Ten reasons to be cheerful about 2023

Yearly, even a troubling one like 2023, brings excellent news in addition to unhealthy. Right here beneath are my 10 selections of the yr for information that shone some gentle amid the darkness.

Within the common spirit of Christmas, I’ve ranged a bit past politics and a bit past Europe. Let me know of some other occasions which will have stood out to you at tony.barber@ft.com. After the break, this text can be again with you on Saturday January 6.

1. Poland’s parliamentary election in October is high of my checklist. It ended eight years of rightwing nationalist rule that corroded the rule of regulation in Poland and broken relations with the EU and Germany specifically.

Naturally, a hard road lies ahead for Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new authorities. However the election confirmed that, as long as a contest is free and honest, voters can and can toss out an illiberally minded authorities. What’s extra, the switch of energy in Poland, although acrimonious, has been peaceable.

2. Second on my checklist is the Czech presidential election in January. The consequence set the tone for occasions in Poland 9 months later: Petr Pavel, a political reasonable, defeated Andrej Babiš, a populist former prime minister.

It was a reduction to see the again of Miloš Zeman, who had served as Czech president for 10 years and raised issues along with his pro-Russian and pro-Chinese language leanings. Taken collectively, the Czech and Polish election outcomes point out that illiberalism is in no way on the march all through central Europe.

3. Subsequent up, Italy. In 2019 Italy grew to become the one G7 nation to enroll in China’s Belt and Street Initiative, however this month Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s authorities formally withdrew from it.

Meloni, chief of the hard-right Brothers of Italy celebration, can be a agency supporter of Ukraine in its conflict of self-defence in opposition to Russia. She is decided that her authorities ought to adhere intently to the western alliance’s frequent overseas coverage positions.

4. Within the UK, Boris Johnson resigned as an MP in June after an inquiry discovered that he had misled parliament about events at Downing Avenue through the pandemic.

The FT’s editorial summed it up higher than I can: “Boris Johnson’s resignation from parliament is nothing apart from an excellent day for British democracy. As prime minister, Johnson besmirched and subverted his personal workplace, and different establishments he touched.”

5. Now we transfer outdoors Europe. In October, the courageous Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mohammadi, who’s in jail in Tehran, this month smuggled out a letter which acknowledged: “Imprisonment, psychological torture, fixed solitary confinement, sentence after sentence — that hasn’t and isn’t going to cease me.”

6. Time for some science. Astronomers introduced in November that they’d noticed the oldest black hole but detected within the universe.

It’s estimated to be greater than 13bn years previous, relationship to about 470mn years after the Massive Bang, the occasion thought to have began the universe. The invention is a tribute to the great facet of human scientific endeavour.

7. The launch of the Wegovy weight loss drug in European nations akin to Denmark, Germany, Norway and the UK (it was authorized in 2021 to be used within the US) is, probably, one of many nice medical breakthroughs of the century to this point.

The problem for Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical group that manufactures the drug, and different firms is to make sure widespread, inexpensive entry to this sort of therapy.

8. In September, the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature published data exhibiting that Africa’s white rhino inhabitants had elevated in 2022 for the primary time in a decade.

Due to poaching, the general variety of white and black rhinos in Africa stays perilously low — scarcely greater than 23,000. However safety measures will be efficient.

9. What about tradition and leisure? For me, the spotlight of the yr was the fourth and closing collection of Succession, the excellent TV drama in regards to the bickering Roy household and their world media conglomerate.

Jesse Armstrong, the present’s creator, and his solid maintained the best requirements as much as the final.

10. Lastly, on account of my private curiosity in historical past, I spherical off my checklist with a very outstanding feat of scholarship — the publication by Oxford College Press of a three-volume version of the letters, writings and speeches of the Seventeenth-century English statesman Oliver Cromwell.

I’m bending the principles as a result of the books appeared within the US this yr, however within the UK in late 2022. Nonetheless, that is, by a ways, essentially the most authoritative, full version of Cromwell ever produced.

A cheerful Christmas to all, and see you within the new yr!

Tony’s picks of the week

• Tony Estanguet, the pinnacle of the Paris Olympics organising committee, says next year’s games in the French capital can be “a uncommon, magical second”, the FT’s Leila Abboud and Sarah White report

• British political events are gearing up for a probable general election in 2024 — a Polish perspective from Przemysław Biskup for the Polish Institute of Worldwide Affairs