2022 PREDICTIONS
Submitted by christian on Fri, 12/31/2021 - 13:21
- The vast majority of the world will have been vaccinated by the end of 2022, but the gap between rich countries (after multiple waves of boosters and amid the roll-out of antiviral drugs) and poor ones (where logistical bottlenecks could hamper distribution even when vaccines are delivered) will be larger. Expect at least one more breakout variant (“sigma”?) from one of the many under-vaccinated corners of the world.
- Putin will engage a substantive military move to drive a permanent wedge between Ukraine’s eastern regions and the rest of the country most likely through some form of hybrid warfare rather than a conventional, full-scale invasion.
- The Democrats will lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in the midterms and the Republicans will deepen their indulgence of unconstitutional political methods. The US will end the year with Democrats in full-on panic mode over Donald Trump or a Trump-like candidate winning the 2024 election – by fair means or foul.
- Horrific famine in at least one country will to some extent shake the rich world out of its introspection. This may be Ethiopia (in the grips of civil war) or Yemen, but most concerning is Afghanistan – where the International Rescue Committee predicts near universal poverty (97 per cent) by mid-2022. The West’s particular responsibility for the situation there might prompt more action than would otherwise be likely, but Global North states consumed with their own pandemic problems will still be far too slow to act.
- Domestically, 2022 will be the most difficult year for China. A gradual slowdown in the housing sector, combined with the other strains, will mean lower growth than the level to which China’s middle class has become accustomed. All of which will not go unnoticed as the backdrop to the party’s 20th congress in October, at which Xi will implicitly confirm that he will serve an unprecedented third term as president.
- The coming year will bring elections in several countries in which the institutions and norms of liberal democracy have been abused in recent years: Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines and potentially Turkey, where an election is due in 2023 but could be brought forward by economic crisis. In all four countries strongmen incumbents face either a newly competitive opposition (Hungary, Brazil, Turkey) or term limits (the Philippines). In all four there are questions over whether those men will accept the democratic process. At least one major international strongman – most likely, Jair Bolsonero in Brazil – will attempt to “do a Trump” and defy the legitimate electoral result through widespread manipulation and/or violent insurrection. He will probably not succeed but, in a country with weaker liberal institutions than the US, will get farther than the American prototype and in turn inspire US Republicans looking to 2024.
- No EU leader begins 2022 with more at stake than Emmanuel Macron. In April he will attempt a feat that no French president has managed since 2002: re-election. With at least three competitive challengers (Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour on the far-right and Valérie Pécresse on the moderate right) and many imponderables (the pandemic, consolidation on the far-right, wider European affairs) it is hard to say what will happen. Meanwhile Macronism in the EU has a window of opportunity. France holds the EU’s rotating presidency for the first half of the year and in Olaf Scholz and Mario Draghi, Macron has favourable partners in Berlin and Rome. He plans to use the presidency to push for greater euro-zone growth and more European “strategic autonomy” in defence and foreign affairs. The year could bring anything from his expulsion from the Élysée to re-election and a Macroniste transformation of the union. The most likely outcome of the election is a narrow Macron win that returns the president to office with his authority dented. At a European level, there will be incremental achievements – but more in the field of fiscal policy, where he is working with the grain of wider shifts, than on defence and security policy, where the union remains more intractably divided.
- The Iran nuclear deal will survive in some extremely limited form but will not be resurrected – especially if the chances of a Republican win in 2024 appear to grow. That will increase tensions between the US and Iran at least to the level they reached following Trump’s drone strike that killed the senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Hostilities between Israel, along with some of the Sunni states of the Middle East, and Iran will intensify.
- There are three potentially global crises of connectivity in 2022. The first is the possibility of a vaccine-resistant “monster” variant of Covid-19 that forces societies already at economic and societal breaking point into new lockdowns. The second is that of a cyberattack, by a state or non-state actor, that cripples crucial institutions and networks and has the potential to spread, pandemic-like, across the international system. The third is a climate shock (heat, cold, drought storms) that affects more than one region, for example by collapsing food or energy supply chains. Countries and regions of concern in 2022 are the situations in Libya, the Sahel region, the Balkans and Afghanistan.
- The year 2022 could see the creation and roll-out of new Covid-19 vaccines that cover all possible variants of the virus, as well as cheap antiviral drugs. The vast resources pumped into this research – and mRNA technology in particular – could produce other breakthroughs. Meanwhile the coming year will see the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s minimum corporate tax rule adopted in national legislation ahead of implementation in 2023 – when it is expected to raise an additional $150bn for states worldwide. And while liberal democracy likely faces a difficult year, it is also possible that one or more of Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be successfully ousted in 2022.
Add new comment