan gap has opened even on scientific questions. In all of the 14 rich countries surveyed by Pew in 2022, people on the political right were less likely to see climate change as a major threat than those on the left (see chart 3). In Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden the gap was very large: between 22 and 44 percentage points. In America it was a gobsmacking 63 points. And a new poll by YouGov for The Economist found that whereas 87% of Biden voters believed that climate change was caused by human activity, only 21% of Trump voters agreed. In democracies such divisions have consequences. (Public opinion matters in dictatorships, too, but that is beyond the scope of this article.) In rich democracies, especially, divisions over climate are aggravated by populist politicians, who take real problems (such as cost and disruption) and exaggerate them, while claiming that the elite who impose green policies don’t care about ordinary motorists because they cycle to work. Populism tends to undermine effective climate policy in several ways. First, populists are often sceptical of experts. When people say “trust the experts”, suggests Ms Karamo, they really mean: “You are too stupid to make decisions about your life.” Second, populists are suspicious of global institutions and foreigners. “Every subsidy we award to an electric-vehicle manufacturer is really a subsidy to the [Chinese Communist Party], because we depend on them, like a noose around our neck, for the batteries,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate. Such attitudes are bad for climate mitigation, argues Dan Fiorino of the American University in Washington, dc, because “climate policy is as much a matter of foreign relations as it is of economic policy.” Third, populists encourage people to believe that the elite are plotting against them, thus adding paranoia to public life and making compromise harder. Mr Trump frames policies to promote electric cars as a threat to the American way of life, and does so in ways that make his fans bristle with rage and laugh out loud. “They say the happiest day when you buy an electric car is the first ten minutes you’re driving it, and then, after that, panic sets in because you’re worried. Where the hell am I gonna get a charge to keep this thing going? Panic!” he told workers in Michigan. “If you want to buy an electric car that’s absolutely fine...But we should not be forcing consumers to buy electric vehicles…There’s no such thing as a fair transition to the end of your way of life.” If Mr Trump is re-elected in 2024, he would once again pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. He would also roll back executive orders on such things as methane emissions. He would probably not be able to repeal Mr Biden’s big climate law (misleadingly called the Inflation Reduction Act), which involves huge subsidies that are popular with recipients in red states as well as blue ones. But he would appoint bureaucrats who could obstruct its implementation. At a minimum, America would cease to offer leadership on climate change at a crucial moment, says Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat. “You cannot preach temperance from a barstool. You cannot tell other countries to do the right thing if you as a country are not.” Similar arguments against greenery have taken root in Europe, too. Even where populist parties are not in government, they can influence it. In Sweden, where only 4% of people say climate change is “not a threat”, the centre-right ruling coalition has nonetheless cut taxes on fossil fuels several times in the past year. One reason is that it cannot pass a budget without support from the populist Sweden Democrats, who have 20% of parliamentary seats. The populists want cheaper fuel. So do lots of Swedish voters. “Fuel Rebellion”, a Swedish Facebook group, boasts 600,000 members. Peder Blohm Bokenhielm, one of its leaders, says cars “have always been a big part” of his life. His father imported American Mustangs and Corvettes to Sweden. His first word as a child was “car”. And he has practical reasons for objecting to high fuel taxes, too. In a small Swedish village “there are no shops, and just two buses a day,” he says. “If you want to buy groceries, you need a car.” Charging points are not yet everywhere, and a car’s range matters in a country where journeys are long and getting stranded in the snow is hazardous. And don’t get people started on the cost of home-heating. Politicians who keep high fuel prices in place are “making it harder for people to live where they want to live”, Mr Bokenhielm says. In Germany this year the hard-right Alternative for Germany (afd) has risen in the polls—and did well in state elections on October 8th—by lambasting the energy policies of the ruling coalition, which includes the Green Party. It says they will “impoverish” the country. The AfD is ostracised by mainstream parties, but the centre-right borrows its talking-points. The Greens hurt their own cause with a plan to make green home-heating almost mandatory before there were enough skilled installers to install heat pumps. Householders struggled to book tradesmen. The government backed down in September and extended the deadline—but the political damage had been done. Now in Germany it is not just the hard right that bashes the Greens. Their rallies have been pelted with stones, eggs and insults. Martin Huber of the Christian Social Union (csu), the main centre-right party in Bavaria, told The Economist that all the Greens do is make Verbotsgesetze (laws that forbid things). At a rally in Andechs, a pretty village 40km from Munich, the head of the csu, Markus Söder, drew guffaws from a beered-up Oktoberfest crowd with a series of jabs. When the lights suddenly brightened he quipped: “So at least they are still sending us electricity from Berlin.” An elderly supporter said: “I heat my house with wood. How can I afford to change this, and why should I in my old age?” In Britain, the Conservative prime minister has adopted the main populist themes. In a speech last month, Mr Sunak stressed that he favours curbing emissions, but decried the way Britain’s climate goals had been set “without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there”. (His party has been in power since 2010.) He also lamented that green policies “will impose unacceptable costs”. He named specific, frightening sums. “For a family living in a terraced house in Darlington, the upfront cost [of a heat pump] could be around £10,000 ($12,200).” He vowed to scrap plans that have never seriously been considered: “taxes on eating meat…compulsory car-sharing [and] a government diktat to sort your rubbish into seven different bins”. And he played the nationalist card. “When our share of global emissions is less than 1%, how can it be right that British citizens are...told to sacrifice even more than others?” (Brits are less than 1% of the global population.) “Rishi is playing with fire,” says Michael Grubb of University College London. Businesses crave predictable policies in order to plan for the long term. “Making climate change part of a culture war will undermine investor confidence.” James Patterson of Utrecht University in the Netherlands argues that anti-green backlashes sometimes occur when environmentalists overreach; for example, by enacting policies so coercive that many people deem them illegitimate. This has happened in the Netherlands. A new populist party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement), shot to prominence when the government began to penalise farms emitting too much nitrogen. Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas; the problem is that big intensive Dutch farms produce enough of it (from fertiliser and cowpats) to threaten important nature reserves. The government wants to buy out farmers, leading to a reduction in the number of livestock of between a fifth and a half. Such bossiness has provoked rustic rage, with tractor protests and farms across the country flying the national flag upside down. The Farmer-Citizen Movement took 20% of the vote in provincial elections this year—in a country where only 2.2% of people farm. At a general election on November 22nd the more eco-friendly parties are expecting a thumping. For the most part in developing countries, climate change is a less divisive topic in domestic politics than it is in rich ones. The elite discuss it—governments want to be compensated for the industrialised world’s past emissions and to attract investment for the energy transition. But during elections in India or Africa the topic is barely mentioned. However, voters in developing countries are even more sensitive to rises in the cost of living than those in rich countries. So they often resist policies that they think will batter their budgets. Hence the difficulty of cutting fossil-fuel subsidies, which were a staggering $1.3trn (1.3% of global gdp) in 2022, according to the imf. Such handouts are so popular that the harm they do to the environment is seldom motive enough for governments to get rid of them. Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu, scrapped a fuel subsidy this year not because it encouraged people to burn carbon, but because selling petrol at below-market prices was bankrupting the treasury. In 2022 it cost $10bn, leaving the state oil firm with nothing left for the federal government, of which it is usually the biggest bankroller. Abolishing the subsidy frees up billions for public services, with the happy side-effect of reducing emissions. However, there is pressure to reinstate it. As oil prices rise, some fear a subsidy will be quietly reintroduced. Several middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and India, are burning more fossil fuels even as they try to reinvent themselves as green powers. India’s government plans to triple renewable-electricity-generation capacity by the end of the decade. It has also declared a moratorium on new coal plants and aims to become a big producer of green hydrogen. This is good news, but seems to be driven at least as much by worries about energy security as climate change: last year’s green-hydrogen strategy mentions a plan to be “energy independent” by 2047 before the target to achieve “net zero” by 2070. And despite the moratorium on new coal plants, Indian coal production grew by 14.8% last year. National-security arguments can be a spur to green investment. Building wind farms can reduce dependence on energy imports, which is a point that many politicians emphasise. But if such arguments also spur governments to erect barriers to foreign inputs, it will make the energy transition more costly. From a green perspective, the big middle-income country that has improved the most in the past year is probably Brazil. Yet it, too, is complicated. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, deforestation in the Amazon in the first eight months of the year fell by a cumulative 48% compared with the same period in 2022, when his logger-loving predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, was in charge. However, Lula also supports a push by Petrobras, the state oil firm, to increase output from 2.9m barrels a day to 5.2m by 2030. And his green plans have met resistance. In Congress 347 out of 594 lawmakers belong to the agri-business caucus, whose members fret that greens block development. Congress has curbed the powers of the environment ministry. In most developing countries, net-zero targets are far in the future and voters have not yet been asked to make big sacrifices to reach them. For many, the harm wrought by climate change itself is a bigger worry. A massive 74% of Indians, for example, say they have experienced the effects of global warming, up from 50% in 2011, according to a survey by Yale University. “We’ve lost crops because of extreme heat and rains and it has got worse in the past few years,” says Shiv Kumari, a farm labourer in Delhi whose fields were flooded this summer. Such trauma translates into greater support for green policies: 55% of Indians say India should reduce its emissions immediately without waiting for other countries to act, up from 36% in 2011. Globally, innovation will eventually ease the grumbles that drive so much of the anti-climate backlash. “The clean is already cheaper than the dirty in many parts of the economy, and those parts will just get bigger and bigger,” says Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. But it matters immensely how fast this happens. Many green technologies require hefty upfront investment, which is harder when interest rates are high. This particularly affects the poor world. “Look at Africa. If you pay 15% interest, wind and solar are not cheaper than fossil fuels for generating electricity, though they are cheaper at 7% or 8%,” says Professor Stern. He suggests supercharging multilateral lenders to crowd in other sources of finance. “The most unrealistic and dangerous thing of all would be to go slow,” he says. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Norska Sparebank1 köpstämplar Africa Oil mot bakgrund av att aktien sjunkit till en attraktiv värdering. Banken ser samtidigt en risk.

Africa Oils vd Roger Tucker har den 6 oktober köpt 125.000 aktier i bolaget till en kurs om 20:69 kronor, motsvarande 2,6 miljoner kronor.

När Polen snart går till val är många av kandidaterna desamma som när det nationalkonservativa partiet Lag och Rättvisa (PIS) vann valet 2015. Men Polen idag är ett annat land, med andra förutsättningar, en annan retorik och med andra insatser. Det skriver författaren och journalisten Anne Applebaum, vars man är en polsk oppositionspolitiker, i The Atlantic. I texten går hon till hårt angrepp mot det nuvarande styret. Frågor som inflation, migration och kvinnors rättigheter är under diskussion. Som meningsmotståndare riskerar man idag att utsättas för trollattacker, avlyssning och att anklagas för påhittade brott. Precis som under kommunisttiden går politiker helst ut och pratar eller lämnar sin telefon i ett annat rum, förklarar Applebaum. – Det är priset, nuförtiden, av att vara i demokratisk opposition, skriver hon. The Law and Justice party captured the Polish state. Can democracy survive? By Anne Applebaum October 4, 2023 State capture is a clean, formal phrase that describes a messy, ugly process. A political party or clique typically consolidates control over a state’s institutions only after years of bad legislation, concentrated propaganda, and many different forms of corruption. In some cases, constitutions have to be broken. Occasionally violence is required. Whole swaths of the public have to be persuaded, bribed, or frightened into going along. In Poland, this process has been under way for eight years. After the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, known as PiS, legitimately won a parliamentary election in 2015, it began with an assault on the highest courts. Then it set out to dominate everything else: the national and local civil administration, regulators of all kinds, even seemingly apolitical institutions such as the forestry service. Now Poland is just days away from another parliamentary election, on October 15—an election that feels as if it were taking place in a completely different country. Some of the candidates are the same as in 2015. But the rules are different, the rhetoric is different, and the stakes are different. Inflation, migration, and women’s rights are under discussion. But in truth, only one issue is really on the ballot: Do you want PiS to complete its capture of state institutions, or do you want those institutions to belong once again to the entire country? Before I continue, here is a very emphatic declaration of personal interest. I am married to a Polish politician, Radek Sikorski, a former foreign minister who is a member of Civic Platform, the largest opposition party. He is not a candidate in this election, but he is a member of the European Parliament, and he is campaigning on behalf of others. If that bothers you, then stop reading here. But do remember that some stories are clearer from the inside. As soon as this article is published, both my husband and I could once again be the focus of orchestrated online attacks from PiS trolling operations, more slander on state-run and state-controlled media, and maybe even more antagonism from the state institutions that use the security services to harass political opponents, including us, by orchestrating bogus financial or criminal investigations. Those same institutions have put spyware on the phones of our colleagues and friends. As in the Communist era, people in Polish politics now sometimes go outside or leave their phone in a different room when they want to speak. That’s just the price, nowadays, of being in the democratic opposition. In this sense, the Polish political system has already diverged from other democracies. In the United States, people who watch Fox News and follow Truth Social believe in a false version of reality, one in which the 2020 election was stolen. Now imagine what would happen if an American politician could promote that lie, not just on social media but with hundreds of millions of dollars of federal-government money—your money, in other words, that you paid in your taxes—in order to hold power indefinitely. In Poland, that once unimaginable scenario has become reality. PiS’s most important tool is state media—a couple of dozen state-owned television channels, national and local, as well as radio stations and websites—that have no American equivalent. Although Poland does have one fully independent satellite news station—TVN24, owned by Warner Bros.—subscribing to it costs money. State television is free, and for millions of people it remains the only source of political information. PiS has added 2 billion zlotys to the annual state-media budget since 2015 (some $450 million, which goes a long way in Poland). For that money, the state can produce some of the most virulent, aggressive television propaganda anywhere in the democratic world. State media work by targeting particular people, running repetitive, angry stories about them. The main news program repeatedly describes the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk as dishonest, treasonous, and above all, German. Tusk, who was previously the president of the European Council, once addressed a meeting of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union online during the pandemic. His brief remarks to the political party ended with a generic expression, in German, of good wishes “for Germany and for Europe.” The sentence was cut to one phrase—für Deutschland—and has been repeated scores of times on Polish state television. Although legally obligated to be politically neutral, state television also picks themes designed to help the ruling party, especially during campaigns. In the run-up to parliamentary elections in 2019, state television ran a documentary called Invasion, about the sinister “aims, methods, and money” of the LGBTQ community. During presidential elections in 2020, the taxpayer-funded broadcaster described the opposition candidate as “serving Jewish interests.” State media also hide or downplay genuine scandals. PiS has been telling Poles for years now that they face an existential threat from migrants coming from the Middle East. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the PiS party leader, once said that Syrians carry “parasites and protozoa,” words that had a clear echo in Poland, where in 1941, Nazi occupiers put up posters warning that Jews cause typhus. Alongside the parliamentary ballot, PiS has also organized a referendum of dubious legality. It consists of four tendentious questions, including this one: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced-relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?” The wording is a lie: No European bureaucracy has imposed any forced-relocation mechanism. But the larger, more extraordinary lie is the implication that PiS actually cares about stopping migrants from “the Middle East and Africa.” In truth, this government has allowed tens of thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa, Central and South Asia to enter Poland, which now has more immigrants than at any other time in modern history. In Warsaw, I have randomly met Tajiks, Mongols, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis who are delivering packages, driving taxis, working on construction sites. Their presence has nothing to do with European bureaucracy. Instead, media reports estimate that as many as 250,000 non-European migrants have recently entered the country, many after purchasing visas from corrupt PiS officials or intermediaries. The details of this swindle, recently leaked to Polish independent media, are astonishing. One foreign-ministry official described a booth set up outside a Polish consulate in Africa, where people lined up to hand over cash. Another scandal involved a group of Indians, described falsely as a Bollywood-film team, who purchased hard-to-get EU visas from a Polish consulate in India for up to 40,000 euros apiece, intending to use them to travel to Mexico. From there, they hoped to cross the U.S. border. If you want to know how a would-be migrant might get from Mumbai to the Rio Grande, this is one answer. Several officials, including the deputy foreign minister, have been sacked for selling visas. German and EU officials want explanations, particularly because one former PiS minister has said he believes that the government was deliberately admitting migrants who it knew would head for Germany. The Germans have set up temporary controls on Poland’s western border. But the foreign-policy implications are less significant than the breathtaking hypocrisy of PiS officials: Even their racism turned out to be less powerful than their greed. And what will the audience of state television learn about this story? Almost nothing. Even this week, many days after the scandal broke, the evening news is still telling them that Donald Tusk and Civic Platform want to bring more migrants to Poland, and still telling them that only PiS can protect Poland from this deluge. But media directly owned by the state are only part of the story. State-owned and state-controlled companies are also major contributors to PiS propaganda. The Polish state gas and oil company, PKN Orlen, directly owns 20 out of 24 Polish regional daily newspapers as well as 120 weekly magazines (just as Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled gas company, owns media properties in Russia), and uses them to attack the opposition and support the government. State companies lavishly fund foundations and other nongovernmental organizations that spread pro-government messaging. Utility companies have sent messages to voters directly on their monthly bills, praising government policies and attacking the European Union. Orlen appears to have artificially lowered gas prices in advance of the election (which the company denies). Individually, the highly paid executives of these state enterprises, who are supposed to be working on behalf of the country, not the ruling party, are also helping fund the government’s campaign, including a massive, targeted online advertising campaign of unprecedented scale. Normally there would be limits on contributions, but because of the referendum, those limits have been removed. No opposition party can raise the money to compete, particularly because many Polish businessmen know that helping the opposition means they could lose licenses and contracts with state institutions—or even become targets of trumped-up tax or corruption investigations. Some will even donate to the ruling party, just to stay out of jail. The tactics that Americans call gerrymandering and voter suppression play a big role in Poland too. District maps that were due to be redrawn years ago have not been changed, meaning that urban areas, which are more likely to vote for the opposition, will be underrepresented. Hundreds of thousands of Poles working abroad—also more likely to vote for the opposition—have to vote in person at a limited number of sites, which means many won’t be able to vote at all. By contrast, hundreds of additional polling stations have been added in rural Poland, so that people more likely to support PiS can vote more easily. New rules will also slow down the vote-counting process, while at the same time discounting any results not received in 24 hours. Overburdened polling stations in big cities, in Poland or abroad, may not make the cutoff. The opposition can in theory still win, and indeed should win: Together, the three parties that would return Poland to a fully functioning democracy easily outpoll PiS. But the three-way division of the anti-authoritarian vote could yield fewer seats than a single opposition party would receive—a situation that will be made far worse if one of the parties fails to get enough votes to enter Parliament at all. The peculiarities of the voting system make the final outcome hard to predict. A few percentage points’ swing for or against one of the smaller parties could radically shift the final result. This particular quirk of Polish politics helps explain another aspect of the election campaign that has surprised outsiders. There is a fifth party, Konfederacja, which models itself after the pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian far-right parties that are gaining prominence elsewhere in Europe. One of its slogans is “No welfare payments for Ukrainians.” The language it uses was unacceptable in Polish politics just a few years ago, as was its anti-Semitism; now, thanks to state television, xenophobes sit happily in mainstream Polish politics, and PiS wants to win their votes. Also, thanks either to corruption or the incompetence of the PiS government, Ukrainian grain that was supposed to transit across Poland in recent months was allowed to fill Polish grain silos instead. Prices fell, angering the farmers whose votes PiS needs to win. These two factors help explain Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s now frequent public outbursts against Ukraine, as well as his declaration that Poland will cease sending weapons to the country—a statement that appears not even to be true. From the outside, this eruption of ill will might be hard to understand. Yet the damage it did was incalculable, destroying the genuine transatlantic unity that is absolutely necessary for Ukraine to win the war, and self-destructive as well: If the war is prolonged because the Kremlin thinks allied support for Ukraine is faltering, that’s very bad for Poland indeed. But the ruling party’s political concerns override the national interest. Why? Because electoral loss would be a personal catastrophe for PiS members, their relatives, and their friends. Before 2015, Poland had an imperfect but mostly apolitical public service. Now Poland has replaced its apolitical civil servants with a system of patronage, comparable to the one that existed in 19th-century America. Whole areas of public life have been politicized, from the judiciary and the prosecutors to the national and local public administration, right down to the level of small towns and villages. Thousands of civil servants were fired for their perceived political affiliations, as were military leaders and diplomats. When my husband and some local political leaders were campaigning at a public event a few days ago, members of a local fire brigade told them that they were very sorry, but they could not be photographed with opposition politicians, because they might be fired too. In that sense, Poland already resembles an autocracy. I say that even though a loud, energetic election campaign is unfolding across the country, and even though hundreds of thousands of people joined an opposition march on Sunday, possibly the largest demonstration in the history of Warsaw. But if the central feature of modern kleptocracy is a ruling party that has claimed control of state institutions, both to enrich itself and to remain in power, Poland already matches that description. Whatever social or economic reasons led people to vote for PiS back in 2015 are now of little significance, given how dramatically these captured state institutions have changed the country. I’ve heard several people in recent weeks describe the Polish political system, like the Turkish and Hungarian systems, as “free but not fair.” This is a deep misunderstanding: Long before anyone starts counting votes, this election will already have been severely distorted. This campaign is neither free nor fair, and also offers a lesson to other democracies, including the U.S., about the high price they will pay if they elect autocratic leaders who openly seek to capture the state. Victory for the opposition in this election is the only chance Poland has to prevent this system from becoming permanent. That’s why PiS will sacrifice anything—Poland’s economy, Poland’s alliances, Poland’s physical safety—in order to win. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Africa Oil meddelar positiva provborrningsresultat från brunnen Venus-1X i Namibia på torsdagen. Detta efter att aktien sjönk på onsdagen i skuggan av mindre fokus på projektet än förväntat från operatören Total.

Total Energies kom på onsdagen, i samband med sin kapitalmarknadsdag, med en uppdatering kring testborrningarna i Venus-oljefältet i Namibia där Total Energies är operatör och Africa Oil delägare.

Stockholmsbörsen steg inför onsdagskvällens räntebesked från Federal Reserve och vid stängning såg det ut så här:

• OMXSPI: +1,3% • OMXS30: +1,2%

SEB varnade i ett marknadsbrev för ”en viss risk för att Fed överraskar marknaden med mer hökaktiga toner” trots att marknaden ser en höjning som utesluten. På hemmaplan presenterade gamingbolaget Enad Global 7 nya finansiella mål och ett utdelningsprogram, vilket skickade upp aktien 19,5 procent. Northgold rusade 19,8 procent efter positiva testresultat från sin borrning i Finland. Cybersäkerhetsbolaget Yubico gjorde på onsdagen börsdebut efter sammanslagningen med spacbolaget ACQ Bure. Aktien handlades upp 2,9 procent. SBB toppade OMXS30 med en uppgång på 5,8 procent, före Sinch och Boliden som båda steg över 3 procent. Enda bolaget i indexet på rött var Essity, som tappade 0,4 procent. Energisektorn hörde till dagens förlorare i spåren av ett sjunkande oljepris. Maha Energy föll 5,5 procent och Africa Oil tappade 1,6 procent. Axfood minskade 2,5 procent efter ett säljråd från SEB. New York-börserna i går • S&P 500: -0,2% • Nasdaq: -0,2% • Dow Jones: -0,3%