World

Catherine Ellis

Is time up for Brazil’s Bolsonaro dynasty?

Brazilian politics is a soap opera that never runs out of plot twists: bitter rivalries, corruption scandals and colorful characters who keep rewriting the script. But Lula da Silva’s comeback was remarkable even by Brazilian standards. It brought an end to a dramatic cliffhanger, where the veteran left-winger won a fourth term as Brazil’s president. Just three weeks ago, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva looked vulnerable. His rival Flávio Bolsonaro had beaten him in the first round, raising the prospect of a right-wing turn in South America’s largest country. Brazil looked set for a shift towards tougher security measures, tax cuts and closer ties with Donald Trump’s administration.

bolsonaro
Bruce Gilley

It’s time to colonize Haiti

For more than 20 years, the United Nations has been trying to impose some form of colonial rule on Haiti, without success. The problem has never been a lack of resources, much less a lack of demand from the Haitian people. Rather, it has been a lack of political will and leadership from an organization scared to death of being accused of promoting “neo-colonialism.”  The recent action by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele to send 100 troops to rescue four compatriots serving as technical workers who were kidnapped by gangs is a welcome sign. It shows that a successful recolonization of Haiti would require governments to drop the pretense of Haitian sovereignty and to organize a proper colonial force for the country.

Haiti
Arnout Nuijt

Lula has broken Brazil

In a dramatic reversal, Brazil’s 80-year-old president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, has secured a fourth term in office, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Flávio had finished first in the opening round of the election three weeks ago, and his political camp had performed strongly in congressional and gubernatorial elections. Lula’s victory, with almost 52 percent of the vote and a substantial margin of nearly 4.4 million votes, was decisive. But the election was marred by the badly managed extension of voting hours. Lula’s fourth term will begin in an extremely hostile environment, amid accusations of foul play on election night It was a night of confusão and emoção.

Lula
Gavin Mortimer

The specter of civil war haunts France

It was a peaceful weekend in France apparently. One broadcaster described the latest protests as “calm” and Le Monde said they unfolded “without serious incident.” Tell that to the 53 police officers who were injured in clashes with demonstrators, 1,513 of whom were arrested as trouble broke out across the country. Laurent Nunez, the Interior Minister, said that in several towns and cities the police had been subjected  to an “extremely high level of violence.” This Saturday is Halloween and social media is full of threats and taunts about bringing terror to the Parisian bourgeoisie In Grenoble, for example, hundreds of far-left extremists were beaten back by police who resorted to tear gas and baton charges.

Ukraine

Ash Bhardwaj

Ukraine is much weaker without access to Starlink

The full-scale war in Ukraine began with fast, armored advances that covered hundreds of miles in weeks. Then drones began finding tanks and other vehicles in their hideouts, destroying them before offensives could get going. By 2024, both sides had largely given up on armored warfare. A 19-mile-wide “kill zone” now straddles the front line, with drones spotting and striking anything that moves. The front line has barely shifted. Ukraine recently found a way to get tanks back into the fight, raising the prospect of a new phase in the conflict. But those innovative tactics could be under threat, following interruptions to Ukraine’s use of the Starlink satellite network.

ukraine
Daryna Bondarenko

Ukrainians are struggling to keep going

Each time I fly back to Odesa, my hometown, to see my family, I notice how things have changed since my last visit to Ukraine. Which is to say, how much worse they have become. Take the bombing raids, which used to happen only at night. Now they take place in the daytime as well and have grown much more violent and unpredictable. The Russians send over a cocktail of drones, ballistic missiles and guided aerial bombs. You never know where they’ll hit – residential buildings, shopping centers, pharmacies, trains, you name it (“Russian Roulette” is the new, blackly comic Ukrainian name for it). The war, all the time, is getting closer to you and your loved ones. It used to be happening in another part of your region. Then in another area of your city.

Owen Matthews

The UN is no longer a forum for international peace

Should Russia’s aggressive war on Ukraine, with its accompanying litany of horrific human rights abuses, disqualify it from a seat on the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC)? That’s what Poland’s feisty foreign minister Radek Sikorski called for yesterday in New York. The UNSC was meant to be a "guardian of peace, not to give immunity to aggressors" like Russia, Sikorski told Polish television. More, he called the legal basis for Russia’s permanent seat at the Security Council table – with its accompanying veto over all resolutions – "questionable" because Moscow took over the USSR’s old seat without a vote.  In moral terms, Sikorski has a point – and it’s one that the Ukrainians have been pushing for a while.

Israel

Tom Gross

Can Netanyahu win again?

Next Tuesday, Israel holds elections for the first time since the appalling attacks of October 7, 2023. After such a sadistic onslaught, which happened on Benjamin Netanyahu’s watch, many pundits predicted his political days were numbered (though it’s worth noting that neither Roosevelt nor George W. Bush were expected to resign after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 respectively – indeed both were subsequently re-elected.) But Israel is tiny, and in per-capita terms, the loss of life on October 7 was 12 times worse than 9/11 was for the US; 89 times worse than the Bataclan massacre in Paris, 140 times worse than 7/7 in London.

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Arieh Kovler

The man who could topple Benjamin Netanyahu

The year is 2019 and, after almost a full term in office, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government of right-wing and religious parties heads to a general election. Opposing him is a former IDF chief of staff heading a new centrist party which quickly soars in the polls, making him the main challenger for prime minister. That challenger was Benny Gantz. Gantz formed alliances, fought elections and got caught up in the paralysis of Israel’s 2019-20 governing crisis in which nobody was able to form a coalition. Facing the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gantz agreed to a deal with Netanyahu where they’d take turns at being prime minister – with Netanyahu going first, of course. Nobody except Gantz believed his turn would come.

Charles Lipson

Will the wars in Ukraine and Iran merge?

This is a fraught moment, perhaps the most dangerous since the end of the Cold War. Two major wars are being fought, one threatening European security, the other the world’s energy supply. In East Asia, China continues to threaten Taiwan, and North Korea is reportedly upgrading its military technology with Russian help. Put simply, the bad guys are on the march, fighting for their regimes’ survival, their malign domestic projects, and as much regional domination as they can achieve. Although the wars in Ukraine and Iran have remained largely separate, there have been several intersections recently and a gnawing fear they could merge into a global conflict. That grim possibility is still a longshot, but there is real danger because the coalitions fighting the two wars overlap.

DC

America

Europe

Lionel Shriver

Can we be surprised that France has descended into nihilism?

Given its corpulent government and inexplicably entitled populace, I’ve long been in awe of the fact that France functions at all. In the past four weeks, the verdict is belatedly in: it doesn’t. Early estimates of the riots: 1,500 shops damaged, destroyed and/or looted; 1,000 police officers injured; at least 1,800 arrests; innumerable cars burned; multiple architecturally irreplaceable public buildings set alight or vandalized. Two versions of the “unrest” have emerged. For the left-wing press, “mostly peaceful” minors protesting poor educational provision were joined by “mostly peaceful” adults protesting the cost of living – who were then infiltrated by masked outside “agitators” of totally unknown identity who looted and set stuff on fire.

nihilism
Louis Sarkozy

Who’s who in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s revolutionary guard

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the chief instigator of the recent riots in France and leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), is currently ranked second in most presidential polls. Marine Le Pen remains the favorite despite her continuing legal problems. But the polls do not reveal Mélenchon’s strategy, his organization, his coherence or his ruthlessness. It has become fashionable to dismiss his chances. He is too radical, they say, too inflammatory. As if that has not benefited other modern underdogs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z44ZraRn35w Born in Tangier in 1951, the former socialist schoolteacher became a senator at 35 and briefly served as a minister under the former PM Lionel Jospin. Mélenchon has spent the past 18 years building a party in his own image.

Philip Delves Broughton

The riots are driving French politics to its extremes

Paris The wonderful thing about electric bikes, if you are fighting with French riot police, is the way they burn. You skid your Lime or Vélib’ into the middle of the Boulevard de Magenta, which leads from the Gare du Nord down to the Place de la République, and set it alight along with a pile of ordinary bikes, and soon you have a conflagration of rubber and battery chemicals. During the weekend’s street protests, the fires provided cover for rioters breaking into mobile phone, vape and jewelry stores and the money-transfer shops which serve the many immigrants who work in eastern Paris. By Monday morning, a vicious guard dog stood outside an Intermarché supermarket, snarling at customers coming in one by one.

Friday

Peter Hitchens

Why is Britain stoking conflict with Russia?

Is Britain becoming an army with a country, instead of a country with an army? Who is actually making national policy on Ukraine and war in general? The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roland Walker, delivered an astounding speech to soldiers last week. He said, as if he were prime minister: “Our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritize defense and security.” And then he told the soldiers: “Ultimately, we’re going to need them to back us, to back you, to do the one thing that you do, that nobody else gets to do, and that is to take the fight to the enemy.” It was surely not his job to put the case for sacrifices by the voting public. Nor was it for him to tell politicians to explain this to the public.

Thomas Markle
Alexander Larman

What is going on with the Markle family?

The news, when it broke last night, was undeniably eye-catching. Thomas Markle, the estranged father of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, was reported to have been in the possession of thousands of images of child sexual abuse, which were discovered at his home in the Philippines. His son, the imaginatively named Thomas Markle Jr., told the British newspaper The Sun that “When I found this material, I was horrified and I had no option but to report my dad. I have supported, cared for him and helped him for years – but that stops now. I won’t speak to my father ever again unless I’m called to give evidence against him.” Meghan herself went further.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

What do Italy’s rioters want?

“Facciamo come in Francia!” shouted the masked and hooded rioters on Sunday in Milan and other major Italian cities, notably Turin and Bologna. “Let’s do like in France!” By far the worst violence was in Milan around the Duomo where about 3,000 rioters fought running battles with police and sacked and looted countless high-end shops. Most of the 200 rioters arrested in Milan on Sunday, plus the 70 odd on Saturday during similar though less destructive scenes, were Italian citizens who are the children of immigrants, according to media reports. They are known in Italian as “di seconda generazione.” Around 60 of those arrested were foreign nationals. Eighty percent were teenagers under the age of 18, some as young as 12. Far-left white activists were a small minority.

Wednesday

Elisabeth Dampier

Is this email hack an attempt to destroy the AfD?

Hundreds of thousands of private emails from Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have been hacked and published online, exposing the inner workings of the party and raising the possibility that members could be harassed.  The party has confirmed that unidentified hackers had accessed their private information, which allegedly consists of 421,179 emails, amounting to 281 gigabytes of data, according to the tabloid newspaper Bild.

Gavin Mortimer

The dark horse who stands to benefit from France’s riots

Marine Le Pen is the political winner from the anarchy that erupted in France at the weekend. A poll conducted in the 48 hours after the nationwide riots found that the leader of the National Rally is the only figure whose approval rating has increased. Le Pen is now up to 38 percent, a popularity not seen since Francois Mitterrand enjoyed widespread support in the 1980s. According to Frédéric Dabi, one of France’s leading political scientists, Le Pen is regarded as “the representative of the party of order, the party of those who can no longer tolerate the chaos.” Her nearest rival is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the far-left La France insoumise, the party that much of the country holds responsible for stoking disorder in recent weeks.

Terry Barnes

Australian politics is becoming increasingly toxic

Wangaratta is a busy regional town in northern Victoria. It’s a place to stop and take a break on the day-long drive between Melbourne and Sydney. For locals, “Wang” serves the region’s agricultural and cattle-farming communities, a town where produce is bought and sold, and families come from miles around to shop and catch up with each other. The Wangaratta outrage highlights how vitriolic Australia’s political discourse is Monday, sadly, was different. Wangaratta witnessed an act of brutal violence against the local member of Australia’s parliament, Helen Haines, run down by a man in a Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle. Victoria Police have confirmed the driver rammed Haines, and then U-turned to strike her again.

Tuesday

Patrick West

The Palestine flag has become the symbol of anti-West hatred

Given that the French-speaking world gave us the science of semiotics, they would be the first to recognize that the Palestine flag, as it is being hoisted and brandished across the French republic at the moment, has come to signify something far more than the aspirant state of Palestine. You don’t have to be Ferdinand de Saussure to appreciate that this signifier has become unmoored from its original meaning. You don’t have to be Roland Barthes to see that this emblem has now assumed a wholly mutated significance: in short, it has become an all-encompassing symbol to denote hatred of the West and of European civilization.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Who will condemn Saudi Arabia’s Islamic barbarism?

On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia executed a Bangladeshi man and woman over an “indecent act” inside a mosque in Mecca. While the Saudi interior ministry hasn’t specified the “indecency,” and some reports suggest that the two had kissed within the parameters of the Islamic worship place, the kingdom mentioned “adultery” as the offense in its prisoner list sent to the Bangladeshi consular general. Nonetheless, for any extent of “indecency” to be deemed a crime worthy of capital punishment is a barbaric affront to humanity.

Gavin Mortimer

France is far too soft on crime

France experienced its first night of calm since the weekend on Monday evening after the imposition of curfews in several cities and towns. The Prime Minister, Sebastien Lecornu, said he is “absolutely determined to restore order” in the wake of the weekend’s urban warfare that stunned the Republic. Lecornu delivered his promise after a crisis meeting in which a series of measures were discussed. While the Premier held back from declaring a state of emergency – for the time being – Lecornu said the curfews in cities such as Paris, Nice, Lyon and Lille were necessary. Rioters are rarely jailed and so far the sentences given to those arrested on Saturday have been derisory “The French get the impression that it's chaos everywhere,” said Lecornu.

John Keiger

Could this be the end of the French Fifth Republic?

May 1958. After 12 years, France’s Fourth Republic was ungovernable, with cabinets lasting barely seven months on average. Four years of worsening war in Algeria culminated in the army’s Algiers putsch of May 13, demanding stronger political authority. General de Gaulle – Resistance hero, France’s savior in 1944 and now the army commanders’ choice – stepped forward. Exploiting the insurrection, he demanded the premiership, temporary rule by decree and six months to draft a constitution for approval by referendum rather than parliament. President René Coty agreed. On June 1, 1958, de Gaulle became the Fourth Republic’s last prime minister; six months later, he was the Fifth’s first president.

Monday

Owen Matthews

Putin can smell Washington’s desperation

Donald Trump has staked a big chunk of his political credibility on finding peace in Ukraine – and by doing so in partnership with Vladimir Putin, and on the Kremlin’s terms. But is Putin ready to play ball and help save Trump’s backside, politically and economically? The answer is yes: Putin will probably play along with small gestures like partial ceasefires and prisoner releases. But when it comes to the big stuff like actually stopping what Putin calls his "special military operation," the Kremlin is likely to stick to its guns and ignore Trump’s special pleading while it continues pulverizing Ukraine’s cities.

donald trump russia
Druin Burch

Barbarism cannot triumph in France

On Bastille Day, 1883, the people of Limoges inaugurated a beautiful new town hall, paid for from the legacy of a rich burgher with no children. On Saturday, rioters set fire to it. “Barbarism is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step.” That was Alain Finkielkraut, but I know it because Clive James quoted him when he wrote of how to keep our societies and values alive. He said we liked to think being cultured warded off barbarism, but that barbarism doesn’t care if we are cultured or not. He was only half right. Barbarism does care: it hates us for being cultured. Barbarism, whether imported or home bred, wants to see our culture burn.

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

The truth about the anarchy in France

France has had its share of riots in recent years but the scenes of urban warfare that erupted on Saturday were unprecedented. The Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Gregoire, said entire streets “have been devasted.” His shocked deputy, Lamia El Aaraje, said the capital suffered “a level of violence that I believe we had never seen before.” In Limoges, the city hall was burned to the ground and those in Lille and Marseille were badly damaged. A tourist office in the heart of Lyon was razed and in Agen the branch office of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was ransacked.

Louis Sarkozy

France is paying for its indulgence of the young

France is ablaze (again). Limoges’s nineteenth-century town hall was set on fire and declared largely lost. The prefect’s residence in Bordeaux was ransacked. The Galeries Lafayette were looted and, in the words of the mayor of Paris, entire streets “methodically wrecked.” This is what happens when a society treats the lycéen – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle We could expend many words analyzing why: a failing justice system, a lack of political courage, the left’s insurrectionist tendencies. But one underestimated reason is the rise of the Child King. This, in essence, is what happens when a society treats the lycéen (the student) – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle.

Friday

Graham Keeley

After years of socialism, is Spain about to turn to the far-right?

Good-looking and always smartly dressed, Vito Quiles sports a wristband with the red and gold of the Spanish flag. It is ubiquitous among Vox supporters. He has made a name for himself in Spain by supposedly reporting on the hate figures for the far-right: migrants, housing rights protesters, students and far-left leaders. He confronts these figures to create provocative content online. Quiles, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, is part of a small but growing number of right-wing agitators who are attracting young people to Vox, a far-right party which less than a decade ago was regarded as a political joke.

Jonathan Spyer

The West needs a coherent plan for tackling Iran’s proxies

Saudi missiles hit the Houthi-controlled Yemen Petroleum Company’s al-Sabaha facility near the Yemeni capital of Sana’a on Tuesday night. The Saudi strikes came in response to the Houthis’ earlier targeting of King Khalid International Airport on Saturday, when 12 people were killed. Another individual died in a similar attack the following day.    The ongoing and deadly exchanges of fire accompany a fierce ground conflict now under way in Yemen between the Iran-backed Houthis and the forces of the Saudi-supported Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), representing the legally constituted government of Yemen.

Louis Sarkozy

We cannot trust our AI overlords

It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the digital apocalypse is at our door. The advance of artificial intelligence is outstripping our fears and expectations. The machinery of the state, slow and predictable by nature, is so thoroughly outpaced in its capacity to control and regulate that it does not even realize it. Our politicians, running on antiquated software, cling to problems that are pressing but dated (such as the retirement age and the number of civil servants) and barely speak of the cataclysm on the horizon. Édouard Philippe, who is currently the frontrunner of the traditional right-wing constellation in France, recently remarked that he used LLMs (large language models) to write his emails. Such is the abyss of our backwardness.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Has Trump changed sides on Ukraine?

Has Donald Trump effectively changed sides in the Ukraine war? Over just a few tumultuous days, Trump’s already rocky relations with Volodymyr Zelensky have tumbled into something close to irreconcilable breakdown. After Trump announced that he would be de-sanctioning Russian diesel exports in an attempt to lower global prices, Zelensky had the temerity to call him “weak.” Trump responded bluntly that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” then squarely (and unfairly) blamed Zelensky’s continued strikes on Russian oil refineries for an international fuel price spike.

ukraine
NATO
Simon Diggins

Revealed: NATO’s plan to combat Russia

Amid the Sturm und Drang of Donald Trump’s White House and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, General Alexus Gregory "Grynch" Grynkewich laid out what he terms NATO’s “Theory of Victory.” This is a concept of operations that will “block the initial attack... blunt it and prevent further advance. And, if required, break the enemy’s forces and the operational war fighting system that is arrayed against us.” In short: Block, Blunt and Break. General Grynkewich was careful not to point fingers but the location of his talk, at the Warsaw Security Forum, left no doubts as to who the potential ‘adversary’ General Grynkewich is both SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s lead operational commander) and USEUCOM, the commander of all US troops in the European theater.

Wednesday

Daniel Thorpe

Azerbaijan’s hijab ban has infuriated Turkey

There are few countries in the world with relations as close as Turkey and Azerbaijan. The two countries hail from the same Turkic ethnic roots, their languages are more or less mutually intelligible, and military cooperation has been strong – particularly in Nagorno-Karabakh against the Armenians. There’s even a phrase, “one nation, two states,” commonly echoed by both sides. Yet, a rift is now brewing between the two brotherly Muslim countries – over hijabs. Last month, the Azerbaijani government imposed restrictions in schools that “do not correspond to the principle of secular general education,” effectively banning headscarves worn by schoolgirls.