The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.
For decades, China's larger cities have attracted people from all over the country. As part of our World Ahead series, we look at why that might now be changing. And Poland's milk bars are self-service cantines that have fed people cheaply for over a century. But as rising costs and a cut in subsidies threaten their future, our correspondent visits one for a bowl of soup and a slice of nostalgia.
But first... This year, more people than ever in human history had the chance to cast a ballot in democratic elections. An estimated 4 billion people across 76 countries found themselves at the helm of civic decision-making. That's more than half the world's population.
Some decisions made this year came as a shock. Others were well predicted. But anywhere you slice it, 2024 reshaped the democratic world. On the intelligence, we began the year by speaking to the economist Deputy Editor Ed Carr, and he looked forward towards the year that would be. One thing to bear in mind about this, that
autocrats try and manage elections and they try and control the process. But once they've accepted the principle of elections, then they are to some extent opening themselves up to surprises. It was indeed a year of surprises, one that pulled the world in all manner of directions. So now on the final day of 2024, we've invited Ed to look back at the year that was.
I feel strangely heartened by this year. I mean so much could have gone wrong in so many places. And of course it did in some, but broadly I think elections this year have shown that you can replace incumbents that would be autocrats, suffer reverses, that broadly people have a sense of what they want and it's not stupid or foolish.
and that people who try and interfere sometimes succeed, but don't always succeed. And so I kind of feel coming out of this pretty good about elections, actually. Maybe this is a ridiculous question, but which election do you think is going to have had the biggest impact?
I think very clearly the US election has. That's a reflection, partly of Americans' role in the world. But it's also one of the elections that we were most worried about in terms of violence and about whether the result would be accepted. It may seem strange to say this, but the fact that Donald Trump was elected unambiguously with a majority of the popular vote, as well as in the electoral college.
And the fact that Republicans now control both houses of Congress means that there was kind of no contest afterwards. And I think there's one other comforting thing from the US election, which is that if you look at the share of the vote in the US,
Compared with Obama's vote in 2012, Democrats have lost vote share among African-American men by 26% to buy Hispanics by 27%. Now, that signifies a shift away from racial and identity-based politics, which I think makes America's politics overall healthier. As you say, the vote in the US was clear. Is the election of a right-wing populist, something that we've seen elsewhere this year?
in plenty of places. It's been a clear feature from elections this year, partly because of the anti-accompensy bias away from the center, but also because, I don't know about you, Rosie, but I feel that we're at the end of a period in politics of sort of centrist technocratic rule. It's being replaced by something clearly in the big countries in Europe anyway, thinking of France and Germany here, but also the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium,
you have had a sense that this consensus is gradually breaking down. Ed, you seem to be saying two slightly contradictory things. On the one hand, we've got less polarization. People are moving in different directions. We don't have the same identity politics. And on the other, that the center's dead. Well, I think the polarization may be along different lines and a polarization that's along class and economic lines, I think, is much easier to handle than one's among identities.
I think the interesting question for me actually is in Europe, where we have European parliamentary elections in June. And there was a strong rise of populism and nationalism in France and Germany, as well as, I said, Austria and Belgium.
And that is going to have real repercussions, I think, because you get a sense in Europe that as this centre fragments, it's really not clear how the parties on the left and right, the far more radical parties, how they work together, how they formulate, and you have this situation in Germany where the government has collapsed, and one of the key elections next year is going to be the German elections in February.
But equally in France, you have this thing where in parliamentary elections that were held, because Macron called them after the European elections, they were held in July, there you had no real party emerging. So you have France in a state of chaos actually unable to pass a budget, having just dismissed its prime minister for the first time since the 1960s.
So this process of realignment is very messy. And of course, that's one of the features of democracies. Elections, if they're genuine and free, can be very messy affairs. But the alternative, I think, is much, much worse, which is you don't get change. Everything gets frozen in. And when you do get change, it happens abruptly and sometimes violently. You talk about genuine and free elections, but of course, not all of them are. What were some of the elections where that was most obvious in 2024?
Well, it won't surprise you to know that Venezuela and Russia are two of them. I mean, Russia is particularly in stream because you had a candidate in Valiz Najeddin, who was the kind of anti-war candidate, and was really picking up votes. And he was ruled out in February before the vote in March. And surprise, surprise of Vladimir Putin was re-elected. In Venezuela, you had an absolutely blatant rigging of the vote.
There, again, the most promising candidate, Maria Corinna Matada, was banned and in her place that a rather benign diplomat, Eduardo Gonzalez, who the analysis showed after the vote got something like two thirds of the vote. Meanwhile, Nicolas Maduro claimed to have 51% of the vote, which is completely blatant stealing of the election.
Now, for about a decade, you've been seeing elections used as a piece of theatre by autocrats to bring themselves some kind of legitimacy. I think that trick's really running out of road. I mean, it still happens, obviously, but I don't think either Putin or Maduro has acquired any legitimacy at all for that exercise. Indeed, sometimes it's gone the other way and Bangladesh is an interesting example of that. He does vote in January.
Again, brig vote, no contentment, no sense of legitimacy conferred on the regime of Sheikh Hasid, who's become increasingly autocratic. And that culminated in the middle of the year with mass student protests after a particularly odious piece of government legislation, and Karmajid and her being ousted. Ed, it will come as no surprise to our listeners to hear that we approve of democratic values and liberal values, which have been the elections that really restored your faith in those.
A couple really stand out to me. One was India, where Narendra Modi's party, the BJP, had been expecting to win enough votes to become a really dominant national party with the ability to change the constitution.
But the BJP was denied that control and it was obliged to go into government with coalition partners. And it said to very clear signal that Hindu nationalism was not enough, that Indian voters also wanted prosperity and they wanted development.
So a very interesting course correction for a government that had been increasingly autocratic and dominant. Great sign of the sort of change that democracy can voting can bring about without violence. For me, the other great example was South Africa, a milestone really, because the ANC lost its majority for the first time since the end of apartheid.
And it decided to go into coalition. That's one surprising thing, because plenty of liberation parties, when confronted by that kind of loss of power, have just denied the result. It acknowledged the result, and it chose as its coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance, which is kind of liberal and reform-minded. Whether the new coalition government can run South Africa in a way that deals with its problems is another question. But the process of election itself did at least set the country on the path to some sort of renewal.
Ed, I'm impressed as ever that after a year of an extraordinary pace of news and some pretty horrific events that you're still feeling optimistic, what can we expect from 2025?
I'm looking at a number of really interesting elections. I've mentioned Germany, where we expect to see Olaf Scholz kicked out of power. But I'm also looking at Poland, which has a presidential election in May. That's key because at the moment Donald Tusk, who came in to try and rebuild the institutions that have been eroded under the law and justice party,
the test will be whether his candidate wins support for the presidency. If it does, it makes it much easier for him to govern. So it's both a measure of how well he succeeded, but also helps him enact legislation. Then this candidate, where Trudeau is in deep trouble, he lost his finance minister, our old colleague, Rosie, from the FT-Christian field many years ago. She resigned this month, and it'll be interesting to see how Canada changes.
And then towards the end of the year in November, there are elections in Argentina. And one of the covers we've had in 2024 was of Javier Millet and his remarkably ambitious and radical programme to cut the size of the state. And it'll be a vote as to whether that is succeeding and whether he's done that amazing thing, which is, you know, the right thing to do, but can you be reelected after you've done it?
Ed, thank you very much. Great to talk to you as ever. Thank you, Rosie.
In China, urbanization and economic growth have long gone hand in hand. For decades, rich and poor have flocked to four cities in particular, the capital Beijing, Shanghai as a financial hub, Shenzhen for tech and Guangzhou, an export powerhouse. Young people, investors, consumers and creators all saw these megacities as the best places to live and work.
But as part of our World Ahead series, looking at what to expect in 2025, our China correspondent Gabriel Crossley told me why that may be changing.
I live in Beijing, China's capital. It's a first tier city, so lots of good reasons to be here. It's got great public services, very fancy infrastructure. For all these reasons, Beijing's a good place to be. But these first tier cities have been losing their shine in recent years, while smaller cities are on the up. So why is that happening?
A big problem is just affordability. Living in these cities is now very tough for a lot of Chinese. They've got pretty poor quality of life. You have to work. What's known as a 996, 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
which isn't very pleasant, and you've got to pay a lot to live there. So renting is tough and buying a house in any of these places is far out of reach for most ordinary Chinese. By contrast, the smaller second or third-tier cities, as they're known, just look a lot more appealing. And they've still got very good infrastructure, the high-speed rail connecting them, good subways. They're still giant cities by Western standards, 10 million people, some of these places. And it's just a lot easier to live there.
easy to rent, easy to buy, and a much more relaxed work environment.
So the Communist Party has been pushing for years for smaller cities to be seen as places that attract ambitious people. Is that finally happening? I think it's starting to. So in 2025, China is going to have maybe 12 million students graduating from its universities and higher education institutions. A lot of these young people are going to be looking for jobs in smaller cities, so places like Changsha or Nanjing in southern China. These are provincial capitals.
They've got vibrant cultural industries, so Changsha, for instance, is known for its TV, music, entertainment scene. And the arrival of all these young people is just going to help with these creative industries. And are the smaller cities welcoming them?
I think they are. China's economy is not doing too well at the moment. Generally speaking, consumption is quite weak. But this influx of younger people is helping smaller cities be a little more resilient. So businesses are springing up to cater for them. If you go to smaller cities now in China, the new Starbucks and KFCs, for instance, they're more likely to be in smaller cities than big ones these days. And the talents of young people are helping with these cities.
technological progress as well. A great example of this is Herfei in Anhui province. It's got a really thriving tax sector these days. They're building all of electric cars, they're developing artificial intelligence. 2025, there's a focus on what they call the low altitude economy. So that's things like delivery drones or attempts to make flying taxis.
And is there a danger that as smaller cities get more popular, they essentially replicate the same problems as the big ones? It's possible. I mean, house prices are starting to creep up, for instance, but it's hard to imagine they would ever get anything like Beijing. And also, some of the problems of the big cities, I don't think we'll see them replicated. So Beijing, for instance, living here over the last few years,
Just as political controls have got a bit tighter and the leaders here aren't such a big fan of maybe some of the vibrant nightlife that Beijing used to have, whereas smaller cities, so Chengdu, for instance, in China's southwest, they're further away from the centres of power and that just means they're a bit more relaxed.
They've got more liberal-minded young people who are arriving as a surprising amount of discussion in bookstores and cafes of some politically sensitive topics, complaining perhaps about how the country is being run. And that's something which I think is hard to imagine you would ever get in Beijing. What's interesting is the party's been trying to encourage this trend for some time. It's been trying to limit the growth of its biggest cities to try and make them a little less congested.
And in 2025, it seems like China's people finally keep beginning on board with the plan. Gabriel, thank you so much. Thank you very much.
It is just past noon outside the Prasovum milk bar in Warsaw and that means it's time for lunch. Maria Wilczyk is a news editor at The Economist. Prasovum is established in 1954 which makes it the oldest milk bar in Poland.
Inside, there's already a queue. Let's see what's on the menu. You've got all the classics. You've got the soups, the various guises of pork wrapped in cabbage leaves, fried as a couplets. Poles love their milk bars. Self-service cantines that started out selling homestyle meals, mainly based on milk, cheese, eggs and flour. Hence the name. And they are a portrait of Polish society.
As I wait for my order, I'm scanning the tables around me. At about half of them, there are students having a quick lunch. There are many people suited up, probably popping out from work. We're in Central Warsaw, where a lot of companies and a lot of ministries are located. But then there are also many retirees. Oh, I can see my soup and my pancakes coming up. The bean soup is just like I remember my grandma making it.
piping hot with fresh herbs, the smelling of roasted pork. Delicious. Milk bars came about at the end of the 19th century, but became really popular during Communist times when other kinds of restaurants were rare. And dozens have survived. In part, thanks to nostalgia, the people I met at Prasovo told me they liked the unpretentious atmosphere of the bars and that they reminded them of family dinners.
This tech worker who'd just popped out for lunch said it was the best meal he could get for the price and that he had a soft spot for traditional food. Many of the bars have also survived because of government subsidies that allows them to keep prices low. All of this costs 20 water, which comes to maybe $5. It's a very affordable lunch.
When the government recently said that it was going to cut funding in Nexia's budget from 71 million slaughter to 60 million, roughly 17 million to 40 million dollars. Milk bars and their regulars were worried. The owner of Prasava said it would be impossible for him to run his bars without the subsidies. But the government says not all milk bar funding was used up last year.
That's in large parts because of how the subsidies are designed. The state reimburses the costs of selected ingredients, only used in meatless dishes. That becomes a headache when you have to divvy up the costs of a bag of flour used to make, say, cheese dumplings and for breading pork cutlets. As a result, many bars just forgo to subsidies.
The number of subsidized bars has nearly halved since the turn of the century, from 120 in 2001 to 70 more recently. I can't wait to tuck into the pancakes, freshly fried in butter, crisp, with a snow-like coating of powdered sugar and a dollop of stiff sour cream on the side. The bars have other worries.
Inflation in Poland has slowed from its peak in 2023, but labor and energy costs are still growing fast in the food prices. Soo bars are looking at ways to cut overheads, and more and more are installing digital kiosks. I've been coming to Prasov the bar for well over 10 years, and when I visited recently, it was the first time I'd seen them there.
I remember that when I used to come here you have to stand in a long queue and a sad-faced lady in a window in the wall, but take your order and then scream out your number when it was ready to collect. When you come in now there's a sleek screen, much like in McDonald's, with all the options listed both in English and in Polish for you to choose from.
These are popular with younger customers who don't want to deal with a cashier or stand in line, as well as with tourists. Diners can now also pre-order meals online to save time. A group of students told me that's the only way they can dash out after class, get their favourite tomato noodle soup, and be back in school before their 25-minute break ends.
Meat-free dishes, like the many offered in milk bars, are prominent in traditional Polish person cuisine. But they and the country's burgeoning vegetarians seen are very much part of the future in a changing Poland.
For its festive menu this year, another milk bar recreated Christmas classics, like jellied carp and marinated herring, using soy and seaweed. I like the soups, they serve it really fresh, fresh and horned, so some of the reasons. In Prasavva, I met Atushina Fade. Like one soup from here, it's mom Ginto, and I was actually a huge fan, and then I even prepared it my home. And then I'm actually... She moved from India to Poland six years ago. I have some bed in there to be way back, I have some bed in New Zealand.
But that doesn't stop her coming back for more, every week.
That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Happy New Year and we'll see you back here tomorrow.