The State of Play - July 2, 2023

In this edition: Greece moves forward, Canadian wildfires spread, China and the EV market, Micron's Q3 financials and a little slice of London culture.

Many of my posts are dedicated to ever-evolving, recent news events. Because of this, I think it makes sense to periodically send a brief update on what has been happening in recent days.

---

New Democracy’s victory in Greece

As anticipated, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the center-right New Democracy party won last weekend’s Greek election in a landslide, cementing Mitsotakis as the Greek leader moving forward.

“Mitsotakis is now Greece’s singular and dominant political figure, in full control of his own party and parliament,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group. He said Mitsotakis’ reformist agenda had a chance to be implemented, given he had no constraints from a partner."

Source: BBC

In the aftermath of the election, former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras resigned as the leader of the opposition Syriza party. Syriza won less than 18% of the vote, a crushing blow for the former ruling party.

However, its not all sunshine and rainbows for Mitsotakis. The Spartans, a new iteration of the old neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, earned almost 5% of the vote. In total, ~1/3 voters voted for extreme left and right parties, portending further polarization and resentment across Greek society.

This will likely confront Mitsotakis right away in the form of the migrant crisis, especially in the aftermath of last month’s shipwreck claiming the lives of more than 700 migrants.

---

Canadian wildfires continue their rampage

Canada wildfire season is now the worst on record - Nadine Yousef (BBC): “The blazes have burned more than 8.1m hectares (20m acres) across the country - 21 times above the average over the last decade. There are currently 483 wildfires across Canada. More than 250 of those are considered to be out of control….The previous Canadian record for area burned by wildfires was set in 1989 from more than 11,000 blazes, according to government figures. While this year's fires are smaller in number - nearly 3,000 so far in 2023 - they are much larger in size.”

Source: Canadian government

These fires have been raging for weeks now and unfortunately, there is no timetable for when they will slow down.

In Canada, the mean duration of a fire that’s more than 1,000 hectares (or a little less than four square miles) is 23 days—or a little over three weeks, according to Jain. Meanwhile, a fire that’s more than 10,000 hectares (about 40 square miles) burns for a mean duration of 39 days. Some of the fires active now have been burning for weeks; others are just beginning: In the past 10 hours alone, CIFFC logged three additional fires.

And the currently entrenched fires are big enough that no one really can say how long they will drag on. “Some of these fires in [the] northern boreal forest of Canada right now are enormous,” Bruce MacNab, the head of Wildland Fire Information Systems with Natural Resources Canada, told me. “And it would take some huge rain events to completely stop them.” He believes that they likely will last “for some weeks yet.” Broadly speaking, Canada’s fire season tends to start waning by the fall. Karine Pelletier of SOPFEU, Quebec’s forest-firefighting agency, told me that, this year, barring many heavy periods of rainfall, the agency expects firefighting operations to last until September.