Hagberg & Aneborn is rebranding to Bergs Securities and launches Certified Adviser services

Oodash Group har, som Nyhetsbyrån Direkt skrivit tidigare under fredagen, beslutat om två riktade emissioner till en teckningskurs som långt överstiger de nivåer aktien handlats till på First North. Premien i emissionerna är nästan 2.500 procent.

Budstriden kring First North-listade Pagero har kommit lite som en blixt från klar himmel, men är en bra påminnelse om att det faktiskt finns kvalitetsbolag på de mindre aktielistorna. Att grundaren och storägaren Bengt Nilsson inte låter överlycklig trots miljardbud med hög premie kan man däremot förstå.

Det danska it-bolaget Linkfire, som enligt besked i juli har beslutat om att inleda en avnotering av aktien från First North Premier i Stockholm, redovisar ett rörelseresultat för det andra kvartalet 2023 på -7,2 miljoner danska kronor (-19,5).

Energibolaget Saltx Technology, vars aktie är noterad på Nasdaq First North Premier, redovisar ett rörelseresultat för det andra kvartalet 2023 på -12,5 miljoner kronor (-16,6).

Saudiarabiens skyhöga löner för internationella idrottsstjärnor kan vara på väg att rita om kartan för hur fotbollsspelare resonerar när de väljer väg i karriären, skriver The Economist. Historiskt har de flesta, kanske alla, utövare strävat efter att spela på en så hög nivå som möjligt. Men i dag verkar fler och fler vara öppna för att offra några år av karriären till förmån för en fetare ekonomisk ersättning. Den saudiska offensiven sätter fingret på en reell utmaning för klubbarna i de europeiska toppligorna: att behålla positionen som den självklara destinationen för världens främsta talanger. The kingdom is throwing money at the game. It expects a return By The Economist 14th July, 2023 In 1975 a 34-year-old Pelé came out of semi-retirement to sign a huge contract with the New York Cosmos in the nascent North American Soccer League (NASL). It was a coup for the club to hire a player who had won the World Cup three times, even if he was in his footballing dotage. The Brazilian proved his worth, scoring 37 goals in 64 matches. Before long, the NASL was established as an attractive place for leading players to wind down their careers: Gerd Müller, George Best and Johan Cruyff followed in Pelé’s wake. Although the NASL collapsed in 1984, the idea of raising the profile of a football league by signing older stars seeking a final payday (and a more relaxed level of competition) has been replicated elsewhere. Some of these leagues have flourished and gone on to develop local talent (Japan, Australia), whereas others have crashed and burned (China). The latest country to have a go is Saudi Arabia, whose revamped and highly lucrative Pro League is shaking up the economics of European football. In June the Saudi Arabian government announced that its sovereign wealth fund had acquired a 75% stake in four of the league’s 18 teams: Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr in Riyadh, and Al-Ahli and Al-Ittihad in Jeddah. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) is co-ordinating the acquisition of players based in Europe, of whom it aims to place at least three at each of these clubs. Four state-owned entities have invested in another four teams. The PIF argues that its involvement in football is part of a broader project to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and to promote physical activity among citizens. In 2021 it bought an English Premier League club, Newcastle United, and Saudi Arabia is widely expected to bid to host the World Cup in 2030, perhaps as the dominant partner in a joint bid. Critics see the government’s investments in football, as well as in boxing, Formula One and golf, as an attempt to draw attention away from its dismal human-rights record. For wealthy European clubs, second-tier leagues in far-flung destinations have been relatively unimportant. They offer lucrative places to tour and suitable employers onto whom to offload fading stars on high-wage contracts. The transfer of Cristiano Ronaldo to Al-Nassr in late 2022 was greeted with a sigh of relief in the red half of Manchester. Chelsea have trimmed their bloated roster by selling three squad players to Saudi clubs. The wages on offer in the Middle East far exceed those on offer in the Premier League. Mr Ronaldo’s salary, including commercial agreements, is reportedly $200m per year. It appears, though, that the PIF’s ambitions extend further than taking Europe’s cast-offs. The most interesting signing so far this summer is that of a 26-year-old Portuguese midfielder, Rúben Neves. He moved from a mid-table Premier League team, Wolverhampton Wanderers, to Al-Hilal. Mr Neves, who was the club captain and has been a regular with the Portuguese national team, is entering his prime years. That he has opted to spend a chunk of these playing in a league of lower quality challenges the assumption of most clubs and fans that professionals will seek to play at the highest level they can. For Mr Neves, the transfer is a sacrifice of sorts. He is believed to earn much more money in Saudi Arabia, but his career at the highest level may have ended. Had he stayed in England, he could possibly have played for a club in the UEFA Champions League, Europe’s most prestigious competition. If he seeks a move back to Europe, clubs of the same calibre may not be interested in him. He could lose his place in the Portuguese team. The move also highlighted European clubs’ vulnerabilities. Wolves are far from minnows. They are the world’s 25th-richest team by revenue, according to Deloitte, an accounting firm. Yet the PIF presented them with a clear choice. They could accept £47m ($60m) for their star player or hold on to him for one more year until his contract expired, and then lose him for nothing. The number of clubs with either the status or resources to resist the PIF is very small. Consider also Marcelo Brozovic, a 30-year-old Croatian midfielder, who captained Internazionale in the Champions League final five weeks ago. After eight years in Milan he wanted a new challenge. Barcelona had been keen to sign him, but their contract offer was eclipsed by Al-Nassr’s, and Mr Brozovic chose to head east. It isn’t just that European clubs are struggling to keep hold of their existing players. Teams of all sizes—no one, after all, is more prestigious than Barcelona—may have to rethink their recruitment plans. Players are still only trickling towards Saudi Arabia. But the summer transfer window does not close until the end of August, so for the next few weeks, and then again during transfer windows to come, European football clubs will look eastwards with concern. The PIF will continue to eye up well-known players—in particular if Saudi Arabia wins the right to part-host the World Cup in 2030, an outcome that would intensify the government’s focus on football. Much will be revealed in the next few years. Speculation abounds of Saudi Arabia’s lofty hopes: of entering its clubs in an expanded Champions League, or of reviving and expanding the reviled idea for a European Super League. For now, though, and for the first time, an upstart league is posing a genuine challenge to Europe’s stranglehold on the world’s brightest talents. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Intensifierar satsningen på navbolag Pressrelease 2023-06-15 Pegroco Invest – med preferensaktie noterad på First North Premier Growth Market - byter namn till Navigo Invest efter en omställningsfas där portföljen har renodlats. Bolaget spetsar strategin genom att fortsätta att bygga sina innehav kring navbolagen. I samband med namnbytet ändras även tickern på preferensaktien.

Det har alltid varit svårt att lista ut hur beslut fattas i auktoritära regimer. Winston Churchills citat om beslutsgången i Sovjet, ”en gåta svept i ett mysterium höljd i en hemlighet” är välkända. Och, skriver Odd Arne Westad, professor i historia vid Yaleuniversitetet i Foreign Affairs, ”han var inte helt fel ute”. En liknande situation växer nu fram med Kina, skriver Westad. Kommunistpartiet är mer slutet än det varit sen Maos dagar. Och i maktbalansen mellan regeringens och kommunistpartiets institutioner så har Xi sett till att partiet har fått makten. Därför blir det viktigt att veta vem som gör vad i partiets mäktiga kommittéer – även om det till syvende och sist är Xi som bestämmer. Why Outsiders Struggle to Understand Beijing’s Decision-Making By Odd Arne Westad June 13, 2023 Figuring out how policy decisions are made in authoritarian regimes has always been hard. Winston Churchill famously referred to Soviet policymaking as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—and he was not much wrong. Observers in the West could see the policy output of the Soviet Union, be it under Joseph Stalin or Leonid Brezhnev, by what those leaders said publicly and how they acted. But it was not easy to figure out what was going on inside their regimes, because access to information was so limited and fear prevented insiders from communicating even what they thought outsiders ought to know. In spite of occasional intelligence breakthroughs, U.S. policymaking was severely handicapped by a lack of understanding of how policy was made on the other side. A similar situation is now taking shape with regard to China. Insights into decision-making in Beijing are harder to get than they have been for 50 years. The main reason for this is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is more authoritarian and less open than it has been at any point since Mao Zedong was in charge. People close to power are more fearful, and access to information is less widespread, even within the higher echelons of the regime. Outside observers therefore know much less than they did in decades past about how the party’s leaders arrive at their conclusions with regard to foreign policy. People in China are not yet experiencing the degree of fear and secrecy that they did under Mao, but they are getting there. The big issue for foreign policy analysts is to figure out what they can know with some certainty about Chinese decision-making and what they cannot. And in establishing this knowledge, they need to watch out for common analytic errors, including forms of “past dependency” and mirror imaging. The former relates to the belief that patterns of the past will somehow be repeated in the present. The latter assumes that all governments and all politics tend to function in the same way, although within different settings. Some U.S. presidents have assumed that Chinese leaders’ view of the world will change very little and that they therefore will make decisions consistent with those of the past. Other U.S. leaders have tried to deal with their Chinese counterparts as if they were senators from the opposing political party or reluctant business partners. Such approaches have generally ended very badly. What do analysts in the West know about the making of China’s foreign policy under President Xi Jinping? They know that in China, as in all major countries, foreign policy is first and foremost a reflection of domestic priorities. Xi has spent his time in office attempting to destroy all internal bases of power except his own. He wants to centralize authority around the leadership of the CCP and wipe out party factions, provincial groups, and business tycoons who could stand in his way. Xi believes that he needs such powers for several interrelated reasons. He believes in authoritarian rule and is convinced that it is a superior form of government to democracy. He concluded, early in his tenure, that his predecessors had been weak and that their weakness had given rise to domestic chaos and corruption, as well as to an unwillingness to stand up for China’s interests abroad. And he sees China under his rule as having entered a triumphant new era, the successes of which have so alarmed the West, and the United States in particular, that these countries, who are by nature inimical to China, will do anything to prevent China’s continued rise. The United States has given CCP leaders many reasons to fear U.S. power and distrust U.S. intentions. But it is unlikely that such actions, however ill advised, have made Xi an authoritarian set on profoundly changing his country’s development path. Xi surveyed China’s road through the reform era since the 1970s and saw much that he did not like, especially the economic, geographic, and institutional dispersal of power. He did not, of course, deplore China’s remarkable economic growth, but he wanted that growth to serve a purpose beyond merely making some people rich. Xi’s aim for the past decade has been the promulgation of such a purpose, which he believes lies in recentralization, the consolidation of party power, and confrontation with the United States. All of his key initiatives, such as Belt and Road, the China Dream, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, have been made to serve this aim. How well Xi’s purpose coincides with the views of the CCP elite, never mind the population as a whole, is very hard to tell. There is little doubt that his concerns about corruption and lax governance were shared by many Chinese in the early 2010s. The contempt with which newly rich Chinese treated officials and ordinary people alike was bound to create resentment and bitterness. The image of “Xi Dada” (roughly meaning “big daddy Xi”) as a people’s emperor who punished corruption and humbled haughty business leaders was a genuinely popular one, at least for a while. It was not until Xi grossly overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic that the public began to ask tougher questions about his intentions. By then, however, it was much too late; Xi had consolidated his power within the CCP, and the party had extended its reach into society more deeply than at any point since the Mao era. Repression and surveillance are now everywhere, although few expect a return to the labor camps and mass executions of the 1950s and 1960s. But current conditions are a far cry from the relatively liberal era that stretched from Mao’s death in 1976 until Xi’s rise. The reason why Xi could undertake his wholesale reevaluation of policies and the setting of new purposes without any form of discussion, except at the highest levels of the CCP, is indicative of the almost total lack of political pluralism in China and the lack of democracy within the party. Xi, by virtue of being the general secretary of the CCP, has unlimited power over the party’s organization because of the principle of “democratic centralism” inherited from Lenin and Stalin, via Mao. When a decision has been taken at the party center—in theory by the CCP Central Committee but in reality by Xi and his tight-knit entourage—party members at all levels have one task: obeying directives and carrying them out. In the 1990s and the first decade of this century, CCP officials claimed that there was no need to change these structures, because more liberal practices were so entrenched among the party faithful. They did not realize, or refused to reflect on, the obvious fact that a general secretary could use the full powers of that position to eradicate any trace of liberalism within the party. Xi’s style of decision-making is one of the consequences of this failure of imagination. For much of the past 40 years, CCP leaders have wanted to even out the power of the party apparatus with that of government institutions, which—at least in theory—represented the whole country, including the 93 percent of the population who are not members of the CCP. The party has always been the center of power. But diversifying the ways in which ordinary people encountered the state helped create a sense of equity and balance. It also increased the party’s legitimacy. Outsiders could be made to believe that the CCP was almost like a typical political party in power rather than a revolutionary organization that conquered the country by force. CCP leaders have often presented themselves in public not solely as party figures but also as government officials. And CCP political theorists began discussing a more limited and clearly defined role for the party within the Chinese system of government, including experiments with political participation at the grassroots and straw polls for lower-level leadership positions. Xi has reversed all of this. Now, party institutions and CCP Central Committee commissions take precedence over those representing the government. A number of top-level councils on economic policy, planning, and military and strategic affairs have changed from primarily serving the State Council, China’s central government, to working almost exclusively for the CCP Politburo. The Central Military Commission, which directs all of China’s armed forces, has always been headed by the party’s most senior leader. But now it is openly referred to as the “Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China” much more often than the “Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China.” Sometimes, the earlier government-style naming conventions are kept for external use. The Cyberspace Administration of China, a government institution, is in reality the “Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission of the CCP.” And the Taiwan and Hong Kong offices of the State Council are identical to the CCP Secretariat’s “work offices” dealing with the same regions. This trend toward emphasizing party power is perhaps most visible on national security issues. Under Xi, the CCP’s Central National Security Commission has become the key institution for all foreign and security problems, often presenting the Politburo with ready-made proposals for decisions. In some cases, the commission proposes policies directly to Xi, through the general secretary’s office, without going through the Politburo. Although other central party commissions dealing with international issues have kept some of their influence, they are now clearly subordinate to the commission on day-to-day issues. The Central Foreign Affairs Commission, headed by a former foreign minister and current Politburo member, Wang Yi, mainly deals with foreign policy at the strategic level and does not meet, even at the deputies level, with anything like the frequency of the security commission. The new prominence of the party’s Central National Security Commission (CNSC) is, in part, a response to what has been a complicated and confused list of government and party institutions that contribute to the making of China’s foreign policy. Beijing insiders still list 18 or 19 different organizations that, at least on paper, have the right to propose policies to the Politburo (with the Foreign Ministry halfway down that list in terms of influence). But although some centralization may have been unavoidable, this is centralization with Xi’s characteristics. The purpose seems to be to make all other national security bureaucracies subservient to one commission, through which Xi can exercise his power. Knowing who serves on the CNSC is therefore of utmost importance for understanding China’s foreign-policy making. The full composition of the commission and its key staffers is secret. But a partial picture is available. The commission is, unsurprisingly, chaired by Xi, with Premier Li Qiang and National People’s Congress Chair Zhao Leji as his deputies. The fourth-ranked CCP leader, Wang Huning, is also a member, and, according to sources in Beijing, Wang—who started out as a foreign affairs expert—is perhaps the most influential presence after Xi himself. Cai Qi, Xi’s chief of staff, who has served on the CNSC since its inception, coordinates its day-to-day work, assisted by his deputy Liu Haixing. Liu is the son of Liu Shuqing, a diplomat and intelligence officer who set up the CNSC’s predecessor organization in the 1990s. Liu Jianchao, director of the CCP’s International Liaison Department, and his deputy Guo Yezhou are influential members, since their department has supplied many of the commission’s staffers. Under Xi, Politburo members Wang Yi, Chen Wenqing, and General Zhang Youxia serve on the commission as, respectively, the senior foreign affairs, state security and intelligence, and military leaders. Even though they rank below the most important authorities in their fields, Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Defense Minister Li Shangfu are known to have Xi’s ear, and they may have more influence on the CNSC than their predecessors did when they held these offices. Interestingly, in terms of priorities, Qin’s expertise is in how to present China’s foreign policy abroad. And Li, an aerospace engineer by training, has a career dealing with space and cyber issues. Xi has adopted a much broader concept of national security than his predecessors. The CNSC has working groups on nuclear security, cybersecurity, and biosecurity. But it also has subgroups setting policy for internal security and terrorist threats. Its new fields of concentration are what it calls “ideological security” and “identity security.” Ideological security refers to the CCP leaders’ fear of what they see as U.S.-instigated “color revolutions” in other countries. Identity security is much broader. It includes how to build a patriotic image of the CCP and how to get Chinese people to equate criticism of the CCP to criticism of China and of the Chinese nation. National security, in other words, is as much about domestic politics as it is about international affairs and as much about the hearts and minds of the Chinese people as about military preparedness and new types of weapons. There is little doubt that Xi uses the extended national concept, just as he has used his anticorruption campaign, to control what other party leaders say and do. He has often issued thinly veiled criticisms of former leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and other early reformers, for not doing enough to make China secure and for not standing up for China’s interests. The message, so clear in Xi’s unprecedented election to a third term as general secretary, is that only Xi can defeat the threats that China and the CCP face. In seeing security threats everywhere, party leaders lay bare a striking combination of hubris and fear. Although they believe that the future belongs to them, they are afraid of domestic subversion. Xi’s aggressive and confrontational style suits this dilemma perfectly. Xi has become the guarantor of security for the CCP but also for many Chinese who see the outside world as threatening. Most officials are trying to adopt his style and work toward what they understand—not always clearly—as his aims. Words matter in Chinese politics. The extraordinary emphasis on Xi’s personal role, unseen since the godlike worship of Mao, reveals not only the extent of his power but also the degree to which the party clings to his leadership. When the CCP gushes about “the status of Comrade Xi Jinping as the core of the party’s Central Committee and of the whole party” or about “the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought,” it exposes some of its own uncertainty and insecurity. Today, even economic growth is less important than party power. For instance, controlling big companies is necessary even if it leads to them being less productive and profitable. No wonder some Chinese business leaders have started seeing the reform era as a gigantic scam patterned on Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union: to them, it seems that the party allowed business to create wealth just in order to confiscate it. Many wealthy people want to get out of China, at least for now. Xi’s own biggest fear must be that, rather than presiding over China’s inevitable rise, he is chairing his country’s emerging decline. The economy is not doing well under the triple whammy of unnecessary and unpredictable government intervention, COVID-19 aftereffects, and declining rates of investment, both domestic and foreign. Meanwhile, the CCP has helped provoke severe diplomatic conflicts with all of China’s main markets in Australia, Japan, Europe, and North America. And the country is facing demographic decline at a scale and speed never seen before in the modern era. All of this must make Xi fear that instead of being a twenty-first-century Stalin or Mao, he may end up instead as China’s Brezhnev, catalyzing the gradual erosion of the values he holds dear. Observers can see only the outward contours of Xi’s mindset. Much else is unknowable. For instance, it is impossible to tell how certain Xi is in his estimates of international politics. Outsiders do not know for sure how much influence the military and the intelligence services have on China’s foreign policy. Many in the West assume that the aggressive style of Beijing’s diplomats comes from a need to show off China’s newfound strength and purpose as well as the superiority of Xi’s leadership. But it remains unclear how important extreme nationalism is to this style, and therefore whether it will necessarily be a lasting element in Chinese decision-making. And most important for U.S. policy, analysts in the West do not know Xi’s timeline for his ostensible goals, such as absorbing Taiwan or attaining military preponderance in eastern Asia and the western Pacific. Xi is reportedly fond of quoting two of Mao’s most famous sayings, both found in the Little Red Book. “All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong,” goes the first one. The second quote is even clearer. “There are two winds in the world today, the east wind and the west wind,” Mao told the Soviets in 1957. “Either the east wind prevails over the west wind or the west wind prevails over the east wind. It is characteristic of the situation today, I believe, that the east wind is prevailing over the west wind.” Xi seems to agree. But he apparently needs a vast army of weathermen to tell him exactly which way the wind is blowing. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

Långt under Westminsters imponerande och glamorösa korridorer skvallrar palatsets källarvalv om ett helt annat Storbritannien: fukt och asbests, ett virrvarr av livsfarliga kablar som hänger ner från taket, och halvfärdiga rörkonstruktioner som abrupt sticker ut som från ingenstans. Detta, skriver Der Spiegel, är det forna imperiets verkliga tillstånd. Tidningen besöker bland annat Blackpool, där läkarna diagnostiserat var femte stadsbo med ”skitlivssyndrom” och skriver ut dubbelt så mycket antidepressiva som i resten av landet. Tidningen besöker också matbanker, och pratar med en mamma vars nya, men illapassande fönster lämnat en stor glipa i hennes vägg, och som inte alls är förvånad över att en tvåårig liten pojke dog efter att hans familj tvingats bo i en lägenhet full med mögel. Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon. By Jörg Schindler April 18, 2023 In the innermost chambers of the old palace, Britannia is still just as large as it once was. Vast paintings stretching up to the ceiling narrate the glorious triumphs of a stupendous global empire – of battles against the Danes, Napoleon, the Spanish Armada, of the subjugation of India and the settling of America. Those wishing to enter Westminster Palace, for centuries the seat of British Parliament, must pass by bronze statues of pioneers, commanders and thinkers – Walpole, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Thatcher – and a life-sized Winston Churchill, who still seems to be watching over the lower house, once destroyed by German bombs. With every echoing step, British parliamentarians are reminded by these weighty premises of their own importance. It is rather rare, however, that one of them makes their way from the halls of parliament into the underworld of the old palace, which was once built on a swampy island in the Thames. Here, in the low-ceilinged, labyrinthine catacombs, the foundation of Britannia’s democracy is literally rotting away, largely out of sight and out of mind. Most of the structure is contaminated by asbestos, while thick tangles of cables hang chaotically from the ceiling and pipes suddenly come to an end, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Gas, power and water lines – all bunched together – run for several kilometers through the damp cellars. The fire alarm has been triggered more than 40 times here in the last 10 years, and fire experts are allegedly on patrol in the building 24 hours a day. Seven years ago, an internal report outlined a "substantial and growing risk of … a catastrophic event," and the 1,000-room neo-Gothic monument with its 100 staircases is long overdue for a comprehensive renovation. It would take decades to complete and cost up to 22 billion pounds. But thus far, the honorable members of parliament have been unable to agree on when and how. Instead, inside the gold, brocade and hardwood-trimmed imperial halls upstairs, the country’s representatives continue to put on a show of democracy week after week while a time bomb continues to tick below them. The old palace, in fact, has become a perfect symbol for the United Kingdom of today. Things aren’t going well for the United Kingdom these days. For the past several months, the flow of bad news has been constant, the country’s coffers are empty, public administration is ineffective and the nation’s corporations are struggling. As this winter came to an end, more than 7 million people were waiting for a doctor’s appointment, including tens of thousands of people suffering from heart disease and cancer. According to government estimates, some 650,000 legal cases are still waiting to be addressed in a court of law. And those needing a passport or driver’s license must frequently wait for several months. Boarded up windows and signs reading "To Let" and "To Rent" have become a common sight on the country’s high streets, while numerous products have disappeared from supermarket shelves. Recently, a number of chains announced that they would be rationing cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers for the foreseeable future. Last year, 560 pubs closed their doors forever, with thousands more soon to follow, according to the industry association. Without Oxfam, the Salvation Army and other charitable organizations that operate second-hand stores, numerous city centers would have almost no shops left at all. Last week, the International Monetary Fund forecast that in no other industrialized nation would the economy develop as poorly as in Britain this year. Even Russia is expected to end up ahead of the UK. Whereas the number of billionaires in the UK – at 177 – is higher than it has ever been, millions of Britons have slid into poverty. Newspapers and television channels are full of cheap recipes and shows like Jamie Oliver’s "£1 Wonders." Since December, hardly a day has passed without a strike by bus drivers, medical workers, teachers, public servants, university employees or rail workers. Last week, assistant doctors across the country went on strike for four days, with the media calling on the populace to avoid all activities that could result in injury. For many, the situation is reminiscent of the 1970s, when high debt, punishing inflation and widespread protests brought the country to its knees – leading Henry Kissinger, who was U.S. secretary of state at the time, to grumble from across the Atlantic: "Britain is a tragedy, reduced to begging, borrowing and stealing." To be sure, after two years of pandemic and one year of war, the rest of Europe isn’t doing particularly well either. But nowhere is the feeling of having "lost the future" stronger than in Britain, according to the public opinion pollsters from Ipsos. In 2008, the year of the banking and financial crisis, 12 percent of people in the UK believed that their children would be worse off than them. Now, that number is 41 percent, Ipsos has found. One significant reason for that pessimism is the fact that many simply no longer trust their speechifying politicians in Westminster to get much done. The Tory party, which has been in power now for a dozen years, has gone through four prime ministers since 2016 alone. And even if the fifth in the series, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is doing all he can to leave behind the period of sloganeering and slapstick, the UK isn’t likely to recover from his predecessors any time soon. Particularly not from Boris Johnson, who still refuses to admit any personal responsibility for the plight in which Britain finds itself and continues to bleat in a huff from the sidelines. Even as his country slid further and further into the abyss, Johnson spent years absorbing all political momentum like a black hole, instead throwing his energy into projects like bringing back imperial measurements, building a sinfully expensive royal yacht named Britannia and convincing the populace that he was building a "global,” or even a "galactic Britain,” a reference to the country’s budding space program. Yet in early January, when the first 11 satellites ever to be launched from British soil were to head into space from Cornwall, the mission failed, and they ended up in the Atlantic instead. Excitement about the launch had been limited anyway, with an earthly populace that would have been happy with functioning school toilets. Even before the failure, the Economist wrote: "A country that likes to think of itself as a model of common sense and good-humored stability has become an international laughing stock." No longer is it a single government or political party that seems dysfunctional, the magazine intimated, "Britain itself can seem to be kaput." The question is: Who broke it? Was it just the pandemic and the warmonger to the east, as the current government never tires of insisting? Or did the unstoppable decline of the kingdom perhaps begin much earlier? On the search for answers to these questions, it is helpful to take a trip to the edges of a now modestly sized empire – to the people who no longer expect much from the political classes in faraway London. "You probably won’t believe this, but this used to be one of our most fashionable areas," says Simon Cartmell, as he comes to a stop on Bond Street in Blackpool one Wednesday morning in winter. A cold wind is blowing in from the Irish Sea and the drizzle is falling almost horizontally, but Cartmell, a friendly 50-year-old wearing a colorful scarf, can’t stop gushing about times past. "There were banks, boutiques, an old bingo parlor, a cinema, and right there, the red-brick building, was once a busy hotel." It's almost impossible to imagine. Over the phone, Cartmell – head of the local employment agency – had said: "Come to Bloomfield." This neighborhood in the south of the city, one of the poorest not just in the city, but in the entire country, is, he continued, the best place to see what has happened to Blackpool. "Just a couple of paces away from the sea, and you’re already in the middle of a Dickens novel." Countless shops have closed their doors in recent years, with only bargain stores, cheap supermarkets and fast-food chains remaining. Almost all of the empty lots are filled with trash, while signs on the walls announce the spaces as perfect for advertising. The people here have lost a lot over the years, but not, apparently, their sense of humor. Entire streets are lined with bed-and-breakfasts bearing names like Sweet Dreams Hotel, Fortuna House, Great Escape Hotel and Hollywood Apartments, even as most of them have become home to welfare recipients. The local pub is called Last Resort. Even the screeching of the seagulls sounds like a sarcastic commentary on the current times. When Prince William and his wife Kate visited the place a few years ago to show solidarity with the poor, the local community garden was quickly replanted, says Cartmell. They wanted to present at least a little bit of the town’s past glory to the royal couple. Yet no matter how hard one might try, it is impossible to deny the dismal reality of Blackpool’s present. This "Las Vegas of the North" may still attract more than a million visitors every summer who relive their childhoods between the glaring neon of the beach promenade and the Pleasure Beach amusement park. But the "Golden Mile" has long since declined into a crumbling Potemkin façade along which gleamingly modern street cars – funded by the EU – run. The city’s decline came in waves. Like other cities in northern England, Blackpool profited many centuries ago from the British empire’s involvement in trading slaves and other wares. The wealth of Lancashire County, where Blackpool is located, was primarily the result of the local textile industry. Following the deindustrialization of the north, mass tourism kept the city’s 140,000 residents afloat for a time. But budget airlines soon began flying to sunny southern destinations, and Blackpool has had a hard time competing. And since then, the place has been left largely to its own devices. The young and energetic have left, while many who failed to make it elsewhere have come to Blackpool for old times' sake. The city was already on its knees when the conservative-liberal government of David Cameron announced an era of austerity in order to recoup the fantastical sums the government had injected into the banking industry during the financial crisis. And there was hardly another area of the country that was hit as hard by the savings measures as Lancashire. Blackpool had to slash far more than a billion pounds in public spending, and there was little left over for the poor. The city then had to close its doors to holidaymakers for two years during the pandemic. Today, Blackpool is a place of records. No other city in the country is home to as many run-down neighborhoods. The life expectancy of male residents is just under five years below the national average, while that for women is almost four years lower. Almost one in five residents suffers from what local doctors call "shit life syndrome," while anti-depressants are prescribed here twice as often as in the rest of the country. Brexit, this grandiose promise of restoring lost greatness, found a willing audience in Blackpool, ready to grasp onto any straw – as was the case across northern and central England, where production had plunged over time and hardly anything grew in its place. Aside from inequality. "If you are poor, sick, weak or tired, don’t come to Blackpool," says Simon Cartmell at the end of his stroll through the present. "Nobody will help you here." Nor will the 40 million pounds pledged by the government in London to the university as part of a national Leveling Up Fund – money intended to create a carbon-neutral campus. "It’s like giving a beggar 10 pounds after taking his house." Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took it upon himself to personally announce the windfall for Blackpool and several additional municipalities in the north a few weeks ago, and even flew into the airport in Blackpool for the event. Cartmell, who is running as the local Labour Party candidate in the next parliamentary elections, was in front of the airport to shoot a campaign video. As he was waiting, he says a construction worker suddenly appeared with a shovel and a bucket to fill in a pothole in the airport’s access road. "And 90 seconds before Sunak’s limousine drove past, the road was once again in passable condition." It’s one of those days when Jo McReynolds doesn’t know what to do first. On the screen in front of her is a seemingly endless list of food items. Thirty trays of bread, two pallets of mixed vegetables, hundreds of cans of chicken tikka masala, 600 kilograms of Maris Piper potatoes, 52 packages of frozen buttermilk scones, 144 cartons of veggie meat, 200 crates of yogurt, 318 packets of Caesar dressing – and those are just the items that came in early that morning. Ideally, most of it should be shipped today. McReynolds laughs. "I begin each day with a nervous breakdown, and things get worse from there," she says. On her desk in Hall 2 is a tabloid newspaper with Putin’s face on the cover, pain pills and a package of Yorkshire tea. A blond, 62-year-old with a nasal piercing and wearing a reflective vest, Jo McReynolds is the manager of the FareShare outlet in Birmingham. To fight both food waste and hunger, FareShare collects food that is no longer completely fresh, but which has not yet expired, from supermarkets and producers, distributing it to schools, food banks and other facilities. When McReynolds started as a volunteer 10 years ago, FareShare had six small outlets in the UK, but it now runs 30 regional centers with 1,500 employees and around 5,000 volunteer assistants. Feeding the needy has turned into big business. In the Nechells district north of the Birmingham city center, McReynolds now oversees four brick warehouses filled to the roof with nonperishable food. Forklifts are in constant motion as they load up delivery vans, while countless, mostly good-natured workers are bustling about in their reflective vests marked with the words: "Food Hero." The Nechells site processes six to eight tons of food every single day, with the daily nationwide total in December reaching 3,300 tons – a new record. And they still aren’t able to keep up with demand. The waiting list, says McReynolds, is longer than her forearm. "It is frightening. For Christ's sake, we can send people to the moon, but we aren’t able to feed our own people." Hunger has been the focus of numerous recent stories coming out of the United Kingdom. Stories about a government that was planning on making cuts to the school dinners program before a football star intervened. About how even UNICEF stepped in to help feed children in a country with the sixth largest economy in the world. And about the skyrocketing popularity of Asian instant noodles, popular because they are filling and cheap, and because they take almost no time to cook – a huge advantage given that spiking energy prices have made electricity unaffordable for many Britons. Indeed, in addition to the almost 3,000 food banks in the country – more than three times the number found in the much larger country of Germany – facilities in the UK like churches, museums, public libraries and schools opened up "warm banks" around the country this winter. The needy can also go to baby banks to pick up free diapers and formula, bedding banks for mattresses and down comforters, and fuel banks to receive vouchers for coin-operated gas and electric meters. The Blue Cross also introduced the country’s first pet-food banks this winter so that people with nothing could at least keep their dogs and cats. And in some places, community centers have turned into multi-banks, where the needy can go to find all of the things they might be short on in one place. The New Hutte Neighbourhood Centre in Knowsley, a 10-minute train ride from Liverpool, is one such a place. On a recent chilly Tuesday, 69-year-old Linda was there, wearing short, raspberry red hair and a leopard-patterned shirt that was far too thin for the weather. On Tuesday, the former school offers free lunch, and Linda has learned how to make her money go a long way. A former elderly care nurse, Linda tried to apply for state aid, but she was told that her 700-pound pension was 29 pence over the limit. Since then, she’s been going to the New Hutte on Tuesdays, to the food bank at St. Hilda’s on Fridays, and to the one at St. Mary’s on Saturdays. She also frequents the Asda supermarket, where a bowl of soup and a cup of tea costs just one pound. "This is a good community," says Linda, who hardly cooks at all anymore and only turns on the heat when her youngest grandson is visiting. But she doesn’t want to complain and talks about her life as though discussing some distant relative. "Things are a bit upside-down at the moment," she says, but at least she has friends and a place to live. "And next Tuesday, they’re serving curry with rice. I’m already looking forward to it." Someone has put up Union Jack bunting in front of the house where two-year-old Awaab died – almost as if they wanted to say: This, too, is the UK. The plastic flags are the only color on the dirty-white facade of the four-story residential block, a structure which looks exactly like all the other blocks that make up Freehold Estate in the town of Rochdale. There are no markers, no flowers and no sign to commemorate what happened here, just outside Manchester. Awaab Ishak died shortly before Christmas 2020. But the country where he lived only took notice of his death last November. As part of a court case relating to the death, it became widely known that Awaab’s parents, who are from Sudan, had been complaining for years about the damp walls and black mold in their apartment. Their landlord, Rochdale Bouroughwide Housing, denied all responsibility, saying that the mold was likely the product of the renters' questionable "lifestyle" and should be painted over. That ignorance cost the two-year-old his life, as the court found. Awaab died due to "prolonged exposure to mold" in an apartment that was "not fit for human habitation." The furious coroner asked: "How in the UK in 2020 does a two-year-old child die from exposure to mold in his home?" According to research conducted by the renter rights organization Shelter, such subpar conditions are far from uncommon in the country, with 2 million apartments allegedly in a similarly miserable and unhealthy condition. Yet they remain occupied, since in the vast majority of the cases, the only alternative would be homelessness. No other country in Europe faces such a severe housing shortage, and those most frequently affected are people with low incomes or no income at all. In England alone, hundreds of thousands of men and women are waiting for the council housing to which they are legally entitled – and more than 30,000 of them have been waiting for 10 years or more. The situation is largely the result of the vast wave of privatizations set off by the administration of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, with municipalities across the country selling their housing inventory to investors. The loss of public housing accelerated again during the financial crisis in 2008/09. Construction continued throughout the ensuing years, of course, but little heed was paid to what the country actually needed. Whereas London is now home to almost 3 million square meters of empty office space – the equivalent of 25 Westminster Palaces – countless people in Briton are competing tooth and nail for whatever apartment they can find, even if it is drafty and moldy. Just as is the case in Blackpool, Knowsley and so many other places in the country, Rochdale – population 200,000 – also had little choice. City officials had to cut the budget by 183 million pounds in accordance with the austerity plans imposed by London following the financial crisis. Freehold Estate, with its regiments of housing blocks, was privatized in 2010. One evening in winter, Terry Williamson – whose name has been changed for this story – is standing in front of a fenced-in playground at the estate with her 20-month-old son. Pointing to a soccer-ball sized patch of moss on the wall of a nearby building, she says: "That’s what it looks like in my kitchen, too." Nobody, she says, was surprised by the news of Awaab’s death. "We all live in the same holes. It’s disgusting." She says she has complained to the landlord on several occasions – about the fact that the heating unit in the bedroom is becoming dislodged; about the newly installed window that is too small, leaving a gap in the wall. "Nobody cares," says Terry, adding that she would move out immediately if she had somewhere else to go. She doesn’t think that Awaab’s death will change anything, either, even if a government minister from London showed up in Rochdale once the case started receiving publicity. Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove, a member of the Conservative Party, toured Freehold Estate last November, expressing his disgust at the situation and announced that landlords would henceforth be forced to make improvements. The regulations, he insisted, would soon be outlined in "Awaab’s Law." Gove insisted that a lack of money would not be accepted as an excuse. "It is a basic responsibility of the local authority ... to make sure that people are in decent homes," he said. "All this what-aboutery. Do your job, man!" It was early on a Monday morning when David Wakeley stumbled and fell on his patio in the small town of Indian Queens. The 87-year-old, already weakened by prostate cancer, broke seven ribs and a hip. His family called the ambulance at 7:34 p.m. When it still hadn’t arrived after several hours, Wakeley’s son used tarps, a toy soccer goal and three umbrellas to shelter his father, who was still in too much pain to move, from the wind and rain. He emptied his father’s catheter several times during the night – until the paramedics finally arrived on Tuesday morning, 15-and-a-half hours after the first call went out. The images of Wakeley’s makeshift shelter triggered widespread anger in the UK. But not for long. It was quickly replaced by anger over similar cases across the country as winter began. Images of ambulances lined up in front of countless hospitals where every single bed was occupied; reports of nurses mounting IKEA hooks on the walls in hospital hallways to be able to administer IV drips to patients; photos of a three-year-old suffering from scarlet fever and croup who finally fell asleep on plastic chairs in the waiting room, 22 hours after her parents had first called the ambulance and five hours after she had finally made it to the hospital. The media has been rife with such reports in recent months. The National Health Service (NHS), an element of Britain’s identity on par with the BBC and the Premier League, is sinking into chaos. In December, heart attack patients were forced to wait an average of 93 minutes for the paramedics to arrive – a record. Some 54,000 hospital patients had to be parked in hallways because there were no free beds – a record. Experts believe that there are hundreds of preventable deaths in the country each week – you guessed it, a record. Government ministers insist that the pandemic is to blame, but at most, that is only half true. Even long before 2020, London had been cutting the NHS budget, and the number of hospital beds in the country was falling. Britain spends 21 percent less on healthcare than France, and 39 percent less than Germany. Once Brexit became reality, the country experienced an exodus of workers from other EU countries that affected all industries – including the NHS. Today, around a tenth of all healthcare jobs are unfilled. And those who are still working in the industry are at the ends of their ropes. One of them is Kim Gordon. It’s an ice-cold Tuesday in February, and Gordon is standing on Headley Way in Oxford holding a to-go cup of coffee and a protest poster. Every few seconds, she waves at trucks, buses and cars that honk at her in encouragement. Around a hundred meters behind her is the vast, gray structure of John Radcliffe Hospital, where the photo of the young, scarlet fever patient on plastic chairs was taken. The hospital is considered to be one of the best in Britain, but today, many of its workers are out on strike. Gordon, 56, has been working as a nurse for 39 years, and can still remember times when it was difficult to find a job in the field. "Today, people are leaving in droves. They’re already stressed before they even start." She says she understands quite well why that is. For at least the last 10 years, the NHS has been consistently going downhill. "We haven’t been taking lunch breaks for a long time. We work 10 hours or more at a time and still only manage to do the bare minimum." If there are any beds available at all, they’re only for the direst cases, she says, and there is a shortage of important drugs. "Allegedly because of Brexit," Gordon says. During the pandemic, she says, she and several of her colleagues were even assigned tasks normally taken care of by doctors. "But of course without paying us even a penny more." But this strike, the first one she’s ever participated in, is about more than just money for her, says Gordon. It’s about a vital profession, about her patients, and about the future. "There’s something rotten here," she says. "Nothing is as it used to be." The longer she speaks, the more it seems as though she’s actually talking about the entire country. A country in which the famous wartime propaganda maxim "Keep Calm and Carry On" – one which tourists still like to take home on souvenir mugs – is no longer really a serious option for an increasing number of Britons. It is a country which, thanks to its universities, its thinkers and its cultural importance, has so many opportunities, yet which makes so desperate little out of them. And that is mostly due to the fact that for decades, it has been essentially standing still, seeking its salvation in the very financial industry that collapsed so spectacularly 15 years ago, creating a situation in which billions were squandered – billions which are still lacking today. This country was already on its knees before Brexit, before the endless phase of political trench warfare and before the pandemic. And now, it seems as though it has dialed 999 and is waiting in vain for the paramedics to show up. © 2023 Der Spiegel. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group. Read the original article at Der Spiegel.

Maktbalansen i världen håller på att skifta. Och Indien ser ut att bli en av vinnarna. Det skriver Der Spiegel som konstaterar att Rysslands krig i Ukraina och Kinas flexande av muskler i öst har lett till att många statschefer och företagare vänt blicken mot New Dehli. Frågan är om Indien, som i mitten av april passerade Kina som världens folkrikaste land, kan bli en lika viktig motor för världsekonomin som Kina varit? Om landet som brottas med extrem fattigdom kan bli rikt? Kanske till och med bli en supermakt? En hel del tyder åtminstone på att framtiden för Indien ser ljus ut, den Internationella valutafonden spår till exempel att Indien kommer att stå för 15 procent av den globala tillväxten 2023. Men bilden är inte entydig. India is now the world's most populace country and will likely soon become the third largest economy on the globe. For decades, economists have been predicting that India's time would come. Has it finally arrived? By Laura Höflinger April 19, 2023 It wouldn’t be the first time that the world order shifted with billionaire Nandan Nilekani playing playing a part in it. With his company, he experienced firsthand what a meteoric rise feels like. And if it were up to him, the miracle would happen again – but this time for his entire country. "I haven’t seen that kind of excitement for a long time." Nilekani, 67, is sitting in the meeting room of his foundation in Bangalore. Inside, it is cool and quiet, while the streets outside are buzzing with mopeds and cars competing for road space. Within just 20 years, the population of this southern Indian metropolis has doubled to an estimated 13 million people. Almost every large tech company in the world has an office here, with shining buildings among the palm trees. Bangalore is the epitome of outsourcing and globalization. Hundreds of thousands of jobs at IT companies and call centers that left the United States and Europe in the 1990s have ended up in this city. It was a process that made people like Nilekani wealthy. More than 40 years ago, he and a handful of colleagues founded Infosys, with an initial investment of $250. Today, the IT giant employs more than 340,000 people and generates annual revenues of $18 billion. One of the company’s founders is British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law. New Delhi is watching the world’s shifting balance of power with no small amount of satisfaction. With Russia having launched a war of aggression in Ukraine and China flexing its muscles in the East, heads of state and senior company executives from across the globe are wooing India. It is a change that has suddenly raised a number of important questions. Can India become the kind of driver of the global economy that China has been for years? Can it provide a real democratic alternative? Can this country, which is still home to extensive poverty, become wealthy? Might it become a superpower one day? There are certainly a number of indications that the future is bright. Even as the global economy is stumbling, India has remained stable. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is projecting that India will contribute 15 percent of global growth in 2023. On top of that, India replaced China on April 14 as the world’s most populace nation. The precise date is the product of forecasts produced by the United Nations, according to which the population of India on that day was 1,425,775,850. That is more than three times the number of people who live in the European Union and more than the total in North and South America combined. Close to every fifth person on the planet lives in India. And India’s population is young, younger than China’s. Salaries are relatively low, and the nation’s potential is enormous. Many currently believe that India’s moment has finally arrived, and the country is gripped by optimism. "There’s now no question that one of the fastest growing economies in the world over the next 10 years will be India," Singapore-based political scientist Kishore Mahbubani recently said during an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN. Referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he added: "I don’t know how Modi did it, but he’s woken up a sleeping giant." The investment bankers from Morgan Stanley even announced recently that "India’s decade" is just starting. It is a view that billionaire Nilekani holds as well: "All of the puzzle pieces are falling into place." Still, in Bangalore, where Nilekani made his fortune, it is relatively easy to be an optimist. India’s IT capital is also home to poverty, corruption and traffic chaos. But the city provides a look at India's potential: Birthrates are on a par with those in Western Europe, while young men and women spend their Saturday evenings in cafés serving wheat beer and espresso out of machines that sound just as they do in Berlin. You can meet mothers and fathers in the city who can barely read or write, but whose daughters study engineering, computer science or mathematics. They tend to avoid majors like literature or philosophy, instead sticking to courses of study that the parents know will lead to success. In other parts of the country, things don’t always look quite as rosy. There are countless villages, home to millions, where people still cook with solid fuels and where the paths turn into a muddy morass during the rainy season. Almost all children attend school, to be sure, but the quality of the state facilities is often poor. Nilekani leans back and smiles. He is familiar with all of the objections frequently raised by skeptical foreigners. Indeed, these days he devotes a significant share of his fortune to ensuring that boys and girls receive adequate education. This year, the Indian economy is expected to continue on its growth path, with forecasts calling for an uptick of 6 percent. Among the world’s largest economies, only Saudi Arabia is forecast to experience stronger growth. And when India hosts this year’s G-20 summit in September, the eyes of the world will once again be trained on the country. Many are already knocking at Nilekani’s door to gain insight into the country. Indeed, he hasn’t just been a close observer of India’s transformation, he has also played a significant role in actively shaping it. On behalf of the government, he implemented the vast undertaking known as Aadhaar, meaning "foundation." A revolutionary project – if a bit concerning to those worried about data privacy – it essentially involved issuing an identity card to everybody in the country. By now, almost every Indian has one of the flimsy plastic cards, which also store their fingerprints and biometric data. For millions of people, it was the first time they were able to adequately identify themselves. Prior to receiving Aadhaar cards, many were unable to open bank accounts, but now, a majority of the country’s adult population has one, meaning that benefit payments can now be wired directly to the recipient. The state is able to reduce bureaucracy – and with greedy middlemen out of the way, more money ends up in the hands of recipients. Nilekani’s next act was to help with constructing a payment system that he refers to as the "rails of the modern, digital world." The system allows Indians to instantly wire money from one mobile device to another, without having to pay a fee. Nilekani believes technology is the key to solving the biggest problems facing humanity. "Each time, I ask myself the question: How can we use technology for our country's progress and advancement? How can we build to scale and improve people's lives?" It's an approach similar to the one taken by Prime Minister Modi, who also sees digitalization as a means of achieving one of his most important goals: the elimination of poverty. And the government has made significant progress toward that target: More than 400 million Indians have escaped poverty in the last 20 years. Modi likes to act as though he alone is responsible for that trend. And as it happens, he embodies the hope that anyone can make it. The 72-year-old is from a lower caste and his father used to serve tea on the train platform of a small-town station in the west of the country. Now, his son has accumulated more power than almost any other prime minister before him. During the election campaign, he bragged about the size of his chest (142 centimeters), but he is also the first premier to have been born after India’s independence. When traveling overseas, he prefers speaking Hindi to English, transmitting an encouraging message to his countrymen – that they should be proud of where they are from. Many in the country venerate him for precisely that reason, with the result that Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys an absolute majority in parliament. It is considered highly likely that he will once again emerge victorious in next year’s parliamentary election. Modi has convinced his country that India can only return to past greatness under his leadership – back to a time before the arrival of the British, who sucked the country dry for 200 years. It is the promise that the ignominy of yesteryear will finally fade into the past for good. And India will command that which it so desires: recognition. The prime minister, though, is convinced that India must remain true to the values of an ancient Hindu civilization. He is a Hindu nationalist and sees India first and foremost as the homeland of the Hindus. Minorities such as Muslims and Christians have a place in his new India, but only if they conform to the rules of the majority. Modi is even using his current G-20 presidency to further his narrative of India’s rebirth. Posters bearing his visage are hanging everywhere in the country along with statistics testifying to the country’s success. Not all of the numbers, however, are reflective of reality, and not all of the successes have been the result of his initiatives. He has, however, proven adept at implementing them. "This government has a bias for action," says Nilekani, expressing a view held by many. Modi may not have pushed the decisive reforms through parliament, but during his nine years at the top, he has dramatically sped things up in the country. All you have to do is look at the new ports and the new roads, says Nilekani, all the trucks and bulldozers at work around the country. Highways that have been mired in the planning stage for years are finally being built. New high-speed trains are going from city to city. Around 80 new airports are to be built in the coming years. The government, Nilekani continues, has a better handle on the economy, and the new combination of both physical and digital infrastructure, he believes, will combine to produce enormous growth. Plus, he says: "India’s great strength is China’s weakness." A number of large corporations are focused on diversifying their supply chains, Nilekani points out. Apple now has a presence in India. Others, he believes, will follow. "Everything is coming together. This time, it is for real." The Narasapura Industrial Area is a two-hour drive east of Bangalore along a two-lane road – which doesn’t prevent Indian drivers from using it as though there were four lanes. Construction is underway here, too, with trucks and bulldozers everywhere. At some point, the road turns into the industrial area, where Wistron – a large Taiwanese parts supplier for Apple – has a factory. According to forecasts from J.P. Morgan in the U.S., some 25 percent of all Apple smartphones will be produced in India just two years from now. The Taiwanese firm Foxconn has also recently announced the construction of a new mega-factory in the country. "Made in China" is morphing into "Made in India." India is already home to strong IT and pharmaceuticals industries, but it was never the world’s factory in the same way China has been over the last decades. Foreign companies may have valued India being a democracy, but were nevertheless wary of relocating production facilities to the country due to its poor infrastructure and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. These days, though, India is seen as a reliable partner while China’s image has become tarnished, with many considering Beijing to be unpredictable. During the coronavirus pandemic, the government imposed extremely strict lockdowns, which unsettled many. On top of that, President Xi Jinping has proclaimed himself the country’s eternal leader and has also continued to maintain friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite Russia’s hostile invasion of Ukraine. In response, a huge number of companies are suddenly rushing to find alternatives to their factories in China. "I've never received so many senior representatives from German companies as I have in the last six months," says Rajesh Nath, from the Indian branch of the influential German trade association VDMA, which represents the machinery and equipment manufacturing sector. "And I’ve been in this job for 23 years." The Indian government has established a multibillion-dollar subsidy program to attract companies interested in producing things like semiconductors, batteries and mobile phones in India – a plan that has been praised even by critical economists. Every month, millions of Indians are entering the job market, and they badly need better jobs than those that have thus far been available. Asha CS, an earbud in her ear and hair tied back in a ponytail, is sitting in a ricksha at the end of the road leading to the factory. The sun is blazing down as a farmer drives his herd of goats past. The 25-year-old looks at the buses leaving the factory premises, full of young men and women on their way home from work. She hopes that she, too, will soon have a spot on one of the buses. Asha CS would very much like to work for Wistron. The cafeteria inside the factory is clean and the inside areas are all air conditioned, not like at her home, where the monsoon never brings enough rain for the fields and the money always runs out before the end of the month. She hopes that her job interview went well. "I’ve been looking everywhere for work," she says, "and have been unable to find any other job." She has rent to pay and debts to pay off, along with two young children she wants to send to a private school. For her, the black factory gate holds the promise of a better future. But not everybody is convinced of this bright future. "There is no inevitability, no straight line of causation, from the decline of China to the rise of India," wrote the economists Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman in a December article for Foreign Affairs. There are, the duo wrote, indications that things are going in the right direction, but they say there are still plenty of "software bugs." A number of foreign companies are still hesitant about setting up shop in India because the government focuses on what it calls "national champions," a handful of large Indian corporations that seem to win important contracts at a higher rate than other companies. On top of that is India’s tendency, even 30 years after liberalization, to continue protecting its economy, with comparatively high customs duties. The country has been negotiating for years with the EU over a free-trade agreement, thus far with little success. Almost 76 years have now passed since India wrestled its independence from Britain. Back then, on August 15, 1947, the day when India "awoke to life and freedom," many thought the new republic would have a short life. It was too poor, they said, home to too many religions and ethnicities. It couldn’t even agree on a common language. British statesman Winston Churchill said that India "is no more a united nation than the Equator," and predicted that it would quickly fail. Today, the Indian economy has left the British in the dust. The country’s steel factories are among the largest in the world, and more than 50 percent of all children in the world will receive at least one vaccine produced in India during their lifetime. India has a vibrant film industry (Bollywood) and has also produced an extremely successful diaspora. Sons of Indian middleclass families are in control at both Google and Microsoft, while a third, Ajay Banga, is set to be confirmed as president of the World Bank in the coming weeks. Still, the rise might not be quite as rapid as the meteoric explosion undergone by China. Economist and author Niranjan Rajadhyaksha believes it realistic to expect the Indian economy to grow by 6.5 percent annually over the next decade – which is certainly strong, but not equal to the double-digit growth China has repeatedly experienced. Still, India’s rise is good news for the West. Within several years, the country is likely to become the world’s third largest economy behind the U.S. and China, essentially becoming a third economic anchor in a multipolar world. India would have weight and its actions would have consequences. In recent years, India has grown ever closer to the West, even though it won’t likely ever become a close ally. The country doesn’t necessarily share all of the West’s values, and approaches the world pragmatically – in the search for partners rather than friends. But India also isn’t a country harboring dreams of annexing islands or pushing the U.S. off of its throne. And it shares American and European concerns about Chinese dominance in Asia. As such, India’s rise could ultimately transform the world in a way that is more amenable to the West’s vision of the future. © 2023 Der Spiegel. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group. Read the original article at Der Spiegel.