During his term in office (2012-2020), Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought to demonstrate Japan's high level of interest in Africa, including by pledging a total of $ 60 billion in financial support at the 2013 and 2016 Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) summits and announcing his vision for a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP) at the TICAD-VI in Nairobi.

The COVID-19 crisis has made clear the importance of resilient supply chains and effective economic security.

Energy and electricity policy, planning and regulation in South Africa has been slow and bureaucratic, lacking visionary leadership, and marred by uncertainty. Policy positions and actions taken have tended to be reactive, and driven more by crisis management than by forward-looking leadership.

This sad year ends with a pandemic that continues in full swing over a large part of the planet, especially in the United States and Europe, with no other reassuring prospect than that of one or more vaccines, which is already a lot. But that’s not the subject I want to focus on in this eighth letter, the last one for 2020. Internationally, two other facts have dominated the scene in recent months.

At the end of year 2020, the European space sector finds itself at a crossroads between challenges and opportunities. While the 2019 European Space Agency (ESA) Ministerial Conference marked a progression in terms of budgets, a sign of renewed space ambitions, the technological and financial acceleration from the United States represents a disruptive scenario that poses threats to the continuity of European space capabilities. 

Since 2018, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU - Christlich Demokratische Union) has been confronted with a long-lasting leadership crisis. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s favorite candidate for the position of party leader, was not able to maintain herself at the top of the party and resigned after only 15 months.

On December 9, 2020 will be celebrated the 115^th anniversary of the 1905 law on French secularism (laïcité). On the very same day, a new law project will be presented by the French government, with the objective of further strengthening the “republican values” in order to fight against so-called “Islamist separatism” within French society.  

When analyzing the global state of play around artificial intelligence (AI), Russia so far looks like an “outsider” compared to the two technological leaders, the United States and China.