Daniel DePetris

When Emmanuel Macron won a resounding victory over far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential elections – claiming 66 per cent of the vote – Matteo Salvini was a little known Italian politician largely scoffed at as a clown by the status-quo parties. While Salvini was posting selfies on Facebook and making outlandish comments about North African migrants, the eurozone, the European Union, and the Italian political establishment, Macron was in Paris measuring drapes in the Élysée Palace. Stories in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian gushing about Macron being Europe’s saviour from the dark forces of populism were as prevalent as stories deriding Salvini as a buffoon.

Democrats had a good night last Tuesday, flipping dozens of seats to recapture the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years. On the surface, the party looks confident and newly ascendant. It seems to have shaken off the 2016 jitters, which gave liberals around the country a mild form of PTSD. Yet, underneath the veneer, Democrats are still their usual listless selves. They may seem unified and ready to do battle against President Donald Trump, but the party remains divided about which course to take, how to bring the white working class back into their corner, and which candidate would be their best hope in 2020 to make Trump the first one-term president since 1992. The Democrats are desperately searching for their own white whale.

Midterm elections are traditionally nightmares for the party of a sitting president. Just ask former president Bill Clinton, who suffered the humiliation of seeing his Democratic Party lose 54 seats during Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution. Ask George W. Bush, whose blunders in Iraq cost the GOP control of both chambers of Congress in 2006. Or maybe ask Barack Obama, who candidly admitted after the electoral disaster of 2010 (in which the GOP picked up 63 seats on their way to capturing the House) that he needed to do a better job presiding over America’s economic recovery.

What does the Democratic Party stand for other than visceral and vocal opposition to President Donald Trump? Ask the average Democrat on the street, and you’re likely to get a million different answers; it’s one of the major reasons why the party has been struggling to define itself since Trump shocked the universe with his upset victory in November 2016. ‘The Resistance’ will settle for nothing short of pitchfork leftist populism, a rambunctiousness that party elders tend to regard as juvenile.Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker-in-waiting, has tried to demonstrate a more mature face of the party to American voters less than a week before the polls open.

Whoever posted these bombs, he or she clearly doesn’t care for Democrats and progressives; suspicious devices were sent to the Clintons, Barack Obama, Trump critic John Brennan, billionaire George Soros, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, the Democratic National Committee, and CNN’s New York studios. Fortunately, nobody has been killed or hurt. Unfortunately, the bombs have already told us something about how ugly American politics has become. Commentators have been quick to say that Donald Trump deserves blame for his purposely divisive rhetoric.

Is there a possibility Hillary Clinton will launch her third presidential campaign in 2020? If you ask former chief political strategist Steve Bannon, there is no doubt in his mind the former First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee is itching to run. ‘She’s looking for a rematch’ against Donald Trump, Bannon told Curt Mills in a Spectator USA exclusive. Whether or not Clinton enters the race, Democrats across America will have plenty of choices when candidates officially declare their bids next year.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is a man on a mission. His goal: to turn back the clock and bring the Republican Party back to its roots, to a time before Donald Trump hijacked American politics and cloaked the GOP with a populist, anti-establishment veneer. Indeed, ‘make Republicans great again’ may make for a decent slogan in the event he tosses his hat in the 2020 scrum. Flake knows from experience how powerful and intoxicating the tribalism engulfing American politics has become. Relatively popular with his constituents with an immaculate record as a fiscal conservative, Flake has represented the state of Arizona in one way or another since the early 2000s.

Just as Theresa May's Chequers plan for Brexit was being savaged in Salzburg, EU leaders also found time to engage in their usual response when it comes to the question of migration: a lot of talk, glad-handing, and pats on the back, but very little concrete action. The summit was a two-day affair that encapsulates all of the negative connotations of the EU as an institution: slow, cumbersome, ineffective, and increasingly detached from reality. Hours were devoted to the migration issue, that perennial crisis that has hovered over Brussels over the last five years.

There aren't many EU politicians with a high profile, but Federica Mogherini, the former Italian foreign minister and, since 2014, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, is one of the exceptions.  Mogherini’s five-year term is up next year. Where she will go after her time expires – back to a fractious and circus-like Italian political scene, or somewhere else in the EU structure – is anyone’s guess. But if her address at yesterday's EU Ambassador’s Conference is anything to go on, she intends to use the twilight of her tenure as Europe’s top foreign policy official to drill home a central point: multilateralism is not a dead or dying concept worth discarding.

They were the words of a presidential candidate who had enough of the taunts and the insults. ‘This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth...The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist — a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.’ ‘This man’ was none other than Donald Trump. And the person doing the ranting was none other than Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas who at the time was engaged in a nasty, divisive, and childish Republican presidential primary contest with the New York billionaire celebrity. How times have changed.

It wasn’t long ago when Italy used to be referred to colloquially as “the sick man of Europe,” a country whose economic situation was stuck in the doldrums, whose political system was always a crisis away from collapse, and whose political class was divided into those who were ineffectual and those who were corrupt. The Italians still have their systemic problems, no doubt. Italy has accumulated a pile of national debt (£2bn) that is larger than its GDP (£1.48 trillion). Its unemployment rate is over 10 per cent, higher than the EU’s collective average, and about three in ten young Italians can’t find work.

It was a mild February in the great state of Alabama, and presidential candidate Donald Trump had a surprise announcement for an already electric crowd. Dressed in a sports coat and donning a red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, the boisterous billionaire excitedly told his supporters about his first endorsement from a US Senator. ‘I have a little surprise for you,’ Trump teased, as if promoting a new reality TV show. ‘I have a man who is respected by everybody here, greatly respected...He’s really the expert as far as I'm concerned on borders, on so many things.’ And out strolled Jeff Sessions, the senior senator of Alabama.

The 2018 midterm election season was already shaping up to be an excruciatingly steep one for the Republican Party. The first 18 months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been a dizzying experience for many GOP lawmakers; every week, there is some brand new controversy the president creates. With every racially-tinged comment from the president’s mouth or indictment in the Russia investigation, the Democratic base gets more eager to run to the polls and cast their ballots in November. And then came August 21, 2018, the political equivalent of Pearl Harbour. In one courthouse, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of bank fraud and tax evasion.

When Robert Mueller’s investigation is over and everything is said and done, will the history books cast White House Counsel Donald McGahn as the John Dean of the 21st century?  Reading Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt’s latest scoop in the New York Times this weekend, you’d be forgiven for thinking so. According to their report, McGahn has spoken with Mueller’s team of prosecutors on three separate occasions over the last nine months.  The testimony has clocked in at 30 hours, a boatload of information from an inside man who has access to President Trump and the goings-on at the White House.

Steve Bannon is planning his political comeback. But don’t tell him that; in Bannon’s eyes, he never really stopped being a combatant in the war against the elitist cabal. A few years ago, Bannon was a figure on the fringe of the American political spectrum. He may have commanded a loyal group of readers from his chair at Breitbart, but Steve Bannon only became a household name in America when then-candidate Donald Trump hired him in August 2016 to turn around a flailing and chaotic campaign. Trump was mocked as a laughing stock when Bannon came onboard.

There was a time not too long ago - less than three years to be exact - when German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at the very top of her game. She dominated German and European politics for over a decade with her clear, effective, but cautious leadership, watching as the German economy solidified its place as Europe’s economic engine. When Merkel decided to open Germany’s doors in August 2015 to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria, she became much more than the steward of Berlin’s economic power - she transformed overnight into the moral beacon of the European continent.