371. Question Time: Buying Gaza, Macron’s AI Stunt, and Europe on a Knife’s Edge

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Welcome to the rest of politics question time with me Alistair Campbell and me Rory Stewart.

So where do you want to start Rory?

Well, I want to start with Alice. What's the significance of the death of the Aga Khan? Haven't seen much coverage of this, but this seems like a crazy story.

So the Aga Khan has just died aged 88 and the Aga Khan is the head of the Ismaili community. He was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, famously one of the wealthiest families in the world. He was both an extraordinary leader in international development, but also a head of state without having a set geographical nation.

So I got to know him probably 25 years ago. And he was a really extraordinary entrepreneur. His father and grandfather had a little bit more of a reputation as a playboy. And he definitely was somebody who was a great skier. I think he skied in the Olympics and had racehorses. But what he really did was care about international development. And it was really impressive.

It's a sort of sign of what you can do and what I'd love to see some of these American mega billionaires do with their money, because he did both pure development and he also did development impact investing. So he spent about five and a half billion dollars a year. But to give you an example of how it came together in Afghanistan, he would be funding cultural restoration. So they did incredible work restoring Babel's Gardens, for example. But he also had a hotel, Best Hotel in Kabul, where I was staying last time we did a podcast, the Serena Hotel.

He would also invest in really good basic healthcare and clinics, particularly in remote rural areas. He would provide support on banking and microfinance. He ran airlines in Africa. He had big nurses training colleges going. And because he was able to draw on the Ismaili community, there was a lot of local expertise that was done incredibly professionally, often largely with local staff with very few international staff.

And I've never seen, I think, anywhere in the world, including Bill Gates, anybody in international development demonstrates such kind of imagination, creativity, flexibility on bringing stuff together.

You know, he believed in enabling environment for business, but he also was somebody who would say that a country's culture is just important as its mineral resources and its water for its development. So he will be deeply missed. I don't recall ever meeting him, but I did go to his museum once. The Aga Khan Museum is in, do you know where it is? Toronto, is it? Toronto. Correct. Yeah. And it's, I'm sure you would, have you never been there? You would absolutely love it. It's full of Islamic art, but it's a beautiful, beautiful building. It was actually, I was there doing a mental health thing and a friend of mine who has got an interest in architecture said, you've got to go and see this building. So it was absolutely beautiful. Anyway, that was a very nice tribute.

Shall we return to politics? Very good. Yes. Here we are. Question for you then. Carter Price, where should Canada look to in future for trade relations as we clearly can't rely on the US? And maybe tell us a bit about some of the response we got from subscribers and listeners really engaging with us on the Canada question. We threw it out last week when we talked about Justin Trudeau's, the way that he dealt with and the other politicians dealt with Donald Trump's threat of tariffs. And I was, you were saying, basically, you thought that Trudeau should maybe have gone the whole hog and take the pain. And I was arguing, no, I'm not sure that would be the right thing to do. He should just have to stop the tariffs, which he's managed to do for this 30 day reprieve at the end of which I suspect Trump will have moved on to, as Tommy Vita suggested, invading the Falkland Islands or something.

I'd say the very strong balance of opinion amongst many Canadians who responded was that they supported the pretty tough approach that Trudeau had taken and also supported him giving this line about having, we'll have a fentanyl czar. Just remind people what they were saying often is, yeah, OK, we get Rory's theory that we could have played brinksmanship with Trump. But the reality is that the impact of these tariffs on the Canadian economy would have been completely catastrophic. Yeah. And that actually most Canadians support him for giving a little bit of a concession in order to get the threat of tariffs suspended. I think he's only suspended them for 31 days.

My only question is this divide and rule question that I'm beginning to think that countries need to stand together against Trump. And even if the concessions he's getting are, as you say, pretty minimal, nevertheless, he got concessions out of Canada and Canada didn't get any concessions out of him. Well, they did in a way. They did. They didn't get the tariffs imposed. Well, there's not a concession. That's like, I come up, I threatened to club you over the head unless you do something and you say, I don't want you to club me over the head. So you give me a book and then you say, well, we both made concessions because I didn't club you over the head.

OK. I think Trudeau won that one. I do. Also, I want to give a shout out, Roy, to a boy called Magnus. I think his name is and he's and he's got a podcast. He's nine years old and he's got a podcast called Magnaphone. And he sent us a voice note about why he was agreeing with me and Trudeau. And his basic line was, you have to stand up to bullies, Rory. This is where, this is exactly Magnus, where the disagreement is coming from. What the Canadians are saying is, yes, we did stand up, but we also gave him some concessions because we actually couldn't bear to go all the way to the wire on this. He didn't really give him concessions. He said, we're going to do this, which are things that are already doing. And he had this fentanyl czar idea, which, you know, Trump, honestly, Rory, I think, listen to me and the Canadians, Rory, we're right about this. We're right about it.

And just to remind people as well, Saturday, sometime in the afternoon, UK time, we're going to do a, me, the Mooch and the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, ex-governor of the Bank of England. And so we'll talk lots more about Canada there.

Now, Rory, what about some of the stuff that's been going on in Europe? Yeah, his question for you. I want to get this, Valderin Emini, big fan of the podcast, love to see these detailed discussions about current affairs happening around the world. Love to get your opinion on Kosovo's general election and the tweet by former American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who we've raised that sheep in the past when we're talking about Trump and Kosovo and what's happened in the Western Balkans, his tweet about Prime Minister Albin Kurti.

Let me just remind people what he said. Grenell labelled Albin Kurti, the Kosovo Prime Minister, as an unreliable partner for Washington. Grenell was the Director of National Intelligence under Trump, has been named Trump's nomination to run the Kennedy Center and is, I think, an envoy for special diplomatic relations around the world. The Kurti's government was unreliable during Trump's first term. It's also been unreliable during Biden's term. And he blames Kurti. In other words, he's basically taking the Serbian side. And the Serbian side is to portray Kurti and the Kosovo Albanians as causing all the trouble and portraying Vucic, the Serbian leader, as though he's the one offended against.

Over to you. We can't match the points about America's unreliability. There's Musk interfering, trying to interfere in the German election, which we'll talk about in a minute. And this is Grenell essentially in trying to interfere in the Kosovo election. Grenell, who, by the way, Rory, yesterday was in Venezuela with Maduro talking about, you know, Venezuela taking back some of their people. And there's a horrific story in Venezuela at the weekend. There was a guy filmed, I don't know how they got the film, being dragged out of his flat in Chile, but by what looked like Venezuelan security people. And his body was later found encased in concrete.

So Kosovo, Albin Kurti, who we interviewed last year, was it last autumn? Yeah. Prime Minister of Kosovo, very, very interesting character, very tough character. And Kosovo, tiny, tiny, tiny place, not recognised still by some countries, including, I think, half a dozen European countries. But, you know, clearly emerged out of the war with Serbia. Just again, for younger listeners, very, very symbolic, because Kosovo, along with Bosnia, were the two big international humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, where they were challenging Milosevic and Serbian led ethnic cleansing and were seen controversially for Russia and others, but generally for the West as successful examples of the West being able to work together, intervene, stop further killing, and set up states, more democratic states coming out of authoritarianism, and putting them, we hoped, at that stage on the path towards European Union membership.

Back over to you. So he won last time round, where you got an overall majority because he got more than 50% of the vote. This time, he got 41.05%. The PDK, which is the Democratic Party of Kosovo, they came second, 22%. Then the Democratic League of Kosovo, 17%. Turnout, very badly down, just 40.6% took part in the election, down from almost 50% last time. But in a sense, he is an amazingly tough character. We saw this in the interview, he really didn't mind saying very critical things about America, very critical things about the European Union. He now has to try to build a coalition, which obviously makes things more difficult, especially as some of the other parties that he might be tempted to form a coalition with, their basic line was we have to improve relations with America and with European Union, and indeed some of them with Serbia. But the Serb-Kosovan relationship is not in a good place.

And meanwhile, in Serbia, of course, you've got these extraordinary demonstrations going on at the moment, they're still going on, student demonstrations against the Vucic regime. It started with this, we talked before about this collapse of a railway station roof. And since when these demonstrations have broadened out and become much more about, it seems, trying to change the regime, Vucic has got rid of the Prime Minister, to see whether that sort of stems the flow as it were, but we'll see. Anyway, Pukerti is back in power, but now has to work with other people. Yeah.

And it's a contrast, actually, because for all the problems in Kosovo, it is a democratic election. And Kurdi was seriously challenged by a serious opposition group. And that's not happening in Serbia. Serbia, you're absolutely right, there's demonstrations on the street, but there's no political party that they can arrange themselves around because Vucic has been very successful at dismantling his political party opposition.

And Vucic is someone to really watch because in a world which is increasingly going in a kind of Putin-Trump direction where governments sweep civil society aside and begin to make nationalist statements about their borders. We have in Republika Srpska, which is the Bosnian-Serb bit adjoining Serbia, which came out of the Bosnian war, a leader who is openly now saying Trump-like things, openly saying, you know, USAID is a criminal organisation, we always told you so, etc. Grenell very much, who's Trump's man, very much on Vucic's side.

And so to return to something we've discussed in the past, the threat remains that Serbia will make aggressive moves towards trying to re-annex Northern Kosovo and re-annex Republika Srpska, which would basically undo those humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo 25 years ago. So got to keep our eyes on that.

Now, I'm going to wrap in a few questions together, Rory, and we're going to whiz around Europe. Austria, Franz Friedrich, who says he's a member and thinks it's time that we informed our viewers and listeners as to quotes, "has Austria got a government yet?" You can maybe deal with that one first. Macron AI, Vanessa Gould, what do you think about Macron's use of deepfakes to publicise the start of his AI action summit? And T. W. wants to know, how is Friedrich Merz, the CDU candidate in the German election later this month, including the far right for campaign leverage seen internationally?

So the big story is that Europe is now in the last chance saloon. The West is basically disintegrating under the pressure from Trump. And in most of these countries now, far right populist groups are emerging who are joyfully imitating Trump's language, Trump's language on immigration, Trump's language on constitutions, Trump's languages on the rule of law. And in Germany and Austria, we've got this very interesting question about what the big old parties do. Can they form coalitions to exclude the far right? Can they govern? And then what happens when new elections come along? And it's the last chance saloon, because if they don't manage to bring together functioning coalitions that work, it's giving that opportunity to the far right.

And here's a little update from today on Austria, which is a good example of this, and we'll get to you on Germany. So Kicill, who people will remember, is the leader of this very, very extreme group in Austria, the FPO, which was always had a Nazi roots has become much more extreme under Kicill, and he got the most votes in the election. So many votes, in fact, that when a coalition collapsed, it seemed inevitable that he would probably end up as chancellor. But his demands have become more and more extreme. So he's demanded the suspension of the asylum system. He's demanded leaving the WHO. Nobody knows why the hell he wants to leave the WHO, but he just imitated Trump. Exactly.

He says when EU court decisions are things that he disagrees with, Austria should just ignore the European Court, no sanctions on Russia, cut all the funding to public sector broadcasting, put more money into government money into funding right wing news outlets, remove the EU flag from buildings. And then he's also very interested in these very extreme moves on citizenship. So you can only get citizenship in 15 years. You get the feeling that he's, he's trying to provoke them to say no and not do a deal because he's also asking for all the big departments, the ones where you can change the institutions of the state, which, of course, is, you know, the way that Orban organised Hungary, added to which the guy that he's negotiating with, the leader of the more conservative right wing party, they're sort of long term sworn enemies. So it's hard to see this one ending anytime soon.

In a bit of a sort of replay of a theme across Europe, what you'll see is the OVAP, which is, as you say, that more traditional conservative party, probably is in the end going to try to return to form a mass coalition against Kikl's party, because his demands have become so mad that presumably what he's trying to do is trigger another election, where he'll think he'll get even more of the vote and be able to take over Austria. Now, over to you on Germany, because to some extent, we've got a very interesting question there after the election on what are the CDU going to do? How do they work to exclude the AFD? Can they make a coalition with the Greens and the Social Democrats?

Yeah, no, it's a bit of a mess. And I mentioned last week, a German interviewer, who I said had given Alice Weidel of the AFD quite a going over and her name is Karen Miosga. And I also watched her, she did, there was a TV debate this week between Scholz and Merz. And this issue that we talked about last week, was it or the week before, where Merz got a vote through the Bundestag with the help of the AFD. This being seen as a sort of breakdown of the Brandt-Mauer, the firewall between the mainstream parties and the hard right. That was a very, very big part of the debate. It was interesting debate because we're so used these days to think the TV debates, well, that's Donald Trump sort of, you know, insults and all that stuff. It was by German standards, it was quite rough. At one point, Scholz used the word doof of Merz, which sort of means, you know, stupid, crazy kind of thing. That was about as rough as it got actually.

But the debate about immigration, about how to deal with the AFD, about the economy, it was a pretty traditional debate. And then what followed, which I also watched with Karen Miosga, she was interviewing Markus Söder, who's the leader of the CSU, the CDU, the other part of the of the union, as it's called. And also a guy called Lars Klingbeil, who is one of the leaders of the STP, and a journalist from Spiegel. And it was really an hour without a break, just talking about what had happened in the debate, with quite a lot of sort of agreeable disagreement going on. And on the one hand, you think this election needs a bit more fire and a bit more excitement. On the other hand, there's something quite nice about, about seeing them sort of being moderately polite to each other. But I think that the CDU look like they're going to come first, the AFD looks like it's going to come second. Merz is adamant that he will not do a deal in government with the AFD, in which case, he then has to look at things like doing a deal with the SPD, who have basically said that they can't trust him, because of the way that he dealt with the AFD in this vote a couple of weeks ago. So it's a bit of a mess. I also saw another interview he did, Merz, because he's got a reputation for being very stiff and very conservative and very traditional.

And actually, when he lightens up a bit, he's, he's maybe more impressive than I, than I thought he was from seeing the just the straightforward debate, he had a bit more, bit more life around him. But anyway, we're gonna have to get used to it, because I think it's very hard to imagine that anybody other than Merz is going to win this election. It's again, this question that's repeated across Europe, of do the conservative parties cut a deal with the far right? So in a British context, does Cammy Baden-Ock in the end, merge with Farage? Which basically, she has said today, by the way, Roy, I don't know if you've seen in the Daily Telegraph, she says there's no way she's going to get into bed with Nigel Farage. I think we should all be very happy about that. And she said herself, that is a truly horrible image.

And in the French example, I guess it was the Les Republicains de Chottier, decided to try to go with Marine Le Pen, and by doing so tore his party apart. So some of the leading figures in the CDU, for example, the leader of the CDU in Westphalia, who called the AFD Nazis, are not going to put up with it for a moment, it would split the party to pieces.

Okay, let's have a quick break. And then when we come back, we'll answer the Macron part of that triptych that I set out a moment ago.

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Welcome back to the rest is politics question time with me Rory Stewart and with me as Campbell and we we were so long on that previous question or that we had a break in the middle of the question. That's that's a first. I think we need to be disciplined on not asking three questions at once.

I was trying to give you an opportunity to go bang, bang, bang, a bit of Germany, bit of Austria, bit of France. Here's your question. Vanessa Gould. What do you think this from a subscriber to what do you think about Macron's use of deep fakes to publicise the start of the AI Action Summit? Is it a clever tool of promotion or does it poke fun at something that is in fact of deadly serious concern?

Both. I was in France on Sunday staying in a hotel and I turned on the telly and I was channel hopping and I lighted a pop. Oh, I know you go out about about crawl be this sort of you. What was the word you use the other day? Bloviating. I still think he's one of the finest communicators in the world. He did a one hour interview about AI with a French presenter and an Indian presenter ahead of this AI summit that was co. It was in Paris, but it was basically put together both by France and India. And honestly, Roy, he just was so articulate, so eloquent. He knew so much about it. And it's interesting.

So Francis had this AI summit. He was talking eye watering sums of money that the French were announcing. So the video that the question refers to is this. He put together a compilation of lots of deep fakes that have been doing the rounds about Macron, including somewhere he was clearly being projected as as gay, as a woman, you know, lots of him dancing and they were all complete fakes. So what he was doing, he was using that to get attention for the summit.

Peter Kyle actually was also at the summit. He did something similar. He posted a video of himself speaking French, but then admitted that he couldn't speak French. And what had happened, he used an AI tool to translate himself. And it was very, very, very convincing.

But what's, what's the big point? Because I guess the big strategic challenge that he needs to face is getting the balance between risk and growth as with all this, and the normal criticism that you would get from the AI guys in Silicon Valley is that Macron and the European Union are basically going to choke AI development because they're so worried about the risks. They're barely even allowing the models to develop and that you can't even really regulate these models until you see what they are. The analogy they use is it's like trying to, I don't know, regulate a car in about 1908 when it's still traveling at 20 miles an hour. You start putting in rules that people have to walk in front of it with a flag because you don't really understand what a car is.

Yeah. And when, when Keir Starmer had his equivalent AI event recently, he was very much on the side of take more risk. I saw Macron's interview. I didn't follow the event itself because I was traveling. He essentially was saying to Europe, you know, we've got to, we've got to catch up here and we've got to catch up by being pretty innovative and pretty entrepreneurial about it. He did have some very, very big private sector in engagement at the event. Modi was there, quite a few of the big world leaders were there.

So I just wanted to draw to your attention though, Roy, that for all your accusations that he dislikes sort of Sorbonne style bloviation, that he's still a very, very, very effective communicator. I'm going to have to reel it in. We're never going to get him interviewed on leading.

Okay. Now, so we got a bit of pushback on our reporting on Trump's statements around Gaza. So here's a question from Martin Tabachnik in Sydney. So he says your discussion of Trump's plan for Gaza and Rory's list of alternative outcomes seems to miss a key possibility. New Gaza leadership pursuing peace with Israel to build a better future for Gazans. Why wasn't this considered? Is your thinking becoming ossified?

So I don't quite understand really where he's coming from. So I guess the closest that I can imagine to this is leadership in Gaza, which means by definition, Palestinian leadership.

So that would be either the Palestinian authority or some new group emerging in Gaza, which would have to come to some kind of accommodation with Hamas, because whether you like it or not, Hamas is still a very, very significant force on the ground in Gaza. Then engaging with Israel on the reconstruction of Gaza, but I don't know quite where Martin Tabachnik thinks it then goes. Israel's made it clear they want no responsibility for Gaza. They don't want any costs for Gaza, and they want to reserve the right to close Gaza's borders and be able to mount military raids in order to defend Israeli security.

And then Trump has outflanked even the wildest dreams of the Israeli far right by talking now not just about clearing Gaza and repeating this again and again. So the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, 2 million people moving to Jordan and Egypt, but also made it clear since we recorded the podcast that in his vision, the Palestinians will not return. I know you said on the main podcast, there's a dangerous sort of Trump derangement syndrome. It's very hard not to feel deranged when you hear him saying this.

So he's on the plane, he's deciding that he's had enough of golf for one day, so he's going to get on Air Force One and he's going to go and watch the first half of the Super Bowl. He's going to leave for the second half because he probably didn't like, even though he claimed he got the nicest welcome of anybody in history, there was actually a bit of booing going on. He said this on the plane, I'm committed, right, not America, I'm committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices, but we're committed to owning it, taking it and making sure that Hamas doesn't move back.

Then goes on, there's nothing to move back into. The place is a demolition site. The remainder will be demolished. Everything's demolished. I mean, you're talking about a people and a land as though, and he used this phrase himself, as though it's a great real estate deal. And that is how he views the whole thing. I mean, I find the whole thing just utterly horrific.

Well, it's sort of almost impossible to kind of unpick that, isn't it? I mean, it runs blatantly in the face of international law because it's ethnic cleansing. You're pushing out too many people whose homes those are, whose country that is, out of their own country. It's totally breaking state sovereignty. So America is somehow acquiring this on what grounds? And this is one of the other strange things with his acquisition of Greenland stories. He doesn't claim that he has a moral justification or a legal justification. He just says, I've got the money.

And then there's the context of what this means. I mean, very unusually, when I was talking to you last week, I'd been talking to people who are very close to Saudi and UAE government. And they initially said that the smart money is on not saying too much about what Trump is doing and just hope it goes away. Of course, King of Jordan's just visiting the states at the moment, and he's under huge pressure because Trump has basically taken away all the underpinnings that the US provided the Jordanian budget and using that as blackmail to force them to take Palestinians in a way that will probably topple the Jordanian monarchy if he did it. But the response from Saudi was so strong and immediate, very, very unexpected. Instead of being quiet, the Saudis chose to immediately put out a statement condemning the entire idea. And that's also going to be something that start unraveling. This is American relationships in the Middle East unraveling.

Yeah. Rory, why this one? Same subject. Therese Mack, having just listened to your podcast on Trump Gaza, if you listen back to your early episodes, after October 7, do you think you were wrong in your analysis and your attempt to be balanced about Israel's response?

Have Western politicians and media enabled genocide with weak criticism? I have thought about that, whether we were, we were too balanced. We said right at the start, we're going to, we saw our role was trying to explain from both sides, in fact, from all sides, why they were doing the things that we're doing. And I think as it went on, we became more and more frustrated at this idea that it wasn't clear what the Israeli strategy was other than ultimately, eventually to wait for Trump. And you can argue from Netanyahu's perspective, that was effective because Trump has given him way more than he thought he was going to get.

Yeah, I think we've been too equivocating. You're completely right. And I'm guilty of it because I'm always feeling that we need to do your sort of macro on the one hand on the other. But we have to be clear now, the attitude of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians of Gaza is unforgivable. The complete lack of interest in reconstruction, in the interest of their lives, the endless justification for the prolonged conflict, the fact that there has not been any clear statements about the reality here. This is Palestinian land. It has nothing to do with the historic state of Israel. Everything being proposed here is ethnic cleansing, completely illegal. And it is outrageous that we are allowing these double standards to happen. And I think it is absolutely right that people should be returning to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. And we should also be pointing out what's now happening on the West Bank.

You know, just to give a small example, there's a bookshop that I go to when I'm in Jerusalem that many, many other people visit. It's just been raided by the Israeli police. And the two bookshop owners have just been locked up. And you have this bizarre and slightly sort of almost comical, if it wasn't so nasty image of the Israeli police, who presumably can't read any Arabic, going around trying to use Google Translate to pick up books by Noam Chomsky, which are being stocked in this Palestinian bookshop. I mean, this is not the liberal Israel. This is not the democratic Israel that people like Yuval Noah Harari stood up for. And it's a sign of one of the reasons why I'm afraid so many people are now leaving Israel, because this is never supposed to be the vision of liberal Jews.

And meanwhile, Donald Trump is talking about the whole thing like he's back in New York and his property development days. It's pretty horrific.

My last question, Rory, from Miranda Green. Do you guys have a WhatsApp group for the podcast? And are you careful about what you say on it?

I think this may be a reference to Mr. Andrew Gwynne, the third member of the Labour government to lose his job. We had Louise Hague, the transport secretary, we had Tulip Sadiq, who was the city minister, and now Andrew Gwynne, a health minister, who's resigned over offensive messages on a WhatsApp group called "Trigger Me Timbers." His greatest message for me as an MP, he was pretending to write a letter to a constituent. This is a sort of chat group with other Labour politicians. "Dear resident, F your bins. I'm reelected and without your vote, screw you. P.S. Hopefully you'll have croaked by the next count." So I mean, you can see why MPs get frustrated and develop a sense of humour, but that was pretty extreme. He came in in 2005. So I knew him. Well, he's part of this interesting question of how Starmer's governance put together the fact he's not using people like that have been in parliament for 20 years, and who was in fact, the shadow secretary of state at one point, and in fact, I think, a PPS in the Home Office and in education, even under Gordon Brown back in the day. So he's a kind of sort of senior veteran figure who ended up in a very junior ministerial position. And this may have driven the sort of frustration and the sick jokes.

"I think the lesson, Rory, which I've said to you before, life is on the record when you're a politician. And it is amazing. I mean, look at how many WhatsApp messages got leaked during the COVID period and the party gate and the people in these groups. And, you know, I think you've just got to be, I think if you're a top flight politician, you've got to be very, very, very, very, very careful."

"I also think that, you know, one of the bugbears in my life, Rory, is when people, you do this very occasionally, when people set up WhatsApp groups and add you to them without permission. I think, I think this is, this is shocking behaviour."

"That's definitely microaggression, which is a good word on which to end our podcast. Thank you very much. See you soon. Bye-bye."