Slight, unassuming and cerebral, YouTube star Dhruv Rathee doesn’t give off insurgent vibes. But the Berlin-resident Indian social media star may well have helped overturn Indian PM Narendra Modi’s majority, thought of as unassailable just a week ago.
Despite the grandiose rhetoric, it’s unlikely that Modi will have viewed last week’s Indian election result as a win having lost his supermajority. The chatter among local media is that 29 year-old Rathee, and other young people with large social media followings disenchanted with this current brand of strongman politics, helped wrench power from Modi’s grip. In an environment increasingly inhospitable to unfavorable media, Rathee has asked pointed, daring questions like: “Is India becoming a dictatorship?”
It’s not just Indian politics on a knife edge. In South Africa, the governing African National Congress too lost its majority, and various analyses attribute the swing to young influencers, tired of the incessant corruption allegations. In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum emerged from a tide of social media hate to claim victory as Mexico’s first female president.
With a general election coming up on July 4, U.K. politics is today predicated upon a handful of hot button issues that germinated on social media: transgender rights, free speech and migrants. And, despite his conviction last week, Trump’s ability to regain the White House may, like last time, depend on which of the warring factions on X can shout loudest.
In this climate of fickle, febrile, social media-driven global politics, law firms are expanding, gladhanding corporates and politicians with vigour, detached from any fixed set of principles, but instead ones determined by locality.
The finest example of this today is Saudi Arabia: a spendthrift post-Russia destination for international law firms that last week introduced an amendment to current legislation that would “remove the requirement for foreign law firms to partner with Saudi lawyers to establish a professional company in the Kingdom”.
Having lured figures like Cristiano Ronaldo and mounted supposed sustainability campaigns, the Kingdom’s ability to quieten the chorus against its human rights abuses and treatment of women, minorities and migrant workers seems to be working...
